Meet Dorothy. At 150 inches diagonal, she’s the world’s largest plasma screen and the biggest direct-view TV ever made, built (and named) by Panasonic. We got to play with her recently and as you've seen, it was mind-meltingly awesome. Even though firsthand experiences with Dorothy are akin to filling a leaf blower with nitrous oxide to jet-huff directly into your brain, Dorothy's backstory is almost as incredible, especially when it comes to manufacturing, shipping and yes, managing all the electricity needed to fire her up. So even though you will absolutely never own one—except for you Giz-reading NBA stars and platinum-selling rappers—the story of the world's most advanced television is a thrill, and serves as a crystal ball to the future of all TV. Come, talk to her. She's intimidating, but it'll be good for you.

Why "Dorothy"?
There are currently five 150-inch Panasonic plasmas in existence—and a sixth for CES 2009 is currently being assembled. They’ve been named, appropriately enough, like hurricanes—starting with A and working down. Dorothy’s number 4, hence the D.

Why 150 inches?
It’s all about the upper limits of the manufacturing process. Panel factories crank out the largest single piece of “mother glass” they possibly can, so that they can cut more large TVs per pane of manufactured glass. The ultimate size of a piece of mother glass is limited by the glass’s strength and uniformity—how large the thing can get without cracking. Panel makers will always be pushing this boundary, because the more 50-inch TVs you can get out of each single assembly-line run, the more money you can make on them even if they're selling at lower prices in stores.
Panasonic’s previous biggest piece of mother glass was 103 inches (remember?), from which four 50-inch plasmas could be cut. Their new manufacturing plant, Amagasaki 5 in Japan, has pushed the max to 150 inches—enough glass to birth nine 50-inch plasmas. Dorothy’s as big as she is because she literally swallowed nine TVs. When manufacturing evolves further, creating even larger panes of mother glass, you could see larger trade-show sets, provided they fit through the convention-center doors. 103 inches, how quaint. And look at that lil' 42-incher, looking fit for bathroom viewing only by comparison.

What’s the resolution?
Typically called 4K, it's resolution is 3996x2160. Even though you could technically call this 2160p, it's important to recognize that it's four times as tight as 1080p. Think four 1920x1080 panels Voltroning together to make something that's 8 megapixels, as opposed to the best current TVs' 2 megapixels. The annoying thing is that the industry went from measuring vertical resolution—720p and 1080p—to horizontal resolution—2K and 4K. (More on that here.)

As a result, watching a 1080p Blu-ray disc upscaled on Dorothy is akin to watching a standard-def DVD upscaled on your HDTV. As you can see in the shot below, the upscaler uses two pixels to render a one-pixel wide line from a test disc. But at Dorothy’s scale, it’s less about spotting compression artifacts, which are most visible when you’re close enough to induce nausea anyway. It’s about getting your face blown off.

How’s it stack up to Pioneer’s Kuro, one of the top plasmas in the game?
As far as motion-resolution goes—the all-important ability to maintain crisp images while they’re in motion on the screen—it's actually better. According to HD Guru Gary Merson (who was more interested in running his calibration discs on the 150 than sticking with us for some Counter Strike, God bless ’im), the 150-incher, even as a prototype, scored a resolution of 920 lines on a 1080i signal. Pioneer’s ’08 Kuros, the next best, scored 900. Our bet is that Dorothy can't best the Kuro in the contrast department, but as you can see from all of our shots, it's no slouch. Check out more performance specs in Gary’s 125-TV mega-guide. Below: Gary testing motion resolution.

How much power does she suck down, and at what cost?
Dorothy is addicted to raw electricity—we’re talking two dedicated 15-amp, single-phase, 208-volt lines which produce around 3,000 watts on average. Dorothy peaks at around 7,000 watts of direct consumption. Not exactly EnergyStar.

If I plugged Dorothy in at my apartment (that is, after removing my second-floor balcony door and window and much of the exterior wall while at it, and hiring a crane to bring the TV in), Dorothy’s juice habit would run me around $1.50 per hour of use, at ConEd’s current price of 22 cents per kilowatt-hour. So, after renting the Godfather Blu-ray set, factor in about $15 more in electricity charges for watching the whole thing.

How much heat does the thing put off?
We were expecting getting close to Dorothy was going to feel like putting our faces in a toaster oven. Even standard-size Kuros can feel a little warm. But surprisingly, up front, the heat was far from extreme. It very well could be channeled out the back, but we didn’t see any industrial-grade heat sinks behind her, either, or hear any fans blowing away. (Note: We're not allowed to show photographs of Dorothy's rear, though we did have a peek.)

How much does she weigh?
Around 1,700 pounds not including the stand. For comparison, an actual Mini Cooper with Adam in the driver’s seat weighs about 2,800 pounds.

How does Dorothy get around?
With great care and difficulty. After her inception at Amagasaki 5, Dorothy and her sisters were tested then sent on the trade-show circuit. Unlike the 103, they’re too big even for wooden crates. All that protects Dorothy and her sisters from the elements are the thin membranes of bubble wrap and Styrofoam wrapped around them, and the tarp draped over the open shipping cage. That’s all. Here's a fun fact: Only two 150-inchers can fit in a single 747 cargo hold at a time.

Although we saw a 150-incher at CES last January, Dorothy’s first trip was to IFA in Berlin this September. Afterward, she headed for Panasonic’s North American HQ in Secaucus, NJ where we got the chance to meet. She’s due to appear on Wall Street today (unfortunate timing for the poor girl) for the official US debut, then on to trade shows in Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong before returning home again to Japan.

