This is big news. Panasonic is now (almost) ready to ship their 50″ and 65″ plasmas capable of displaying a full 1920×1080 image. This is really important for HD monitoring. Now you’ll be able to see every single pixel at a 1:1 resolution. There isn’t a significant price premium for these, which makes them especially exciting.

But hey, it’s just a plasma. Why so excited?

One of the things that causes me great pain on a daily basis is the death of high quality CRT monitors for studio use. Sure, you can still drop $43,000 on a Sony, but that’s just a bit much, thank you.

LCDs are great, but they don’t get very large at a realistic price.

I’ve often considered getting something like a Miranda Kaleido-Quad box, to combine a number of SDI/HDSDI signals into a single feed, and then using one large plasma for both program and preview monitoring. However, the relatively low resolutions of large plasmas had always put me off.

Now however, with decently priced 1080p plasmas a reality, this option is much more realistic. Since the Miranda box can jump between different layouts, you can setup a standard Program/Preview layout for production use, but press a button to jump to a single, full screen, pixel-for-pixel display of your 1080p video.

Delicious.