Panasonic TV-65Z95A Review
Panasonic's most important TV in a decade fortunately turns out to be brilliant.
Verdict
While European home cinema fans have long enjoyed having Hollywood in their living rooms thanks to Panasonic’s premium TVs, with the US launch of the 65Z95A the brand is also finally back in the business of bringing Hollywood back to, well, Hollywood.
Pros
- Outstanding picture quality
- Impressive multi-channel Dolby Atmos sound system
- Extensive gaming support
Cons
- Minor colour banding with HDR
- It’s expensive by current TV standards
- But only two HDMIs deliver the full range of gaming features
Key Features
- Master OLED Ultimate panelFeatures a combination of Micro Lens Array technology and Panasonic’s heat sink hardware, with a new HCX Pro AI MK II processor
- 360-Degree Soundscape Pro audio systemCarries a 5.1.2-channel audio system that includes side-firing, up-firing and front-firing speakers.
- Fire TV SmartsSwitches from its previous My Home Screen smart system to Amazon’s Fire TV platform.
Introduction
The TV-65Z95A is arguably the most important TV Panasonic has launched in a decade. Why? Because it’s the first TV the brand has sold in the US since dramatically pulling out of that market back in 2015.
On paper the flagship 65Z95A seems pretty much the perfect model with which to re-enter the US – while also, of course, offering plenty of enticing stuff for its legions of European Panasonic TV fans to get excited about.
Availability
Let’s kick off this section by reiterating the big news: The Panasonic TV-65Z95A will be available in the US, as well as the brand’s more traditional homes. Adding to the pressure put on it by its US relaunch status, the 65-inch 65Z95A the only model from Panasonic’s flagship Z95A range that’s getting a US launch. The 55-inch model available in Europe isn’t crossing the Atlantic.
In the UK and Europe the 65Z95A costs £3899 and €4399 respectively, while it debuts in the US at $3199. Before European buyers spit their coffee out, though, I should stress that the quoted US price doesn’t include purchase tax.
Design
- Rotatable centre desktop mount
- Built-in genuine multi-channel speaker system including front-facing ‘soundbar’
- Premium ‘one level’ fascia
Viewed head on, the Panasonic TV-65Z95 presents a suitably premium face to the world. Its frame and screen appear to exist on the same single, glassy level, and the build quality looks and feels impressive. Plus there’s an inch or so deep strip of fabric running right along the bottom of the screen that houses a forward facing set of front left, right and centre channel speakers.
Round the back, the 65Z95A ditches the glamour and current trend for slimness in favour of an unusually deep rear that plays host to an unusually ambitious multi-channel sound system – including an up-firing ‘chimney’ speaker arrangement, an integrated bass speaker, and a pair of side-firers. Panasonic still manages to make this chunky look quite elegantly sculpted – but then what sort of lunatic wants to spend their days looking at the back of a TV?
The hefty screen sits on a surprisingly small but extremely heavy and well built semi-circular desktop foot mount, on which it can rotate a few degrees to left and right.
The 65Z95A’s remote control merits a mention because you actually get a different one depending on where you buy the TV. In Europe you get a long, button-packed silvery remote that’s very much in keeping with Panasonic’s established style, whereas in the US you get a much smaller handset in a typical Amazon devices style. Why the Amazon connection? All is explained in the next section…
Features
- Fire TV smarts
- Master OLED panel with Micro Lens Array technology
- True 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos sound system
For the first time since I can remember, Panasonic has dispensed with its own My Home Screen smart system and interface for one of its premium TVs, replacing it with Amazon’s Fire TV system.
While My Home Screen has always struck me as a perfectly solid and impressively customisable smart TV system, there’s no doubt that moving to Fire TV immediately gives the 65Z95A a more global, US-friendly feel. As well as giving Panasonic access to all of Amazon’s immense reach when it comes to making sure all the most important streaming apps are present and correct.
Panasonic has been at pains to stress in its communications about the switch to Fire TV that it has worked hard to ensure deep integration between Amazon’s smart platform and Panasonic’s established TV set up menus and features. And it did indeed feel to me as someone who’s tested Panasonic TVs for decades very much like the 65Z95A was still a Panasonic TV that happened to be running Fire TV for its streaming services, whereas most TVs that run Fire TV feel like they’re basically Amazon TVs.
