Panasonic TX-50DX750 review

The 50DX750 is a mixed bag where day-to-day use is concerned. On the plus side, the Firefox-based smart TV interface is outstandingly easy to use thanks to the way it lets you build your own 'home page' and streamlines access to the most useful apps.

The TV's set up menus, on the other hand, are a bit tortuous to navigate and feature some quite complicated but not brilliantly well explained features. Plus, you'll almost certainly need to familiarise yourself with at least some of the picture set up features if you want to consistently get the best picture quality from your 50DX750.

Sound quality and value

For such a slim, airy design the 50DX750 produces a pretty satisfying sound performance. Male and female voices alike sound clear and well rounded even during action scenes, the speakers are 'hi-fi' enough to deliver lots of detail from high-quality movie and TV show mixes, and there's enough power on tap to avoid the sense of thinness and harshness you often hear with action scenes on ultra-slim TVs.

Voices and effects sound like they're coming from the right place on screen too despite the set's speakers actually firing downards rather than directly forward.

The 50DX750 doesn't deliver the same aggression and dynamics you get from TVs that do use forward firing speakers, but overall the 50DX750 sounds better than I would have expected for its size and money.

Despite its flawed HDR performance, the 50DX750's picture quality looks far more impressive for most of the time than you've any right to expect for its money.

It's well featured for a £1,300 50-inch UHD TV too, and its smart engine shames those of some TVs costing thousands of pounds more.

The 50DX750 scores big on shelf appeal. Its £1300 price is aggressive for a TV that supports both a native 4K UHD resolution and high dynamic range playback, its adjustable design is a breath of fresh air, and its smart TV system is both eye-catchingly attractive and a dream to use. For the most part it backs this initial attraction up with its picture and sound performance too, only coming up a little short when it comes to handling HDR's most extreme content.

We liked

The 50DX750's glinting, barely-there chassis and adjustable stand design look handsome in any room design, and it's well connected for today's 4K, HDR world. Its picture quality is capable of looking excellent for most of the time too, and we're a big fan of its Firefox operating system. It's strong value too.

We disliked

If you're watching a dark HDR scene that has some bright highlights in it, you can see some pretty clear light 'striping' down the picture. There's also some more generalised backlight clouding with SDR content unless you reduce the backlight considerably.

Verdict

Although the 50DX750's difficulties handling dark high dynamic range scenes remind you that we're still at the frontier of HDR playback, the technologies the set introduces to aid its HDR playback also deliver across-the-board SDR picture quality improvements that make Panasonic's aggressively priced mid-range TV a great value option. Especially if you're not prone to dark room viewing and so are less likely to be troubled by the occasional backlight issue.