Given the enormous vested interest Panasonic has in its beloved plasma technology, it is hardly surprising that the company has been quite overdue in getting involved in the LED scene. However, now Panasonic is very keen to prove that it can manufacture LED LCD TVs as well as the next manufacturer. This year, this Japanese company had finally bitten the LED bullet, plumping for the edge mounted LED approach for its debut display and released the 32 inch, 1080p Viera TX-L32D28. The good news here is that, as the LED illuminated LCD TVs can offer more contrast than the traditional CCFL LCD sets. However, the downside is that, Panasonic has put on a £1,000 price tag for this TV. Taking into consideration the fact that you can get a 37” TV with the standard backlight for this price tag, or you might even be able to place your hands on a 42” plasma set, the TX-L32D28 will seem to be rather expensive.
The Viera TX-L32D28 is quite a distinctive LED TV, not just with the looks, but also in its utterly comprehensive feature count. There is simply very little the TX-L32D28 cannot do. The flatscreen TV market is simply dominated by the bargain basement prices and indistinguishable gloss black designs, but is there any room for a no expense spared purple LED TV?
Design:
A non black TV: Yepee!
The TV designs are really boring. In the late eighties, TVs were made of black plastic and in the nineties, they were all made of silver plastic. When flat-panel TVs arrived in the middle of the last decade, everyone went bonkers for shiny black plastic. Now it seems we are just heading back towards silver. Ok, we will stop beating around the bush, this TV is not black. Well, so what colour is it? The bezel seems to be very light silver, but it is so light that it looks almost white. The rest of the box is a more of the traditional silver colour, as is the remote control. Does any of this matter? No, not really, but, while we think this TV will look totally awesome in your bedroom, we are not so sure it is well-suited to every living room. If you are a bit cool and funky, you can get one of these in purple and white too.
Sleek:
Panasonic Viera TX-L32D28 LED TV is not big and fat; it has a pleasingly thin body, and it is lightweight too. We found that the stand accounts for the majority of the weight, so the TV does not blow over when you sneeze. For starters, the really heavy, metal desktop stand it ships with is designed so that you can slide the TV right down its neck, leaving the TV sitting almost flush with the table. The stand also tilts the screen back slightly, for a more comfortable viewing angle. The problem is that TVs with LED edge lights are usually wafer-thin, and the TX-L32D28 is not that sleek. While the TX-L32D28’s “Size 10” does not affect its operation, Panasonic would probably sell more units if it were really thin. After all, market research tells that we, the consumers, care more about size and style than most other features. One final plus point to mention is that the L32D28’s viewing angle seems slightly more forgiving than most LCD TVs. It’s still no match for a plasma screen, with greyness settling over blacks and other colours losing saturation from around 45 degrees and more. But this compares favourably with the mere 20-30 degrees of angle achievable with many LCD TVs, and the level of the drop off in colour, in particular, doesn’t seem as severe.
Slots, Ports and Connectivity:
The TX-L32D28 LED edge Backlit LCD TV has a haul of ins and outs to pose a challenge any top specification display. In the side panel, you will find slots for HDMI, USB and SD cards, while the rear adds three more HDMI, another USB, and a host of other audio and video ins and outs that excludes only S-video. While that might sound like one USB too many, with an optional Wi-Fi dongle and a webcam, which is no less for Skype video calls on the horizon, there may not be much room for any of your memory sticks. The Ethernet also does a cast, which powers the LED TV’s DLNA networking and also its Viera Cast portal, while the TX-L32D28 HD LCD LED TV also doubles as a recorder. The television manufacturers have long kept clear of the built-in hard drives because of the worries about faults and returns, so it is really nice to know that the 32” D28BP can record to an external hard drive of up to 2TB in size.
User Interface:
EPG:
The cluttered and clunky remote’s Guide button brings up the EPG for either the Freesat or Freeview tuners, though it kills dead both the audio and picture of the channel you are watching. And, it is totally a squashed affair as the schedules for seven channels over two hours are shown, but too much of the screen real estate, well over half is taken up by a Viera logo where there should be a thumbnail of a live TV channel and an empty grey background. Using the EPG is fairly comfortable, with searching done by the fastext buttons and also by genre.
