I once heard a director describe his moviemaking process as possessing three elements: cheap, fast, and good. And you could have any two of the three.  If you wanted it fast and cheap, for example, it wouldn’t be good.  And if you wanted it cheap and good, it wouldn’t be done fast.  And of course, good and fast together are never cheap. But Panasonic has managed to get good and cheap together in one place with their exciting new plasma television, a low cost and decent quality alternative to just about any other with the Panasonic TC-P42X1.

The Panasonic TC-P42X1 is a forty two inch 720p plasma television that offers a 600 hertz sub-field drive for improved image quality, the Viera Image Viewer for pictures, a remote that will actually control several other Panasonic devices from the same remote, two ten watt speakers with surround sound, three HDMI inputs, one analog audio input, two composite inputs, one S-video input, two audio inputs, two component video inputs, two component audio inputs, one digital audio outputs, and a game mode to reduce blurring in high speed images.

Sure, a 720p image will never be quite as impressive as a 1080p, though they’ll be at least somewhat close. And the sound quality on this is at least halfway decent, which makes me assess the overall quality as at least being decent like I said in the headline. But it is downright impossible to ignore the fact that the Panasonic TC-P42X1 is only $739.95 out at Amazon, which makes it another fairly good quality sub-thousand dollar plasma television. And that’s downright difficult to ignore.

So yes, you can get cheaper televisions.  And you can get significantly better televisions to boot. But the Panasonic TC-P42X1 is one of those rare televisions that, at least somewhat, puts cheap and good together.