Panasonic Viera TX-L32C3B review

It’s a good thing that the default image quality was above average, as there are very few options for tweaking the picture. Three colour profiles, a Vivid Colour setting and a single slider provide very little control over how colourful images appear. Brightness, contrast and sharpness sliders are all useful, as is the noise reduction setting that provides minimal relief from Freeview artefacts, but that’s basically all you get.

Making the switch to Blu-ray, the limitations of the 1,366×768 screen resolution become more apparent. Although images were sharp and had a lot of detail, they weren’t any match for the same image at Full HD resolution. Even though overall image quality wasn’t at the same level as a 1080p TV, in all other respects it managed to produce a very clear image. We had to lower the brightness slightly in order to balance out the black levels in darker images, but in most cases the defaults were perfectly acceptable.

Unsurprisingly for a budget TV there’s no frame creation for smoothing motion, but the basic VReal picture engine managed to stop Blu-ray movies from appearing too jerky. However, there were noticeable artefacts in some of Casino Royale’s faster action sequences and motion blur was quite significant.

In the light of other low-priced TVs from companies such as Sony, it seems that Panasonic has tried too hard to shoehorn in an IPS panel, at the expense of extra features such as iPlayer and USB multimedia playback. In spite of the superior image quality over similarly priced TVs, we would still prefer to have a full HD panel, even if it meant settling for TN rather than IPS. The increase in pixel density has a huge impact on overall picture definition, which is well worth sacrificing viewing angles for.

If you don’t want to spend more than £350, you’re unlikely to find many other TVs with such a high quality screen, but if you can stretch to it, the Sony Bravia KDL-32CX523 has far more features and 1080p video for under £100 extra.