Introduction
There was a time in many of our youths that the concept of a television hanging on the wall like a picture was about as distant as civilian space travel. Although space tourism is still a few years away (though now in sight, thanks to recent advances by Richard Branson’s enterprises), flat televisions are here today and are living up to their long-awaited expectations. Initially, these flat televisions were immensely expensive and were surrounded by concerns about reliability and longevity. Today, they’re in every AV retail store and are becoming affordable to the average consumer. There is still much debate over which technology is best (LCD vs. plasma), but both come with the ability to hang on your wall, thus freeing up ultra-valuable floor space and adding endless options for integrating AV into your living spaces.

The Panasonic TC-32LX20 is a HD-compatible, 32-inch LCD-based flatscreen display that boasts skinny five-and one-half-inch thickness and retails for $3,499, a price that’s suddenly within reach of the masses.

The Panasonic TC-32LX20 is a 32-inch diagonal, 16:9 widescreen HD television that’s capable of displaying 1280 x 768 lines of resolution. It measures 39.4 inches wide, 22 inches in height and a shade over five inches in overall thickness. With its dense 60-pound stature and significant price tag, I would nearly always recommend that it be professionally installed.

The TC-32LX20 will display 480p, 720p and 1080i signals. At 500:1 contrast ratio, it’s not going to compete with a 220-pound, 25-inch-deep Sony XBR CRT tube in overall black levels, yet it is in line with all LCD and plasma-based displays. Its overall viewing angle is 170 degrees, meaning that it can be viewed from virtually everywhere in your room, a stark contrast to many rear projection sets that have a degraded picture as soon as you wander from center position. It has internal progressive scan electronics, so you can run games and everything else through an improved, doubled signal. This will come as a benefit to those who have enjoyed the upgraded pictures from their DVD players with progressive scan outputs but have had no way to double their remaining inputs. For those who don’t plan to add an AV system to complement their flat display, the TC-32LX20 has a four-speaker attached audio system that will produce surround audio.

The TC-32LX20 hosts the standard I/O connections, including two composite video inputs, two s-video inputs, two component video inputs, and even a headphone jack for those late-night movies or music from your satellite or digital cable system. Best of all, it employs a HDMI-HDCP connection, so you can run a single cable for your digital video and audio, thus eliminating the need for a cable run the size of your forearm. The TC-32LX20 comes with a learning remote that fits nicely into the hand and is fairly intuitive with regards to button positions.