Panasonic Viera TC-L37D2

Black Level (5.16)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 produced a mediocre black level of 0.37 cd/m². This performance is certainly far worse than the three TVs we’ve pulled in for comparison. If black level is crucial to you, you can always manually lower the backlight or the brightness settings. (Of course, in doing so, you’ll invariable affect brightness and color performance.) More on how we test black level.

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Peak Brightness (9.08)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 has no problems with producing a bright enough screen. At maximum, it produced a peak brightness of 388.3 cd/m². That’s a performance that surpassed the competing televisions, particularly the Panasonic plasma T. Unfortunately, peak brightness is not quite as important, or sought after, as a good black level. More on how we test peak brightness.

Contrast (6.04)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 has a respectable contrast ratio of 1010:1. Granted, that’s pretty far from the performance of the three competing televisions, and certainly not what we’d expect from a high-end television, but we’ve seen a lot worse. More on how we test contrast.

Tunnel Contrast (9.02)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 showed no problems displaying consistent black levels, regardless of whether the screen is all-black, or just a little black surrounded by bright white. Typically, LCD TVs like this do fine, while plasmas can have problems. More on how we test tunnel contrast.

White Falloff (9.95)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 also has no problem displaying evenly bright whites, no matter how much or how little white is on the screen. More on how we test white falloff.

Uniformity (6.00)

The Panasonic TC-L37D2 does not have the best screen uniformity. We noticed, when looking at a black screen, a fairly obvious flash-lighting peeking up from the edges of the screen. Imagine how this might kill the mood of a dark, noir-ish thriller. When watching the brighter mid-tones of daytime television, however, it was hardly noticeable. More on how we test white falloff.

Greyscale Gamma (5.00)

When testing the Panasonic TC-L37D2, we noticed an egregiously poor color performance. As such, we retested under an alternate setting to try and get a better result. The results were… mixed. Our original settings put the TV in Cinema mode, which typically gives you the best color performance on any TV. On retesting, we tried Custom mode. The results are below.

Greyscale gamma measures how well a TV transitions from black to white. The chart below shows us the smoothness of the transition, illustrated by the shape of the curve. That tiny bump in the line indicates a stretch in the spectrum where the TV simply can’t display the correct values. It’s a minor issue. There’s also the slope of the curve to consider. A slope of 2.52 is a bit steeper than is ideal (an ideal slope falling between 2.1 and 2.2).

Greyscale Gamma (Cinema Mode)

The second chart, below, indicates the performance under the second calibrated settings from within the Custom mode. As you can see from the shape of the curve, the performance is far worse. There are two major hiccups, which you would almost surely see in the course of normal TV viewing (appearing as color banding). More on how we test greyscale gamma.

Other Models in the TC-LxxD2 Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
Panasonic TC-L42D2 42 in.