Panasonic TH-L32G10A LCD TV

Panasonic's small 1080p LCD TV has impressive image quality and useful integrated features

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Panasonic's TH-L32G10A is a 32in LCD television with a regular CCFL backlight. It’s a small screen but it has high-end features for a non-LED LCD TV.

Pros

  • Good picture quality for a non-LED LCD, well-implemented 100Hz mode, useful SD slot

Cons

  • Image is overly sharp by default, minor DVD upscaling issues, slightly expensive

Bottom Line

The Panasonic TH-L32G10A offers better picture quality and more features than many small LCD televisions, but you'll have to shell out extra cash for it.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 1,399.00 (AUD)

Like most of Panasonic’s TVs, the TH-L32G10A LCD TV has unobtrusive styling. After spending some time with Panasonic's stylish but expensive TH-P54Z1A, we’re keen to see the company use a thinner bezel on its other TVs. The TH-L32G10A's slightly curved, slightly too thick border looks a little long in the tooth. Because it's a CCFL-lit LCD it’s not particularly thin, but the overall package, including its stand, is a compact one.

Despite being a small TV, the Panasonic TH-L32G10A has four HDMI inputs and plenty of analog connectors. The side panel includes an HDMI port, a headphone jack and an SD card slot for displaying video files and photos.

The TV uses Panasonic’s intuitive interface. Scanning for digital television channels and tweaking settings is straightforward. We found the image settings overly sharp in the default Cinema and Game modes, but it only took a few seconds to adjust them.

Picture quality is more impressive than we expected, given it's a CCFL-backlit LCD television. Panasonic claims the TH-L32G10A has a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and this seemed accurate during our tests. The panel has a 1920x1080p Full HD native resolution, which is quite a novelty for such a small screen size. The screen can display a great amount of detail when supplied with high-definition content. After a little adjustment to the Cinema preset we witnessed good contrast levels and a vivid and accurate colour gamut, with only a small amount of black crush. We did have to drop the backlight brightness down slightly to avoid washing out blacks.

The Panasonic TH-L32G10A’s 100Hz video smoothing mode operates well, reducing judder without seeming overly synthetic. The TV supports a 24p mode for watching Blu-ray movies. One niggle we found was with the screen’s standard-definition scaling. Upscaling a 480p content stream to the TV's native resolution introduced a few aliasing artefacts and some over-sharpening noise, but the image still has good detail and colour.

The integrated SD card slot performs admirably for impromptu picture viewing sessions — the interface is clean and intuitive and pictures load quickly. We didn't encounter lag while browsing through a series of 14.6-megapixel images and fine image detail was visible with minimal scaling artefacts. JPEG images and AVCHD video files are supported, but make sure your video camera outputs in this particular movie format; we weren’t able to display MotionJPEG movies from a Pentax digital SLR.

Panasonic’s TH-L32G10A LCD television has an impressive feature-set and solid performance for a 32in model. If you’re looking for a small screen and don’t want or need whiz-bang LED technology, this should definitely be at the head of your list.

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Read more on these topics: lcd tvs, Panasonic, home entertainment

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