Dell W5001C 50-inch plasma reviewed

When the best thing a review can muster about a TV is that it has good speakers — for a TV — it's probably not one that many people would want to, you know, buy. And even if 20-watt speakers on a plasma really get you juiced up, PC Mag's one-and-half star rating (out of five, and not two, unfortunately for Dell) of the $3,800 W5001C 50-incher should convince you to look elsewhere for your flat-panel needs. The laundry list of problems with the W5001C is so long that we'll get the other highlights out of the way first- 3:2 pulldown engages quickly and the remote is comfortable to hold. But if little things like picture quality matter at all, then the 1366 x 768 Dell falls short on nearly all fronts: sporting greyish blacks, banding in light-to-dark transitions, picture-squeezing with digital inputs, and off-color shadows- even though it actually performs quite well on ANSI and VESA benchmarks. These almost-unforgivable picture flaws along with the complete lack of noise-reduction make this model seem almost beyond hope; even Dell is aware of the problem and is attempting a miraculous fix through either a firmware upgrade or some magical mixture of calibration settings that the pros at PC Mag couldn't figure out. Until you hear otherwise, though, this would seem to be a classic example of "budget-conscious" big screens that aren't a deal at any price.