Panasonic Viera TX-L42V20

Panasonic is well-known for its range of plasma televisions, but we've seen less of its LCDs.  The Viera TX-L42V20 is an example of the latter, with a Full HD 1080p IPS display. 

It's worth pointing out that Panasonic uses the same model numbers for LCD and plasma TVs, so although this V20 is LCD, you can also get it with a plasma screen. Be careful if you're thinking about buying one, especially if you're shopping online. You need to look at the first letter in the model name, which is what tells them apart: L for LCD TVs, P for plasmas.

Build Quality and Design

To get straight to the point, the name V20 is shorthand for high-end hardware and features.  The LCD V20 shares most of its plasma cousin's spec, including four HDMI ports, a DVR and media player, Internet connectivity either via Ethernet or WiFi and a 200 Hz Intelligent Frame Creation (IFC) Pro filter.  The media player isn't up to much though as it doesn't support NTFS, meaning you can only access content on drives formatted as FAT32-and not many video formats, either.

In terms of looks, although Panasonic's televisions are always perfectly made, they're not always the most eye-catching, and the manufacturer is still relying on a rather dated design.  The frame around the outside is too thick for our taste and the stand looks boring.  Disappointingly, the remote hasn't been redesigned for years.  On a TV as good as this, we would have expected a bigger effort and backlighting.


Connecting this TV up to a computer works perfectly, and the input lag is just 13 ms, meaning gamers will be happy!

Image Quality: Factory Settings

The 'Normal' mode that the V20 leaves the factory programmed in is of pretty dubious quality.  Panasonic relies far too heavily on the dynamic backlighting to artificially boost the weak contrast that's inherent with IPA technology. That leaves a flashy, shimmering look in some cases which is very unpleasant.  To top it off, our equipment showed that the colours were unnatural, the gamma curve wrong and the average colour temperature far too blue.

 
Moving to 'Real Cinema' mode gets rid of most of the features designed to 'improve' picture quality, which smooths out the gamma leaving more natural colours.


The colours are also much more natural: the deltaE 94 falls to 2.6, which is an excellent result.  Remember that this figure describes the discrepancy between the colours in the video input and those actually shown by the TV, and when it is below 3.0, the remaining discrepancies are said to be invisible to the naked eye, 




Turning off the dynamic backlighting reveals the weakness of IPS technology.  Blacks are at 0.26 cd/m², which leaves them looking grey even in a well-lit room.  That's very disappointing when you consider that other TVs get down to below 0.05 cd/m². As a result, the Panasonic L42V20 finishes with one of the lowest contrast ratios, just 747:1!

Fortunately, though, using an IPS panel means that it has very wide viewing angles.  When we measured brightness at a 45° angle in every direction, there were few areas that appeared lighter than they should.

HD content is displayed well, while SD content goes through an average upscaling process, but your DVD player can do much better.

Finally, the IFC Pro 200 Hz filter does a good job of improving the fluidity of movements in content recorded at 24 frames per second, but we did notice artefacts that crept in behind fast-moving objects.  As with rival solutions from Panasonic's competitors, some viewers don't like the 'camcorder' look which can leave films looking unnatural and more like soap operas.  Either you like it or you don't, and you can choose whether or not to use it accordingly.

Sound Quality

The speakers here clearly aren't the same ones as found in the plasma V20.  The bass is almost entirely absent, although mid-range and treble both make a case for themselves.  We would still recommend a real Home Cinema kit, as we do with all TVs.

Energy Consumption

With 0.1 W on standby and 84 W while in use, the L42V0 is about average for an LCD TV and won't be expensive to run.