I've been shooting tests with this camera a lot of the last week.
I love the design and functionality of the camera itself, sony hit gold with that.
The Camera looks amazing in straight up 1080/60i
All the Cineframes looks like garbage, though 30 is the most livable.
And its weird but I found 50i to look ok on some monitors and have a flicker on others. And the same with all the cineframes on some monitors they look horrid and unusable, and on other monitors they looks bad, but not as bad. It has me confused and with many questions.
But in the end the Z1U is only good for shooting in 1080/60i.
Regarding flickering -- some PAL TV's apparently run at 100hz, where older sets run at 50hz. Perhaps the TV or monitors you were watching were different?