Panasonic Viera TX-L32D28BP review

We connected a 500GB Western Digital portable disk to test this, and found it was a little buggy. Recorded programmes appear in the Media Player’s Video section, and their quality is great, but rewinding live TV was hit and miss. Occasionally, the D28 would lock up and refuse to restart the programme after rewinding, forcing us to return to live TV.

However, an undocumented feature is the ability to schedule recordings just as you would with a normal PVR. This will warn you if you’re watching a different channel and will automatically switch to the correct channel to record the programme. Recordings will also be made even if the TV is in standby, but unfortunately, not if you switch to a different tuner. For example, a Freeview show won’t be recorded if you’re watching a Freesat programme.

After a while, we got used to the D28’s clunky menus which are identical to other Viera models. It’s still annoying that image quality settings are split between the Picture and Setup menus, though. The intelligent frame creation option, for example is in the Setup menu, as is the option to enable advanced quality settings. These should be in the Picture menu. There’s also no option to disable dynamic contrast unless you switch to the True Cinema mode, which keeps processing to a minimum.

Fortunately, HD image quality is very good. Details are sharp and colours are excellent. Our test footage of an HD football match showed natural colours and fluid movement. Only fast camera pans resulted in blur, but this is as much down to the source footage as the TV. Thanks to the IPS LCD panel, viewing angles are exceptional, with colours remaining faithful even for viewers sitting to the side of the screen. However, while contrast is good for an LCD TV, it’s still nowhere near as good as Panasonic’s neoPDP plasma screens, whose deep blacks make the D28’s images look a bit washed out.

More disappointing was the fact that standard definition quality was quite poor. No matter how much we tweaked noise reduction and sharpness settings, images looked fuzzy and text looked bloated around the edges of characters instead of sharp. Compared to other TVs we’ve seen, which did a good job of cleaning up Freeview broadcasts, the D28 left people’s faces and hair as a blurry mess. This is less noticeable if you’re sat 10 feet away rather than up close, but it’s still poor considering the high price.

And price, of course, is the unavoidable sticking point with the D28. Even taking into account the very low power consumption – we saw 85W on average – it will take more than the TV’s lifetime to see a saving compared to buying a cheaper, less power-efficient model.

Even comparing it to Panasonic’s own range, the D28 seems overpriced. For only a little more money, you could buy the superb 46in G20 which we gave an Ultimate award to a couple of months ago. If that’s too large for you, the 42in G20 costs less than £900. Meanwhile, if you’re specifically looking for a 32in HD TV, the TX-L32G10B costs just £500 now. It may not have Freeview HD, but you can afford to buy a twin-tuner Freeview HD PVR with the £500 you’ve saved and still have £250 in change.