User Interface
As in most consumer sets, the Panasonic Premiere offers several preset modes in its Picture menu. There are four of them here: Standard, Dynamic, Cinema, and Monitor. They can be either left in their factory settings or individually adjusted by the user, with the exception of the Monitor mode, which locks out the Picture (contrast) control. They can also be set up separately for each input.

In addition to these modes, the Picture menu offers the usual adjustments: Picture (contrast), Brightness, Color, Tint, Sharpness, and Color Temp (Normal, Cool, Warm, and Studio—the latter only available in some setups, and at a claimed 3200K, you won't want to use it anyway!). There's a Color Management control, but it's a simple On/Off feature and had no obvious effect on the picture apart from disabling Tint. It is not a full-featured color-management system by any means.

There's also an Advanced Settings submenu with additional controls. Black Extension appeared to do little other than crush black. Input Level could either darken or clip white. AGC is said to "[increase] the brightness of [a] dark signal automatically." And Studio Gain "sharpens the contrast for a better view when a part of the image is too light to see." I left all of these controls in their default settings.

I didn't use the set's Noise Reduction either, but it might help with some program material. In its Advanced setting, Noise Reduction provides three separate controls: Video NR, Mosquito NR, and Block NR.

More useful Advanced Settings were Gamma, White Balance, and 3/2 Pulldown. White Balance provides both High and Low calibration adjustments for red, green, and blue, and 3/2 Pulldown is the film mode that compensates for interlaced film-based material. In its On position, it appears to operate as an "auto" setting, and that's how I left it for most of my viewing.

Gamma offers up to six settings, depending on the source. (Gamma determines how the image "rises out of black"—that is, as the input signal gets brighter, it determines how quickly the image gets brighter. The lower the number, the more quickly the images gets brighter.) For 480p, 720p, and 1080p over HDMI, in Movie or Standard mode (the set will not accept 480i over HDMI—not a significant omission), the gamma options are 1.0 (intended for use with an external video processor), 2.0, 2.2, and 2.6. Signals at 1080i also have a 2.5 option. I wish Panasonic had also provided 2.3 and 2.4. The 2.2 setting looked best most of the time, but it was sometimes a shade too light, and 2.5 and 2.6 were nearly always too dark.

The set has 16 different memories in which you can store and name different setups, or Picture Profiles, for instant recall when needed. There are also ISF Day and Night modes. Once set up by a calibrator, the ISF modes are locked, and can be selected but not adjusted by the user.

Additional menus provide a variety of other controls. These include several screensaver options to limit the possibility of image burn-in, Power Save to reduce energy consumption, a 1:1 Pixel Mode, Display Size to reduce image size (5 percent underscan), an External Scaler Mode (when it's set to On, the set will only accept 1080p sources at 24Hz, 25Hz, 30Hz, 50Hz, and 60Hz), and audio adjustments.

There's also an Options menu, which you can open only by holding the remote's OK button for several seconds. This menu includes an On/Off control for the onscreen display, additional aspect ratios, assignment of a scrolling-bar screensaver or seven test patterns to the remote's Function button, memory lock, and a Studio mode. When the Studio mode is off, you cannot select Display Size, Studio Gain, and Studio Color Temp. I left all of these controls in their default positions for all of my tests and viewing.

Despite all this flexibility, the set omits a few features that should be mandatory with any respectable monitor. One is a proper color-management system for dialing in an accurate color gamut. Another is a blue-only mode, which allows for accurate adjustment of the Color and Tint controls without the need for a color filter. And I'd also like to see a 10-step grayscale adjustment, but to be fair, only a very few (though less expensive) sets currently offer this.

The multi-component remote is easy to use, with well-spaced, appropriately sized buttons. It's backlit, and the inputs can be selected directly. The only annoyance is the lack of volume and mute controls. To change the volume of the set's built-in amps, you have to go into the menus.