Viewing SD material on the Panasonic TX-P42V20B gave us a sense of deja vu: performance here is basically the same as the rest of Panasonic’s 2010 lineup. So, the quick summary is: the picture will look as crisp as the source allows, will almost never look jagged, but very detailed SD film content may show small flickering in areas of very fine detail. All in all, SD content looks good on the Panasonic TX-P42V20 plasma television
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If you’d prefer to read a more in-depth version of the above: diagonal interpolation is on the better end of the scale, meaning that the Panasonic TX-P42V20B does a good job with suppressing jaggies during the video deinterlacing process. With the HQV Benchmark test DVD’s “three rotating bars” test pattern, all three bars looked smooth for the most part, but would look slightly jagged for a few frames after they reversed direction. This does not translate into any significant real-world performance deficiency. Also, all of the film cadence tests on the disc (2-2 PAL, 2-2 NTSC, 3-2 NTSC, etc.) failed, so anyone watching film material is advised to do so using a high quality Progressive Scan/”Upscaling” DVD player. However, as we always note, most SD content on DVD and broadcast TV is too blurry to reveal deinterlacing limitations, so this is not as big a problem as it might have been.