For those of you out there in the market for a new television, you may remain cheered up–despite the fact that the economy is still a wreck, you can always find a new television relatively inexpensively in many cases, and often still putting out a quality show. The LCD television market is a great place to look for that, and the Panasonic TC-L42u30 is going to be a great model to start with.

The Panasonic TC-L42U30 is a forty two inch 1080p LCD television that offers a 120 Hz refresh rate, the Viera Image Viewer to let you show pictures from your various external devices, the Fine Black Panel to improve black levels, a game mode to reduce blurring in high-speed situations, the Intelligent Scene Controller system, two ten watt speakers with a surround mode, three HDMI ports, a PC input, a composite input, a component input, and a digital audio output.

I definitely liked the picture here–it’s hard not to like a fairly sizable 1080p picture even if it’s just LCD 1080p. The sound, though, I was a little less pleased with as we’re talking about two ten-watt speakers unaugmented except by a “surround mode”, whcih frankly, I find of only limited effectiveness. And while this one will play nicely with your new hardware, your old stuff will get short shrift as component ports are in short supply, and there is no S-video port either.

And what’s more, you can get this one out at Amazon for the oddly specific price of $797.05, which is actually a discount of a whopping $2.90 off normal retail, which frankly makes me wonder why they bothered applying a discount in the first place if they weren’t even going to manage to pull off an even number.

Still though, it’s a pretty good television, though you can likely do better, especially given that this is an older technology that should be considered a mature product line by now. The Panasonic TC-L42U30 should do nicely in your home, though be sure to have a look around at the other models before buying this one.