Panasonic Z95A OLED TV Review

The Panasonic Z95A OLED has a slightly dated look, largely due to the included soundbar and thicker speakers on the back. It doesn't blend in as seamlessly as thinner models, like the LG G4 OLED, do.

This TV isn't part of our accelerated longevity test. It features similar burn-in prevention features to LG OLEDs, and based on power consumption measurements, it appears to run the same compensation cycles.

The round center-mounted stand is rather simple, but it supports the TV well. There's no alternate placement for the stand, but it swivels roughly 15 degrees to either side.

Footprint of the 65" stand: 15" x 13.7". There's about 3.8" between the first visible pixels and the bottom of the stand.

The back section that houses the inputs and speakers is made of plastic and is quite thick. The inputs are located on the left side of the TV when facing the front, but they're easily accessible even when the TV is wall-mounted. There are clips on the back to help with cable management.

The Panasonic Z95A is noticeably thicker than just about any TV on the market. This is due to the inclusion of thicker, higher-quality speakers throughout the TV.

The Panasonic Z95 has outstanding build quality. With the exception of the back section that houses the inputs, the TV is made entirely of premium materials and feels well-built.

The Panasonic Z95A has remarkable contrast and a nearly infinite contrast ratio. Due to OLED's self-lit pixels, the TV displays bright highlights next to perfect inky blacks, making it very impressive in a dark room.

Since OLEDs don't use local dimming and instead have individual pixels that can be lit up to their maximum brightness next to pixels that are turned off, there's no blooming when bright elements are surrounded by deep blacks.

The TV is an OLED and has no backlight, so its self-lit pixels give it the same performance as a TV with perfect local dimming and no zone transitions. We still film the zone transition video on the TV, so you can see how it compares to a TV with local dimming.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and when the TV is set to Game Mode.

The Panasonic Z95A has great HDR brightness thanks to its additional MLA brightness-boosting layer. Combined with its nearly infinite contrast, this TV provides an impactful HDR viewing experience, as bright highlights are very bright and stand out from the rest of the scene. Unfortunately, large bright scenes are significantly dimmer than smaller, specular highlights due to their aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL).

In a three-way comparison with this TV, the Sony A95L OLED, and the LG G4 OLED, the Z95 is brighter in test slides, but with most real content, it's the dimmest of the three. The difference is very minor, though, and not noticeable unless you're comparing the three side by side.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Professional 1
• Ambient Sensor: Off
• Luminance Level: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Peak Luminance: High
• Gamma: 2.2
• EOTF Type: Auto
• HDR Tone Map: Normal
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

There's no noticeable difference with HDR brightness when the TV is set to Game Mode.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: True Game
• Ambient Sensor: Off
• Luminance Level: 100
• Contrast: 100
• Peak Luminance: High
• Gamma: 2.2
• EOTF Type: Auto
• HDR Tone Map: Clipping
• Clipping Threshold: 2000
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is fantastic, and almost all HDR content is displayed at the brightness intended by the content creator. With content mastered at 600 or 1000 nits, there's a sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness, and the TV isn't brightness mapping at all, as it can display the full range. With brighter content mastered at 4000 nits, there's more of a gradual roll off near the TV's peak brightness, as the TV is preserving gradients at the expense of some brightness.

The Panasonic Z95A has very good SDR brightness and can easily overcome glare even in a bright room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Professional 1
• Ambient Sensor: Off
• Luminance Level: 100
• Contrast: 90
• Peak Luminance: High
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

The Panasonic Z95A has an excellent color gamut. It displays nearly the entire range of colors in the DCI-P3 color space, but most colors are slightly undersaturated. Its coverage of the wider Rec.2020 color space is good, but all colors are undersaturated and inaccurate, with saturated greens and cyans faring the worst.

The TV has excellent color volume. It displays dark, saturated colors very well, and its ability to display bright whites is outstanding. Unfortunately, as with all WOLED panels, bright colors are washed out a bit, as the TV relies on the bright white subpixel to achieve the brightest highlights, which dilutes colors noticeably.

This color washout is especially noticeable in the SDR gamut rings in the CIELAB color space. The ring at the highest lightness level shows a considerable decrease in coverage. These gamut ring results are an early sneak preview at something we're working on for our next test methodology update. Stay tuned for more!

DCI-P3:

• Gamut Rings
• Results

BT.2020:

• Gamut Rings
• Results

The TV has excellent SDR accuracy even without a full calibration. Its white balance and color accuracy are nearly perfect, with no noticeable issues at all. Gamma is closer to 2.3 than the 2.2 target, and most scenes are a bit too dark.

The Panasonic Z95A OLED is very easy to calibrate, and the results after calibration are superb.

See our full calibration settings.

The Panasonic Z95A has excellent uniformity. There's some very faint vertical banding, especially in darker shades, but you have to really look for them to see them.

Because OLEDs can turn off individual pixels, the TV has incredible black uniformity with no blooming or halo effect around bright objects.

The viewing angle on this TV is nearly perfect. There's a very subtle color shift at extremely wide angles, but nobody will notice this in practice.

The TV has incredible reflection handling. Its glossy screen finish significantly reduces the intensity of indirect reflections, like when you have glare from a ceiling light that isn't directly facing the screen. It also does an excellent job at reducing the intensity of direct reflections, like a lamp positioned in front of the screen.

The TV has good HDR native gradient handling. There's some noticeable banding in dark grays and greens, but all other colors have minimal banding.

The low-quality content smoothing features on this TV are good overall. It does an excellent job at preserving fine details, but it's only decent at actually smoothing out the image, so there's still some noticeable macro-blocking in dark scenes.

The TV does an outstanding job with upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs, standard definition cable channels, and lower-resolution streams. Details are well-defined and clear enough, but very fine details and small hard-coded text are a bit hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 30
• Resolution Remaster: Max

The TV uses a WOLED panel with a WRGB pixel structure where all four pixels are never lit at the same time. Due to its subpixel layout, it has minor issues with displaying text on Windows since ClearType isn't well optimized to non-RGB subpixel layouts, but most users won't be bothered by this.

The MLA layer on this TV adds a slight haze to the screen coating, but it doesn't impact picture quality, and it's not noticeable in normal viewing conditions.

The white subpixel does an excellent job helping the TV display bright whites, but it dilutes the color purity of greens and reds, as seen on the TV's spectral power distribution (SPD).

The Panasonic Z95A delivers incredibly clear motion with almost no blur behind fast-moving objects thanks to its nearly instantaneous response time. Due to the sample-and-hold nature of OLED technology, there's still some persistence blur when gaming at 60Hz, but it's not noticeable at higher refresh rates.

This TV doesn't have a traditional backlight and doesn't use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim each pixel, but it's not completely flicker-free. There's a slight dip in brightness that corresponds to the TV's refresh rate. This differs from the PWM flicker on TVs with LED backlights and occurs on every OLED we've tested. It's not noticeable, but it can still bother people who are extra sensitive to flicker.

The TV does exhibit flicker-like behavior in low-luminance sections of the screen that resembles pulse amplitude modulation (PAM). This means that bright sections of the screen are flicker-free, but darker sections have very minor flicker present. Fortunately, this isn't noticeable with most real content.

The Panasonic Z95A has an optional black frame insertion (BFI) feature that reduces the appearance of persistence blur caused by the TV's nearly instantaneous response time. Panasonic's implementation of BFI is very strange, though, as unlike any other TV on the market, the screen never goes completely black between frames, it just dims the backlight slightly.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. It handles slow-moving shots well, but there are significantly more artifacts in fast-moving scenes.

Unfortunately, due to the TV's nearly instantaneous pixel response time, there's stutter with low frame rate content, which is most noticeable during slow panning shots.

This TV automatically removes judder from 24Hz sources, like a Blu-ray player or streaming box with a Match Frame Rate feature, and the internal apps. To remove judder from 60p and 60i sources, like a cable box, you must enable the Accurate IFC setting. Unfortunately, movies and TV shows aren't judder-free when BFI is enabled because the BFI feature only flickers at 60Hz.

The Panasonic Z95A supports a variable refresh rate, ensuring a nearly tear-free gaming experience from any VRR-enabled source. It works well across a wide refresh rate range and supports sources with Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC), which ensures your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

This TV has incredibly low input lag as long as you're in the 'True Game' Picture mode. This ensures a smooth, responsive gaming experience or if you use the TV as a PC monitor.

The Panasonic Z95 supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz, but only on the high-bandwidth HDMI ports 1 and 2. Ports 3 and 4 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, so they don't support above 4k @ 60Hz. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly with most supported resolutions when the TV's 'HDMI Setting' is set to Pure Direct, which is essential for clear text from a PC. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't support 1440p @ 120Hz with chroma 4:4:4.

This TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to 'True Game' Picture mode to get the lowest input lag.

The Panasonic Z95A is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to 'True Game' Picture mode to get the lowest input lag.

The Panasonic Z95A supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth up to 48 Gbps on HDMI ports 1 and 2, with both supporting up to 4k @ 144Hz. Unfortunately, the HDMI 2 port is also the eARC port, so you lose a high bandwidth port when you plug a soundbar into the TV. Many soundbars now support HDMI 2.1 passthrough, though, so this isn't an issue unless you have older equipment that doesn't support this. The TV supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+, but it only has an ATSC 1.0 tuner, so you can't watch 4k content over the air.

The TV supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. Unfortunately, it doesn't support DTS audio formats commonly used on Blu-rays.

Thanks to the inclusion of a built-in 5.1 speaker system and soundbar, the Panasonic Z95A OLED is one of the best-sounding TVs on the market. It's still not as good as a dedicated home theater system or even a good soundbar, especially when it comes to deep bass, but it's a good starting point. It gets very loud and has an incredibly well-balanced sound profile, but there's some noticeable compression at max volume.

We also ran the speaker system through our gamut of soundbar audio tests, so you can compare the results to an actual soundbar:

The TV's distortion handling is decent. There's no audible distortion at moderate listening levels, but there's audible distortion near and at max volume.

The TV runs the Fire TV OS, which is smooth and easy to use. Unfortunately, there's a bug that prevents certain settings, like motion interpolation, from working despite the settings being turned on. To fix this, you must enter the 'Home' menu and return to the input or internal app you're using.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

The TV has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The remote is almost identical to the ones included with other TVs that use the Fire TV OS, with quick access buttons for the most popular streaming services. You can use the built-in microphone to switch inputs, change apps, search within apps, and ask for the weather and time. Unfortunately, you can't use voice commands to change settings.

There's a single button on the bottom of the TV that can be used to switch inputs, adjust the volume, change channels, and power the TV on/off. There's also a privacy switch for the built-in microphone.

• Setup guide
• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)