Important though Fire TV might be to globalising the 65Z95A’s appeal, for AV enthusiasts on both sides of the pond it’s actually the TV’s picture features – rolled up into its use of what Panasonic calls a Master OLED Ultimate panel – that really matter. These panels combine the latest generation of Micro Lens Array (MLA) technology, where tiny lenses behind the screen focus light out of the screen more efficiently, with one of Panasonic’s proprietary heat sink systems, to deliver levels of high dynamic range-friendly brightness that rewrite the OLED rulebook.
To put some numbers on this, measurements using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate screen analysis software, C6 colorimeter and G1 signal generator recorded 1700 nits of brightness on a 10% HDR test window – a huge figure for an OLED screen that’s only bettered by Samsung’s S95D and Philips’ OLED+959.
At the same time, the 65Z95A maintains the innate OLED advantage of truly inky, natural black colours made possible by the way every pixel in an OLED screen can produce its own light, independent of its neighbours.
The huge range of light and colour opened up by the Master OLED Ultimate panel design is martialled by 2024’s iteration of Panasonic’s ever-dependable HCX AI Pro processing system. Backed up, as Panasonic’s premium TVs have been for the past few years, by picture tuning by an actual film industry creative in the form of acclaimed colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld. With the 65Z95A’s predecessors being used in some mastering studios as reference large-screen monitors, it’s fair to say Panasonic goes further than most in pursuit of its ‘see pictures as the director intended’ TV messaging.
New elements of the latest AI-driven HCX processor include a specific focus on improving the look of potentially compressed streamed content, and reducing the potential for colour striping with HDR images.
The 65Z95A’s video talents extend to truly comprehensive high dynamic range support, taking HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats, but also the versions of all these formats (and its Filmmaker mode) that can adapt to the light levels in your room.
Panasonic is no longer just interested in attracting movie fans, though. It’s also out to give a premium experience to gamers, with the 65Z95A supporting such key modern gaming features as 4K/120Hz feeds, 144Hz refresh rates, variable refresh rates (including both the Nvidia G-Sync and AMD Freesync Premium formats), auto low latency mode switching, a fast-response Dolby Vision Game mode, and a lowly 13ms of input lag when its Game picture preset is active. The only catch is that the full suite of these features is only support over two of its four HDMI ports.
One last premium touch of the 65Z95A that helps set a suitably flagship tone is its 360-degree System. This squeezes a 5.1.2 multi-channel speaker system into the 65Z95A’s bodywork, complete with true up-firing, side-firing and bass speakers to go with the front-firing speakers built into the bar below the screen.
The 360-degree sound system is, of course, all about trying to deliver Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks more effectively. And the system is further bolstered by a sound beam steering system that actually lets you direct the sound from the front speakers towards your seating position, even if it’s off to the side of the screen, so that you always feel like you’re sitting in the audio sweet spot.
Picture Quality
- Outstanding contrast and rightness
- Beautifully nuanced and accurate picture
- Unusually useful range of presets
The Panasonic TV-65Z95A achieves the seriously impressive feat of being capable of being pretty much all things to all people.
When it comes to what’s likely its most important target market, serious home cinema fans, it can do the best job of any Panasonic TV to date of convincing you that the pictures you’re watching really are remarkably faithful recreations of the images filmmakers and content creators put so much care into creating on professional mastering monitors.
Its most accurate modes – the Filmmaker mode and Panasonic’s own True Cinema preset – deliver a picture of stunning precision, balance and insight, revealing subtleties of colour tone and light that I don’t feel I’ve seen rendered so effectively on any other TV. Especially when it comes to near-black shading and details during dark scenes, which as well as appearing with remarkable subtlety also avoid the sort of noise that can accompany such image elements on less well-controlled OLED panels. All without any compromise to the truly inky deep black tones we’ve come to know and love with OLED technology.
Not a colour tone looks out of place in the 65Z95A’s two most accurate settings, while the ultra-bright panel uses its capabilities to achieve almost infinitely nuanced lighting steps across its colossal light range, rather than simply throwing all of its potential brightness at the screen in some sort of gaudy light show. You always feel as if the 65Z95A’s extreme capabilities are being used to bring you a more natural picture, rather than them just being used to ‘show off’.
Objective analysis of the Filmmaker mode and True Cinema presets using the Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software and measuring devices again confirms my subjective findings, as the screen delivers DeltaE 2000 errors for all SDR colour and greyscale tests of under 2 (where anything under three can be considered undetectable to the human eye).