Picture Menu:
Unusually, both simple (contrast, brightness etc) and ISF-certified complex (RGB gain, cut-off and gamma levels) picture calibration choices are found in the picture menus. Your changes can be assigned to one of two ‘Professional’ gaps in the picture preset roster, though they can also be long-winded to activate while watching TV. Peculiarly, the TV’s headline Intelligent Frame Creation feature which can be set to mid, max, or switched off, and the Resolution Enhancer are hidden away in ‘other settings’. This is typical of the TX-L32D28BP’s illogical interface, which contains a lot of quirks and hidden features, with settings that should be easily accessible discovered only by accident. Other more basic adjustments include a vivid colour processor, a multi-level noise reduction tool, and no less than eight unusually well-considered picture presets. These include a Game mode, a Photo mode (more brands should include one of these), and two ‘Professional’ modes intended for ISF use.
Overall, the interface is sharp, quick and customisable, allowing users to remove widgets, which is probably a very good idea. Another improvement on this model is that Viera Cast now joins-up with either of the built-in TV tuners; a small window in the middle of the Viera Cast home page plays the current TV channel.
Features:
Though the Freeview HD may be all the rage, the TX-L32D28 32-inch LED TV has also added the Freesat HD, along with its broadband entertainment portal, of course, the Viera Cast. The Viera Cast now includes widgets for Eurosport and Daily Motion news clips, though YouTube remains the highlight. Skype, meanwhile, has been advertised as ‘coming soon’.
Freeview HD and Freesat HD:
Panasonic offers a great selection of options for receiving programmes. As we had just mentioned, there is both standard Freeview tuner, as you’d expect, and a Freeview HD tuner too. Hence, if you live in a region that has access to Freeview HD, you will be able to get three HD channels over the air for free. They include, BBC HD, ITV1 HD and 4HD all broadcast various amounts of HD material throughout the day. ITV and Channel 4 also use their HD channels to upscale standard-definition content too, which is a good way of getting better Freeview picture quality. If you are not lucky enough to live in an area served by Freeview HD, then you can, instead, use the freesat HD tuner to get BBC HD and ITV1 HD via satellite. You will also get a selection of SD channels too, which is good news if you are a telly addict. Panasonic keeps the tuners for Freeview HD and freesat HD separate, so you will have to switch between them to see what is on through the electronic programme guide. You can, however, do this with a simple press of the ‘TV’ button.
Skype:
The Skype feature on the TV will be available quite soon and when it is, you will be able to buy a USB camera from the Skype store and connect it to your TV, enabling video chats with distant friends and family.
Viera Cast:
Viera Cast remains to be one of the deluxe broadband entertainment portals around, but now in design terms only. Obviously, these platforms are for streaming content from the web, which simply means films and on-demand TV, but the Panasonic TX-L32D28BP can offer only short videos from YouTube, Daily Motion and Eurosport. Samsung and Sony are both adding BBC iPlayer and LoveFilm to their online services. We hope Panasonic does the same soon, as these features are real draws for people looking to get more out of their TV. A total of ten widgets are now available and have been laid out in an excellent manner, and though we doubt Bloomberg, Czech entertainment site nova.cz or German news services Bild.de and Tagesschau will have wide appeal, there is also an English language service available on the German owned QTom music streaming widget. Unfortunately all that you get is an ‘Error: bad content’ message when QTom is tried to be loaded, which does not bode well. Honestly, we would have been really glad if Viera Cast contained any genuinely engaging content.
The Edge LED:
We were really pleased that Panasonic has turned its undoubted engineering know-how to LED technology, but the TX-L32D28BP’s embracing of Edge LED is technically something of an excuse. Since the ‘Local dimming’, as found on high end Full LED TVs is impossible and as a result, the TX-L32D28BP suffers from troublesome some contrast. Although it is hardly as deal breaker, the detail within dark areas of images takes on a ‘black hole’ look, though we did notice some light seepage from a portion of the bottom of the screen. Contrast is not up to the mark with the much cheaper plasmas from the same brand’s stable, and it leaves us wondering why Panasonic has not thought about manufacturing 32” plasmas. However, the Viera D28 LED still manages a relatively wide contrast spectrum that sees both muted and bright footage dealt well, with the former boasting splendidly scorching colours.
