Panasonic TH-L37D25A LED TV

Name: Panasonic TH-L37D25A LED TV
Item: Panasonic TH-L37D25A LED TV
Rating: 3.75
Author: Campbell Simpson

Panasonic TH-L37D25A review: A small LED TV with useful Internet features and a high quality panel

Campbell Simpson

PC World

14/02/11

Expert Rating

3.75 / 5

Pros

Excellent range of Viera Cast internet streaming features, good picture quality with Full HD content

Cons

Ugly bezel design, not especially cheap

Bottom Line

Panasonic's TH-L37D25A LED TV has plenty of features given its small size and middling position in the company's TV line-up. It's not as cheap as we were hoping it would be, but the inclusion of Panasonic's Viera Cast services is a nice touch. It's compatible with Panasonic's Skype web camera and can be used with a Wi-Fi USB stick for wireless networking.

Would you buy this?

Yes 0
No 5

Price
$ 1,499.00 (AUD)

The Panasonic TH-L37D25A is a 37in LED television that can connect to the Internet and access streaming video-on-demand and YouTube. It's a high quality LED TV panel and when displaying Full HD video it looks great. However, we don't like the design and we think it should be cheaper.

Panasonic TH-L37D25A: Design and features

The first thing we noticed about the Panasonic TH-L37D25A was the interesting bezel design, which fades from dark to light violet-grey across its edge. It's more individual than the regular piano black but we thought it looked cheap and tacky, and the thick bezel makes the television look a little dated.

The Panasonic TH-L37D25A sits roughly in the middle of Panasonic's TV line-up — there are cheaper and smaller screens like the Panasonic TH-L32X25A, and more accomplished panels like the Panasonic TH-P42V20A and Panasonic TH-P50VT20A. The TH-L37D25A's integrated YouTube and Yahoo! PLUS7 video on demand access make it a good choice for media buffs, but you'll need a fast Internet connection to make best use of these features. Accessing these video-on-demand options is simple, and the range of content on hand is great. An Ethernet connector is available for connecting to a network, but you'll need to buy Panasonic's optional Wi-Fi USB adapter for wireless connectivity.

Panasonic TH-L37D25A: Picture quality

The Panasonic TH-L37D25A has good picture quality for a mid-priced, small screen LED TV. Its LED edge lighting — strips of LEDs across the top and bottom edges of the screen, channelled to cover the LCD panel evenly — means it also consumes power efficiently, with a 5.5 star energy rating.

We watched The Dark Knight on Blu-ray, as well as The Matrix on DVD, to test the TH-L37D25A's picture quality. We found that in its True Cinema preset it was able to display good detail levels in dark areas of the screen, but overall brightness levels were slightly low. Switching to a brighter preset like Dynamic boosts colour vibrancy, but dark area detail is somewhat compromised. When viewing an ideal scene — bright and colourful content in Full HD — the Panasonic TH-L37D25A is able to display great detail levels without oversharpening. We'd say that the presets are all slightly oversaturated but colour accuracy is generally good. A 100Hz motion compensation mode allows the Panasonic TH-L37D25A to display on-screen movement smoothly, with only a small trace of the jitter and flickering that plagued LCD panels a year ago. Wide panning shots are generally smooth, but fast motion on-screen occasionally causes a small amount of blur.

Panasonic TH-L37D25A: Conclusion

The Panasonic TH-L37D25A is a competent LED television. It has occasional small problems with demanding video content but this is not surprising given its specifications. It's a good choice for a cheap TV to watch video streamed from the Internet, but we think it should be a couple of hundred dollars cheaper.