Add to this slavish devotion to delivering a creators’ vision some remarkable consistency from frame-to-frame and scene-to-scene, with no distracting signs of obvious picture or panel ‘manipulation’, and you’ve got just the sort of impeccably immersive viewing experience serious movie fans crave.
There are numerous other strengths to soak up beyond the headline colour finesse, light control and extreme contrast, too. Starting with the image’s gorgeous – but never forced – crispness and detail, which seems borne from genuine precision and accuracy rather than any sort of heavy duty sharpness processing. As such it contributes to the sort of sense of depth and three-dimensionality that’s always associated with only the very finest TVs.
The screen’s high brightness means that it retains almost every detail and shading subtlety in the very brightest HDR image areas. More so, in fact, than any other TV I’ve tested.
Motion is handled well, meanwhile. Judder with 24p sources and no motion processing in play is less distracting than I’d feared with such an incredibly bright OLED panel, but if it does bother you, the lowest setting for Panasonic’s IFC motion processing is also excellent at reducing (but not, crucially, fully removing) the judder’s impact without introducing unwanted processing artefacts.
While the Panasonic 65Z95A’s fantastically subtle, balanced, natural and accurate pictures class as its star attraction, I want to mention, too, the way many of its more vibrant and punchy presets also seem to retain a kernel of naturalism and balance that that you don’t usually find with such aggressive presets. So even someone who sticks with the set’s out of the box picture preset will still be able to get completely immersed in whatever they’re watching because the picture being generally brighter, more contrasty, sharper and, especially, more richly coloured doesn’t throw up any obvious picture anomalies.
This might all seem a moot point to the 65Z95A’s main accuracy-loving fanbase, I guess. But I for one always like to see a brand putting plenty of effort into its less accurate presets in recognition of the fact that not all tastes and, especially, room conditions are the same.
One last point worth adding to the 65Z95A’s long list of strengths is the way its ability to play all four of the main HDR formats means it will always give you the best version of whatever source you play into it. Which is saying something when you’re dealing with a TV as accomplished as the 65Z95A.
The only problem I found with the 65Z95A’s pictures was the presence of some mild banding noise in areas of certain subtle background HDR colour blend. The latest HCX Pro AI Mk II processor has reduced the starkness of this banding, but hasn’t completely removed it.
Sound Quality
- Excellent multi-channel sound staging
- Good power and dynamics
- Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support
With more than 100W of power to play with spread across eight real channels of sound, it’s no surprise to find the Panasonic 65Z95A delivering an exceptionally large sound stage. The front firing speakers in the soundbar beneath the screen drive sound out into your room with impressive force and impact, instantly giving the sound stage a potent forward dimension.
The side-firing and up-firing drivers then add a wider but also more coherent sense of width and height to the sound than I’ve heard from the 360-degree sound systems provided with previous Panasonic flagship TVs. There’s a much beefier, more consistent and less-prone-to-distortion sound from the integrated bass woofer than I’ve heard from the 65Z95A’s predecessors too.
The 65Z95A sound so much better than previous Panasonic flagship TVs, in fact, that it really does save you the cost and hassle of adding an external soundbar. Unless you really want the one thing the 65Z95A lacks: True rear channel sound.
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Should you buy it?
You want amazing picture and sound for a flatscreen TV
you want incredibly immersive, accurate and natural picture quality, accompanied by powerful multi-channel sound.
The cost is too high
You can’t afford the price of entry, or you’re looking for a TV to go into a very bright room where LED technology might give you a more consistently enjoyable picture.
Final Thoughts
With its cutting edge panel design, new and immaculately integrated Fire TV smarts and made in Hollywood tuning and processing, not to mention Panasonic’s years of experience with self-emitting TV technologies, the 65Z95A is as brilliant a return to the US TV fold as American home cinema fans could have hoped for. While also offering plenty of new quality and features for Panasonic’s European fanbase to get excited about, too.
How we test
We test every television we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
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Tested with real world use
Benchmarked with CaLman display tech
Tested for more than a week
FAQs
MLA is short for Micro lens Array – a new technology that uses lenses behind the screen to improve the efficiency with which light emerges from the OLED screen.
This is Panasonic’s latest picture processing system, complete with AI features and Hollywood input.
HDR10, HLG, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive