Panasonic VIERA TX-L55WT65B review

PICTURE QUALITY

When it comes to picture quality, we couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed with the WT65’s default performance. It simply couldn’t produce deep blacks and ended up washing out many darker scenes.

The anti-reflective screen filter does a great job during the day, and lets you enjoy films and games without having to draw the curtains, but at night the cloudy backlight makes dark scenes look grey rather than black. As a compromise, you can increase the Adaptive Backlight Control to its medium setting. This setting clips shadow detail a little, but the effect is so minor enough that we’d recommend leaving it on.

On a more positive note, colour reproduction was excellent. The image presets do a great job by default, making high-definition content look crisp and detailed. Although Panasonic’s resolution enhancer doesn’t add much to Blu-ray content, it does sharpens standard-definition video well, and does so without introducing a lot of unwanted noise.

There are plenty of image quality toggles and sliders to use, and you can calibrate the WT65 to produce some great results in all lighting conditions. However, we feel that this shouldn’t be necessary for a flagship LCD TV. We don’t expect perfect results out of the box, but you shouldn’t have to dig deep within the menus to get a good picture for films.

Things pick up a little when it comes to 3D. Panasonic has opted for passive 3D technology for the WT65, which means each pair of 3D glasses costs considerably less an active set, but depth effects aren’t as pronounced. There is, however, a refreshing lack of crosstalk and images remain bright and colourful.

CONCLUSION

At £2,300 the 55in WT65 is £300 more expensive than the equivalent 55in Panasonic VIERA TX-P50VT65B VT65 plasma TV. We’re not convinced that the extra is worth paying, as it simply can’t compete with plasma when it comes to deep blacks. If you’re happy to pay a lot for an LCD TV you should get a Samsung F8000 instead for around £2,000.

With all its attentions turning to LCD next year, with the cancellation of its plasma TV range, we hope and expect Panasonic to improve in this area in 2014.