True Cinema and Intelligent Frame Creation Pro:
The Panasonic Viera TX-L32D28 TV is also equipped with the True Cinema, which is a new picture preset for Panasonic that puts its LED lights on low and movies on Blu-ray sparkle, though it’s more basic Cinema setting looks better with blacks. With little picture processing going on inside, a clean and highly detailed image emerges that has got stacks of depth. It is true that the TX-L32D28BP can struggle with is motion especially on camera pans, but be careful if using the ‘cure’, its Intelligent Frame Creation Pro feature. This feature has been included to literally smooth over LCD tech’s traditional problem with blur when showing video, IFC Pro inserts guessed at frames of video into the action to create a moving image that is supremely fluid. Panasonic has not managed to escape from the fizzying artefacts that appear around moving objects, such as character’s heads. This can be quite distracting, and so, if you wish to give the IFC Pro a go, make sure that you leave it on its ‘mid’ setting for the lesser messy results.
Resolution Enhancer:
The DVD pictures have been given a helping hand by the Resolution Enhancer, which is again available in two flavours. Standard-def TV channels from Freeview and Freesat, however, they struggle to convince and are wrecked by a great deal of digital noise and overt softness, despite the Resolution Enhancer working overtime.
Media Player Software:
The Media Player software that allows recording, but this feature is applicable only for the channel you are watching, and even then, only for two hours, so, it is rather basic. It also has the ability to record high definition channels from either Freeview or Freesat. The Media Player is restricted to hard drives of 160GB and above, hence, there is simply no chance of recording a single show to a memory stick for taking elsewhere. When you go deep into the main menu of TX-L32D28BP, you can change the maximum recording time to 30, 60, 90, 120 or 180 minutes, and even set-up a pause and rewind live TV feature. Once that is done, the external drive you have connected must be formatted and named, with Panasonic making it clear that you can only playback any recordings on this TV. You will be able to register eight hard drives at a time, but can use only one at a time, despite the TV having two USB slots. In practice, only certain brands of hard drive are compatible with this system, it seems, and sadly the popular Western Digital MyBook is not one of those; though the TV manages to format and validate is, it does not manage to make any recordings.
Digital Media Playback:
The same kind of Media Player software also governs playback of digital media from a USB stick or SD card. There is a shortcut button that accesses the SD card straight from the remote, even though it actually leads to a menu from where you must choose between icons for the USB and SD card slots. Choose ‘SD’, then ‘photos’, and the TX-L32D28BP puts on some lounge jazz piano sounds while it strolls through your JPEGs; choose music, and tunes are played from MP3 files in front of 3D wallpaper. However, the screen can be switched off in the TV’s main menus if you want to use less power. You get to choose the videos, however, and only DivX and AVC HD files can be played and not DivX HD, as advertised for this TV. That is certain a worry, though the rather rudimentary software at least displays previews of the video files you hover over, with sound, too. Activate the USB slot and a similar story unfolds; DivX files play quickly and look solid, but again none of the DivX HD files in the MKV format are even recognised by the TX-L32D28BP. The TV’s USB slots are multi-skilled, though they can take a webcam for Skype video calling, a keyboard for Viera Cast; though it is hardly necessary or even a Wi-Fi dongle.
Viera Tools:
All of the above mentioned features can be accessed through Viera Tools, a shortcut button that brings up a line of icons across the bottom of the screen. It includes an option to pause live TV, though that has got nothing to do with its ability with external USB hard drives; it works only if you possess a Panasonic Diga recorder connected through the HDMI port. The Viera Tools also provides you with access to the TX-L32D28BP’s DLNA networking feature, and it is fair to say that it is Panasonic’s best attempt yet. Though the interface is not quite there, it still has a PC feel and we managed to get it to stream music and photos within seconds, from iTunes and iPhoto, respectively, on a Mac installed with the TwonkyMedia. When you stream photos, the same piano jazz starts-up with slideshows once again. However, the videos of all formats were issued with a curt ‘cannot read file’ message.
Performance:
Panasonic LCD TVs are an enigma. Some do a good job with SD material and some manage better with HD. We have not really found one handle both well until we came across the TX-L32D28. This is not to say that this TV is perfect, though, it still has some traditional Panasonic LCD problems. For instance, the image is quite soft and some details are absent with Freeview and SD video. This can be corrected somewhat by increasing the sharpness and turning down the noise-reduction settings though, and that is quite encouraging.
