Plasma display technology offers the widest viewing angle of any type of television. The wide viewing angle makes plasma the ultimate choice for wall mounted television. Plasma television performance is also exceptional for producing high quality images of fast motion content, like sports programming.

This set's video is powered by the PictureMaster HD III processing technology, which features third-generation 1080p processing and new histogram processing for enhanced contrast, sharpness, and color for a clearer, sharper picture. It also offers extended color capabilities to reproduce the purest reds, greens and blues, a maximum 16-bit/281 trillion color capability, and a 16 percent brighter panel.

The 4 MB, 10-bit digital 3D Y/C comb filter separates brightness and color signals better in 3D domain to eliminate cross-color, cross-luminance and dot-crawl distortion. It performs field-by-field comparisons of the television image to accurately separate the color from the black-and-white information and remove both horizontally and vertically hanging dots, as well as dot crawl, resulting in a razor sharp image. This set also performs automatic 3:2 pulldown detection and reversal, too--a handy feature for watching progressive-scan movie programs in their native 24-frame format. To adapt 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video, frames in the original movie must be duplicated; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this duplication by removing the redundant information to display a frame-accurate picture.

The 55HDS69 has a 1365 x 768-pixel resolution, and a high-contrast black rib structure that provides excellent contrast and deep blacks with any source material or viewing environment. It's designed to make a big impact with images that will literally jump off the screen. Other video features include three color temperature settings, four-step black enhancement, multiple aspect ratio formats (four HD, six SD), and split-screen/picture-in-picture functionality. The anti-reflective, high-contrast screen effectively absorbs ambient room light, reducing reflections and producing richer blacks, vibrant color and increased detail in shadows and highlights. Convenience features include on/sleep timers, closed caption decoder, V-Chip parental controls, several screensavers, and three-language on-screen display (English, French, Spanish).

It has a three-way, 36-watt speaker system that can produce simulated surround sound and a bass boost. The set can also be used as a center-channel speaker in a full surround sound system. It includes the following video and audio connections:

• Composite A/V: 4 rear, 1 side
• S-Video: 2 rear
• Component Video: 2 rear, 1 side
• HDMI: 2 rear, 1 side
• RF: 1
• Digital audio output: 1 optical

Tech Talk
HDMI is a lossless, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface to link any audio/video source (such as a set-top box, DVD player, or AV receiver) with your TV--all over a single cable. HDMI supports standard, enhanced or high definition video, plus multi-channel digital audio on a single cable. It supports all ATSC formats--standard (SDTV), enhanced (EDTV), and high (HDTV).

What's in the Box
Plasma TV, remote control (with batteries), printed operating instructions