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This all sounds pretty darned impressive on paper - but does it translate into tip-top picture quality? Indeed it does.

The various processing tricks targeted at colour pay particular dividends, as the Panasonic serves up some of the most vivid colours seen in the LCD world to date. This vibrancy isn’t achieved at the expense of a natural tone, though, with the vast majority of hues looking completely authentic.

The 32LXD60 also enjoys some unusually deep black levels, ensuring that the rich colours have the perfect dark platform to shine out against. This additionally helps the picture look emphatically solid and three dimensional – especially as the Panny’s dark bits are natural and unforced enough to contain the sort of subtle shading details that stop them looking like mere empty black holes.

If you want fine details and sharpness, then the 32LXD60 can give you that too – and what’s more, it can do so without generating the sort of grain or dot crawl noise that sometimes accompanies sharp images.

Finally in the plus column is this Panny’s flexibility. Many LCD TVs look great with HD but struggle with standard definition, whereas the 32LXD60 manages to look impressive with pretty much anything you care to chuck at it.

Keeping the 32LXD60 from a perfect 10 for its pictures are two smallish points. First, motion looks a touch jerky at times. And second, the colour tone occasionally loses its way during dark scenes.

The 32LXD60’s sound is a little disappointing after the success of the pictures, falling prey to the classic LCD weaknesses of insufficient bass and raw power. This means the soundstage is nothing like as involving as the pictures.

Verdict

We understand Panasonic’s argument that LCD should top out at 32in, we really do. But we have to say that if the 32LXD60’s picture quality is anything to go by, we’d welcome a bigger Panny LCD with open arms. Especially if Panasonic also did the decent thing and added some form of PC connection to it…

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