Here are the 2013 Flat Panel Shootout Evaluation final results based on the votes of the attendees and our panel of experts. This year it's been a difficult task to declare a winner. Here's why:
The results came out so close that it is difficult to award one winner. The ZT60 won the popular vote in important categories, black and overall pq, but the F8500 has the highest scores overall and also won in important categories, like contrast ratio and day modes. In the past nine years it has always been very clear who won our Flat Panel Shootout event.
The attendees liked the higher light output of the F8500, so when tabulating the ballots the F8500 is the winner. They saw the F8500 as even sharper, which I would assume is also because of the brighter image in low and high ambient light conditions. Many participants told me the F8500 whites looked cleaner, brighter and in their opinion, whiter.
So the public has spoken and we therefore crown Samsung’s F8500 series PDP the new "King of HDTV" for 2013.
We also recognize and congratulate all of the development engineers at Samsung for making the most significant advancement in PDP technology this year.
Please also take note that the panel of experts selected the VT60/ZT60 as their personal choice. But even their choice was only a slight preference. As DeWayne put it to me.... “To me and just for example, if the VT60 is a 10 the F8500 is a 9 as I don’t care about panel brightness above 30fL”
However, we strongly recommend all consumers to use the same logic that the three expert panelists explained during our closing Q&A: end users should make their buying decision based on viewing habits. The three top contenders are all so very close this year that I don't see a clear winner and these three panels deserve our top recommendation equally.
In fact, all of the 2013 displays in our event this year are exceptional and have made significant advancements in picture quality, build quality and design. So my sincerest congratulations to Sony, Panasonic and Samsung for stepping up the game on PDP and LED display technology advancements.
Very respectfully submitted,
Robert Zohn
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