HD Performance:
The High definition content looks quite good and sharp on this TX-L32D28 LED Television, which is not really surprising, given that it has a 32-inch, 1080/24p panel. The picture will be quite impressive, but you can get better results if you tweak a few settings. Panasonic’s ‘intelligent frame creation’ mode is designed for smooth film motion, and make movies look as silky as video. The TX-L32D28 suffers from quite bad distortion around moving objects when this mode is turned on, however. This issue is pretty common with frame-creation modes; we are just baffled as to why these features are included when they harm the picture quality. Freeview HD content looks good. It is just a shame that there are so many idiotic shopping channels on Freeview. Perhaps if there were less of these, we could have more HD.
Blu-Ray Picture Performance:
Most of the constituent parts of a reference Blu-ray picture are present on the TX-L32D28BP, though a touch more contrast and shadow detailing along with a more forgiving frame insertion feature would take it alarmingly close to LED perfection.
Audio Performance:
Moving on to the audio, there is plenty of vocal detail coming from the TX-L32D28BP’s slim speakers, just enough for digital TV, for sure, but any kind of width and low frequency action proves too much to ask from a super slim 32-inch LED TV. For general viewing purposes, the TX-L32D28’s audio is perfectly acceptable, but you are going to be disappointed if you try to watch a movie on it. We are saying this time and again, but you really need external speakers to get acceptable sound from flat-panel TVs. You will not have to spend much, but it is worth looking into something simple, like a soundbar, to add an extra dimension to your entertainment experience.
Warranty:
Panasonic offers its first LED TV, the TX-L32D28BP one year warranty for parts and labour.
Verdict:
Being easy on the eye on all fronts, the TX-L32D28BP hides hi-def pictures, easy DLNA networking for music and photos and a wide viewing angle within an excellent design, while the prospect of Skype and more on-demand programming on Viera Cast means this TV will keep on giving. On the other side, the Standard Definition pictures can disappoint, as can its USB and SD card slots; neither appear to play DivX HD files and it is incredibly fussy when it comes to your hard drive choice for USB recording. There are also some average speakers and a creaking user interface that does not do justice to either the Freesat HD or Freeview HD platforms. It can be said that its seductive purple surround is hiding plenty of minor flaws.
An inch-and-a-half deep may not sound much considering the TX-L32D28BP’s huge haul of features, but it is actually a tad fatter than most edge-lit LED TVs. Overall, it is a well designed LED TV that produces an excellent picture performance that sees it over the hurdles of a clunky interface and fussy approach to digital media. But those are sideshows; the TX-L32D28BP may be expensive, but it has got a load more talent than your average 32-inch LCD TV.
Panasonic Viera TX-L32D28 Full-HD LED TV – Technical Specification Table
Panasonic Viera D28 TX-L32D28 LED LCD TVVGA, WVGA, SVGA, XGA, WXGA, SXGA 60Hz1125 (1080)/50i, 1125 (1080)/60i, 1125 (1080)/24p (HDMI only),
1125 (1080)/50p (HDMI only), 1125 (1080)/60p (HDMI only)525 (480)/60i, 525 (480)/60p, 625 (576)/50i, 625 (576)/50pIntelligent Frame Creation Pro
24p Smooth Film/Playback
Deep Colour (10-bit Panel)
3D Colour Management
Vreal Pro 5Dynamic/Normal/Cinema/True Cinema/Game/Photo/Pro1/Pro2 (ISFccc)Universal remote control – Infrared2 x 10 watt 1-Way Bottom Speakers (Box)V-Audio ProSurround
Dolby Digital PlusEPG
VIERA CAST
DLNA
VIERA Tools
VIERA Link
C.A.T.S
Game Mode
Q-Link4 x HDMI – 1 Port PC Mode
1 x Component video input
1 x Composite Video Input
1 x VGA input
2 x USB
1 x Audio Input
1 x Analogue Audio Out
1 x PC Input
1 x Digital Audio Output (Optical)
1 x Headphone Jack
1 x SD card reader
Common Interface
VIERA Image Viewer
21-Pin Input/Output
LAN Port
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