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Expectations are high for such an excitingly equipped set and the TX-L37D25 delivers in spades on nearly every score. Colours, as ever with Panasonic, are remarkable, with an exemplary palette spanning everything from the eye-wateringly garish to the delicately restrained.
The areas that have to be right to convince us of its talents, such as flesh tones, are rendered beautifully, with seamless blending between different shades or degrees of intensity.
Black levels are also very good; out test disc of Green Zone features plenty of tense, night-time sequences and the Panasonic picks up a surprising amount of detail even when the film is at its very murkiest.
Detail is exacting - although choose your source carefully. Standard-def Freeview is pretty ugly blown up to this size and you'll be amazed at the difference between SD and HD channels. We flicked between a football match broadcast in both and the higher quality channel made its SD equivalent look hideously approximate.
The one real gripe concerns motion handling, no matter what the source. It's better than on many LCD sets, but the odd instance of judder jars noticeably with what are otherwise pristine pictures.
Perhaps the quality of the images in every other department magnifies this flaw unfairly, but it's a shame that this area of performance lags noticeably behind.
Sound
It's a slender set with 'invisible' speakers, so the audio performance is, predictably, on the underwhelming side. It's faithful enough and copes perfectly competently with uncomplicated, voice-heavy broadcast material or dialogue, but there's nowhere really to go during movies when the action heats up.
There's a reasonable amount of volume - more, probably, than many sets of this sort - but the image is rather flat and doesn't have much in the way of low-end growl.
It's certainly not an unpleasant listen, but it didn't have us ducking for cover from any surround sound shrapnel from Green Zone's many explosions.
Value
The price tag places the set unambiguously in the upper end of what's on offer on the high street, but it's not wildly out of kilter with its peers and that grand or so gets you a hell of a lot of telly.
It's easily one of the best displays in its class, few - if any - are more comprehensively well featured and you'll be able to enjoy subscription-free high-definition television, without a digibox, via either satellite or terrestrial.
If you are shopping for a do-it-all telly but are serious about picture performance, the TX-L37D25 should be one entry on a very short list.
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