Panasonic TC-37LZ85 LCD HDTV Review - Performance: Motion

The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 did not impress us with its motion performance, we saw some obvious problems with fast motion. It does support film-like content via 3:2 pulldown and 24p support.

Motion Smoothness (5.5)
The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 did not impress us with its handling of motion. In particular we noted that the HDTV would produce some cartoonish effects on faces in motion, some obvious jittering with blocks of colors and a sutter effect when dealing with high contrast areas. This last is especially obvious when dealing with 1080i content. The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 lacks some high end features like 120Hz refresh so its less than impressive handling of motion is not entirely a surprise.

Motion Artifacting (6.0)
Artifacts in motion are ghostly images that can appear when there should not be anything there. The Panasonic TC-37LZ85 did show some problems with artifacting, in particular we noted some significant banding when large blocks of white were in motion and some smearing effect with blocks of color.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps (6.5)
Material produced to look like film is generally produced at a different framerate than television content. In order to convert this to look "right" on your HDTV a process known as 3:2 pulldown or telecine is used. With the Panasonic TC-37LZ85 we noted that it generally did a decent job with such content, but there were a couple of small issues. We noted some glitches in a test pattern specifically ment to look for such problems, but they were not serious enough to bother you when watching normal content like a movie. What is slightly more obvious is a slight amount of jagged edges with complex patterns that are converted using 3:2 pulldown. Some content is also encoded specifically to be played back at 24 frames per second. Not all HDTVs can handle this content, but the Panasonic TC-37LZ85 can.