How big is too big? That's the question that you inevitably ask yourself once you spend any amount of time with Panasonic's new 150-inch plasma TV prototype. We visited it in Panasonic's towering warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey last Friday, running it through its paces with 4K footage, Blu-ray movies and Playstation 3 games. After spending a day with it, was it the type of thing I honestly wanted to set up in my living room?
Maybe. Maybe not. The standards that we use to measure other TVs don't apply here. Have you ever seen a TV taller than yourself? A TV that uses more energy than your washer and dryer? A TV that needs to be carried around on a forklift? I'm guessing you haven't. This thing is in a category all its own.
Man, is it impressive. If you stand within a few feet of it, it fills your entire field of vision, quickly making you motion sick if you're playing video games or watching a movie with lots of action. Even standing 20 feet away, you still feel like the TV is the only thing in the room. It's a 4K set, so if you've got the proper ultra-HD footage pumping into it, it makes 1080p look like a second-rate resolution, but even with 1080p, it's absolutely stunning.
Iron Man looked like he was going to jump out of the TV. Robert Downey, Jr.'s baby blues were the size of watermelons in anything closer than a medium shot. Everything was just so big. Seeing a shark leap fully out of the water to devour a seal in Planet Earth becomes even more mindblowing when the shark approaches life size.
