Panasonic TC-37LZ85 LCD HDTV Review - Formats & Media

The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 supports a full 1080p resolution and photo playback, but lacks other advanced media features like streaming video from the internet and DVR capabilities.

Formats (10.0)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 natively supports the highest format of HD content, known as 1080p. What this means is that the resolution of the television has 1080 lines from top to bottom that are shown progressively. This is in contrast to the 1080i format, which also has 1080 lines, but alternates between showing 540 lines at a time. The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 does also support 1080i content, which is good as most HD broadcast content is in 1080i format. It also supports other lower resolution formats such as 720p and 480p.

The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 also supports content that has been produced to look like film, supporting by 3:2 pulldown and 24fps content. It does not support the wider color gamut that many new televisions support, known as xvYCC.

Photo Playback (3.5)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 is capable of playing back photos from a memory card that you place in the built-in SD/SDHC card reader. Photos are displayed in a simple grid on the screen, with navigation done with the remote control. There's not a lot fancy here, you can setup a slide show or view individual photos. It's basically the exact same interface we saw on the Panasonic Viera TH-46PZ8OU. It also shares the slow response time we saw with that HDTV. In particular if you choose to view a photo full screen it can take several seconds to load it, so be ready to spend some time if you want to show off your photos with the Panasonic TC-37LZ85.

Video Playback (0.0)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 does not support playback of video files from an external source like a hard drive or memory card.

Streaming Playback (0.0)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 cannot natively stream video content from internet sources like Youtube or Hulu.

DVR (0.0)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 does not have built-in DVR functionality for recording broadcast television.