Thanks for the facts, but what was that about a "mind-meltingly awesome" experience again? Any way to demonstrate that, say with a video of Gran Turismo 5's in-car view?
Why yes we can, and we'll throw in the 42-inch steering wheel for free:

There's more where that came from: check out more hands-on 150-inch action here and here.

How big is too big? That's the question that you inevitably ask yourself once you spend any amount of time with Panasonic's new 150-inch plasma TV prototype. We visited it in Panasonic's towering warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey last Friday, running it through its paces with 4K footage, Blu-ray movies and Playstation 3 games. After spending a day with it, was it the type of thing I honestly wanted to set up in my living room?

Maybe. Maybe not. The standards that we use to measure other TVs don't apply here. Have you ever seen a TV taller than yourself? A TV that uses more energy than your washer and dryer? A TV that needs to be carried around on a forklift? I'm guessing you haven't. This thing is in a category all its own.

Man, is it impressive. If you stand within a few feet of it, it fills your entire field of vision, quickly making you motion sick if you're playing video games or watching a movie with lots of action. Even standing 20 feet away, you still feel like the TV is the only thing in the room. It's a 4K set, so if you've got the proper ultra-HD footage pumping into it, it makes 1080p look like a second-rate resolution, but even with 1080p, it's absolutely stunning.

Iron Man looked like he was going to jump out of the TV. Robert Downey, Jr.'s baby blues were the size of watermelons in anything closer than a medium shot. Everything was just so big. Seeing a shark leap fully out of the water to devour a seal in Planet Earth becomes even more mindblowing when the shark approaches life size.

And video games? Forget about it. You haven't lived until you've played Call of Duty with life-sized enemies. As I decimated Mahoney over and over again (note to Mahoney: you suck), I felt my hands getting slick with sweat on the controller, my head whipping back and forth to try to see him around corners. My body felt a dissonance because I wasn't moving my legs or having my body jolted with recoil from my automatic weapon.

I've played video games on big TVs before. I visited Panasonic last year to do similar, uh, "tests" on their 103-inch plasma. And while that was awesome, it still felt like playing games and watching movies on a really big TV. The 150 transcends regular TV to become something more. It's like something out of a sci-fi movie, a living wall, a form of primitive virtual reality. It's so overwhelming that you can't really fathom putting it in your house because you can't see it fitting into any kind of reality you inhabit.

Inside the warehouse, we placed a 42-inch plasma next to it that looked pathetic, like something you'd put over your toilet to watch SportsCenter while you take a leak. I wanted to put it in my pocket. Even the 103-incher looked sad and small next to it. And trust me, a 103-inch TV doesn't look sad or small in too many situations.

If this were a true review, I'd have to complain that, since a 4K TV does to 1080p what your new HDTV does to standard-def, you're bound to watch a lot of crappy looking TV on this. If 1080p looks bad, think about all of the channels that come through in standard def. And if you're planning on streaming Netflix movies via your Xbox onto this TV, be prepared for digital artifacts the size of your head.

But you know what? This TV isn't designed for you to put in your living room. Sorry. It's a TV from the future, generously time-teleported back to the present by our friends at Panasonic. You aren't going to hook a VCR up to this thing, and neither are they; it is designed to run with precision-mastered footage, and our current lack of worthy video doesn't diminish the ridiculous potency of the thing.

Believe it or not, Panasonic will begin selling the 150-inch plasma sometime next year, probably for about twice as much as the $70,000 103-incher. Will it be snapped up by anyone? Probably. There are always sultanates and NBA stars looking to have the biggest and most expensive TV in the world, and this definitely fits that bill. But again I'll ask: Is it something normal people would benefit from having in their living room?

I'd say no, but not out of broke resentment and the fact that this would quadruple my energy bill and require me to knock down most of the walls of my home to even get it inside. I don't think people should put this in their living rooms because, when you get down to it, this isn't a TV. I don't want to imagine people watching Two and a Half Men on it. To check the weather on The Weather Channel on this thing would be an act approaching sacrilege. It's more than a TV: it's a glimpse into the future, it's a brazen display of hubris and overkill, and it's a visceral, skin-searing experience. It belongs on spaceships and in museums, not in living rooms. It's only right.

Heard in: Panasonic booth...an exec saying how they could only fit one of its prototype 150-inch plasmas in a Boeing 747 cargo hold—and only just barely.

Speaking with an engineer from Panny's Japan TV operations, who revealed a few more bits:
•It's 220volts, so even if you stole it, you couldn't use it in your grand American home. Gary Merson knows more about the power consumption issues, and we'll link to his future story.
•The hardest thing about building a 150-inch TV over a 103-inch TV was the 2160x4096 pixel count on this monster. And the glass is twice as much surface area, so it requires a higher quality piece of glass to be strong enough (and no, it is not thinner).
•No word on contrast ratios, brightness, or weight. I will find out, though

That relatively itty bitty man next to the HDTV is the Panasonic president, and he must either be thinking "I want to lick my TV" or "Sharp sucks." Or both. The screen, at 16:9 ratio, has 9606.45 square inches, compared with 4977.89 square inches on Sharp's now dethroned king, the 108-inch LCD. Sizemodo between the loser, winner, a standard door, and a queen sized bed:

• Home hearth UI lets you to add a fireplace, windows, and wallpaper, etc. Your TV is now your wall, which is cool and sad.
• You can get video calls and use some apps (assuming you'd have a camera or something).

More details coming shortly. [Sizeasy]