Despite the fact that producing a top-grade 42in plasma for a bargain price seems to come easily to Hitachi, we would have thought it impossible for the brand to excel itself again so soon. Yet here's the 42PD7500 - identical to recent Best Buy badge winner the 42PD7200, with the addition of a digital Freeview tuner.

At only a couple of hundred quid extra for entry into the digital age, this plasma looks to be another bargain. Chief among its vitals is not just HDMI, but also a DVI input, meaning two digital high-definition feeds can enter the 42PD7500 - and that's without even mentioning analogue HD via its component video inputs! That a £2,700 plasma has offers such ultra-HD-readiness is positively ridiculous!

Other inputs of note include S-video, composite video, stereo audio ins and outs and a headphone socket, all of which appear on a clip-on, 'floating' cluster.

Tricks of the trade

With its simple outward appearance, the 42PD7500 might not look like anything special, but it has more than enough tricks up its sleeves, especially since Hitachi has also packed-in some advanced picture processing.

At the centre is the Picture Master processing system, which gives all-digital image scaling, eschewing the need for the analogue-to-digital conversions that can affect picture quality. It also adjusts brightness and contrast for individual sections of a picture to produce maximum results, as well as sorting out noise, dot crawl, colours and motion. Additionally, there is the Alternate Lighting of Surfaces (ALiS) panel, which, naturally, is high-definition- compatible at 1,042 x 1,024.

As for the on-screen menus, they are clearly laid out and intuitive, so installation is easy while also allowing for fine tuning.

Killer performance

Like its analogue sister, the 42PD7500 is a superb performer. When viewing our test DVD, The Assasination of Richard Nixon, images are vibrant and well saturated, while bright footage looks simply sparkling. Detail in close-ups is awesome, with little trace of blocking noise, and quick camera pans are smooth.

Thanks to its high-def capabilities, this screen also handles fine detail in dream-like fashion - we've rarely made out so much subtlety from our test movie. Even pictures from the analogue tuner have a solidity and impact that we'd expect of a more expensive screen, while Freeview images are very precise and free of MPEG artefacting.

The only area in which the 42PD7500 falls down is contrast. While greyscale is good, deep blacks aren't rendered quite so well, and there's the occasional case of colour banding - but this is not serious enough to detract from the screen's overall appeal.

With audio, we found that there's some distortion at high volumes, particularly when set to Matrix mode. However, the speakers behave well with dialogue and background detail, and are still good for the price.

This isn't supposed to be the best plasma ever - it's designed to do the basics well and sell for a (relative) pittance. With this in mind, it's with confidence that we declare it one of the best-value 42in plasmas ever!