Panasonic Viera TX-L37E3B review

With its 2011 TVs, the bulk of the LCD line uses Panasonic’s new IPS-Alpha panel. We’ve seen this to great effect on the 2D Viera TX-L32E30B and 3D Viera TX-L32DT30B, but this time we’re seeing what it can do in the budget 2D 37in TX-L37E30B. This range is also available in 24in (TX-L24E3B), 32in (TX-L32E3B) and 42in (TX-L42E3B) screen sizes. We wouldn’t expect to see any major quality differences between the differing sizes.

Essentially, the 37in TX-L37E3B is a cut-down version of the TX-L37E30B. Both TVs use the same IPS-Alpha panel, but while the E30B TVs have a 200Hz backlight scanning refresh rate, the E30B has a standard 50Hz panel. There are some other subtle differences, such as no support for internet or LAN content. The E30B also loses one HDMI port, although the three it has should be enough for most people. One HDMI input has an Audio Return Channel (ARC), so you can send sound from the TV back to a compatible amplifier.

In terms of looks the E3B series is very similar to the E30B. It’s far from ugly, but it’s not as attractive as some of the TVs that Sony or Samsung make. It’s fair to say that the E3B’s looks are more utilitarian rather than stylish.

In terms of pure image quality in still frames there’s little to tell the difference between the E3B and E30B. Panasonic’s new IPS-Alpha panel is excellent, delivering deep blacks and brilliant vibrant colours. Watching the start of Casino Royale, we could configure the screen to produce a detailed image with a good balance between the light and dark parts of the black and white scene, and plenty of detail in the picture. Comparing the screen side-by-side to a plasma, the black level was noticeably worse on the E3B, but impressive for an LCD set.

When it comes to colour, it’s hard to beat the E3B. The parkour scene in Casino Royale, kicked off with rich and vibrant colours, coping well with the green vegetation, the multi-coloured clothing and the dusty environment. It’s a bright image, too, producing really nice whites. Detail in the image is as impressive and we found that we could see every inch of information in the 1080p Blu-ray picture.

Where the TV started to let us down was with the smoothness of the image. This 50Hz set has no motion smoothing processing at all. The new 200Hz sets and above have Panasonic’s excellent and natural-looking Intelligent Frame Creation (IFC), to create extra interpolated frames to smooth motion on screen. It works really well and we found that we missed it a lot here.

For watching TV there are Freeview HD and analogue tuners. HD channels, as you’d expect, produced the best quality image. BBC One HD looked fantastically sharp on this set and we appreciated the rich colours. The quality of SD channels varies, but the TXL37E3B coped well with artefacts and upscaling. Even the 24-hour news channels were watchable thanks to the processing in the set; it’s not quite as good as the processing on some Philips TVs we’ve reviewed, but it’s close.

Sound is provided by two 10W speakers. They’ll play at full volume without distorting and sound pretty good. They obviously can’t match a decent surround-sound system for films, but for standard TV watching they more than do the job.

It’s a shame that this TV doesn’t have any networking features, and the Ethernet port only allows the TV to look for updates online. This means that there’s no Viera Connect internet portal to use for online services, such as BBC iPlayer. It also means that you can’t stream content over your local network.

If you want to play your own videos, music and photos on this TV, your only option is to plug in an SD card, as there are no USB ports. The TV will play JPEG photos, MP3 and AAC audio, as well as MPEG2, H.264 and .mov video files. However, the hassle of having to copy items to SD card means that this slot will probably only be used if you’ve got a camcorder and want to view its contents quickly.

The remote control is basically the same model as used for all of Panasonic’s TVs. It’s well laid out and simple to use. The only difference we could see is that this model doesn’t have a Viera Connect button because the TV doesn’t support the service.

In terms of pure image quality, we were very impressed by the TX-L37E3B. It produced excellent colours and the image contained a lot of data. However, there’s no getting round the fact that its motion is more juddery than on LCD TVs with a faster refresh rate. Given the lack of internet and networking services, too, we’d rather spend around £100 more and go for the E30B version instead.