Panasonic TH-37PX70E

Author's product rating:   

How is the Picture Quality?	Excellent
How is the Sound Quality?	Good
Range of Features	Above Average
Durability	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Picture quality, ease of set up, looks fantastic .
Disadvantages:	Maybe not the most power efficient TV you can buy .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Simply fabulous.

Pros: Easy to setup. Stunning picture quality on non HD feeds, particularly the inbuilt Freeview. Natural looking colours. Contrast and black levels are fantastic. Sound quality is pretty good. Looks pretty sexy, even when switched off.
Cons: So far, none, apart from Panasonic's projected power use.

Popped the box open, plugged it in and it set itself up in 5 minutes. Just enough time to pop the batteries in the remote control and have a cuppa. The remote looks quite sleek and the important buttons all have, nice and clear, numbers or symbols. Once the TV has scanned the available Freeview and analogue channels, it then asks for an owner ID and PIN, for security purposes. If someone makes off with your telly it won't work without these details. It then asks for your preferred viewing mode, Dynamic, Normal or Cinema. (Choose Normal or Cinema as Dynamic's colours look a bit false) Once this was finished it wanted to update it's firmware. This took another 15-20 mins. You can postpone this update but it is probably just as well to let it sort itself out. Go and have another cuppa, you will have earned it with all this hard work, and remember, patience is a virtue.

We have had this TV for over a week now and are still amazed at how good it is with SD analogue and Freeview signals. We have hardly had to play around with any settings as it seems to have a pretty good set of defaults. Only had to adjust the sound a bit to suit our room, and that was about it.

It is by far the best display we have ever seen at around this screen size and, at well under a grand, it's an absolute bargain. The natural colours, levels of contrast and the depth of black are all excellent. We dug out some old favourite movies and they simply looked fabulous. The range of greys and blacks in the black and white movie we watched was particularly impressive.

As part of the deal we got the matching black stand. It took a short time to put together, once you figure out which screws are used where. The screw identification pictures in the instructions are mildly confusing. Once the TV is on the stand, the black combination of the gloss screen and satin stand, looks great. Much nicer than the previous model's black and silver, which we thought was a bit overpowering.

We did consider the more expensive Sony KDL-40W2000 LCD TV, as we already have a small Sony KDL-20S2020, but are really glad that we didn't. We don't believe that the picture on this award winning Sony, which after all is the most important part of a TV, is a match for this Panasonic. When you also consider, at current prices, this Sony is almost double the price of the Panasonic, the sums just don't add up. Yes the Sony display may be slightly larger, and it may have more bells and whistles, but, why pay more for a poorer picture and the extra bells and whistles that most of us will never see the benefit of?