Now offering a range of LCD TVs that is as complete as its collection of plasma screens, Panasonic has brought us this new model with Full HD 1080p.  The screen itself is matt, which will be welcome news to those of you who have their TV in a bright room or one where the window is at right angles to the screen.

The whole thing rests on a rotating stand so that the TV can be rotated to face its audience.  Unfortunately, though, you won’t be able to appreciate its High Definition resolution if you use the built-in digital tuner, which only works at Standard Definition.

Panasonic menus

As soon as you switch it on and start playing with the settings, you’ll find the traditional Panasonic menu.  Simple and clear, they don’t include options such as backlighting and adjustable gamma that are so cherished by purists.  What’s more, they suffer from the same problem as other screens from the manufacturer, a lack of quantitative control.  Instead of programming a setting, you have to count the number of points along a scale the cursor has moved compared to where it was at the start. Having said that, though, once the settings are correct the first time round, it’s unlikely you’ll need to go back to look at them again.

Far too many manufactuers offer menu systems that are either plain ugly or barely manage to do the job.

The default settings have dynamic contrast turned on, which allows the contrast readings to climb as high as 2500 or 3000:1, but this is at the cost of completely skewing the gamma curve.  These impressive figures don’t really reflect the panel’s performance, which is much closer to 800:1 in Cinema mode, which does not feature dynamic contrast but does offer much better results overall.  Like this, the black level is around a 0.15 cd/m², which is a reasonable, if not exceptional, score.  This is even truer given that the scores for black have to be considered with the fairly weak white performance as well (110 to 150 cd/m²). 

On both counts, the color and gamma scores promised good results for our tests with movies

These scores suggested that the screen would perform well showing a Blu-ray disc, and that’s exactly what happened when we tried one.  The colors are very natural, the handling of brightness excellent and the HD screen obviously brings a great resolution to the table too.  Nevertheless, a certain lack of clout in the images, and poor contrast, both of which are also implied by the screen’s performance on technical tests, are also noticeable to the eye.   Despite the lack of a 100 Hz mode or any movement correction system, moving images are sharp and perfectly match the rhythm of the source, without ever overdoing things as some automated correction systems can tend to do.

Good SD Quality

When playing a DVD, we were pleasantly surprised by the screen’s ability to scale images.  It handled the smaller format perfectly and is almost as good at the task as the PS3.  The viewing angle is equally good, allowing six or so viewers to sit or stand 2.5 m away, without any deterioration in image quality.

A final point that we’d like to mention is the quality of the built-in sound, which is definitely above average for TVs of this type.