Hitachi Plasma: Digitise This!

If the plasma world was the Premier League, Hitachi, Panasonic and Pioneer world be Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal. Just when you think one has the best lineup, another goes and buys some fancy foreign talent to usurp the competition.

Hitachi has been on a prolific spending spree of late, investing ¥85bn to produce 10,000 more plasmas a month. We only care that it's finally adding Freeview as an optional extra to this brand-new 42-inch plasma. Hopefully it'll fare better than Panasonic's latest effort.

The 42PD7200 sells for £2,500 (with the Freeview version costing £2,700), and we've got a brand new one sitting just metres away. We're desperately trying to write this blog piece, but we can already hear a ruckus kicking off across the room. The Hitachi is taunting all our other plasmas: "I'm high-definition ready, baby," it's saying, "check out my HDMI socket..."

We think that once we introduce the Hitachi to the Denon DVD-2910 DVD player, they'll get along famously, with Denon's video upscaling capabilities bound to tickle the plasma into some gloriously detailed pictures. We'll let you know if it's a match made in heaven in our forthcoming review... -GC

Update: this review is now live here.