Panasonic Z95A review: Panasonic returns to the global TV stage in glorious style

Panasonic shocked the world in 2016 when it announced it would no longer sell its TVs in the US. Some saw this as the first step towards the brand departing the TV scene entirely but it has used its time focussing on its European and Japanese markets wisely and now feels confident enough to return to the notoriously turbulent US market.

Leading the charge across the pond – as well as heading up Panasonic’s 2024 TV range in the UK and Europe – is the Z95A OLED range. Available in just a 65in option in the US and 55in and 65in versions in Europe, the Panasonic Z95A brings together all the latest and greatest technologies in the company’s arsenal.

Its OLED panel is bolstered by micro lens array technology and Panasonic’s in-house heat sink hardware, smart features are powered by Amazon’s Fire TV platform, and Panasonic’s Hollywood-inspired, AI-backed HCX processor has received an upgrade. As if all this wasn’t already tantalising enough, the Z95A also boasts a true multi-channel Dolby Atmos sound system and support all the latest premium gaming features.

Panasonic Z95A review: Key specifications

Panasonic Z95A review: What you need to know

The Z95A is a 4K (3840 x 2160) OLED TV which, as befits its status as Panasonic’s flagship TV for 2024, incorporates several premium features.

Brightness is bolstered by the latest generation of micro lens array technology, where tiny lenses in front of the self-emissive OLED pixels improve how much light emerges from the screen, and one of Panasonic’s proprietary heat sink hardware solutions. This helps to dissipate the high running temperatures with bright images that might otherwise cause OLED screen burn.

The Z95A is designed to be the ultimate expression of Panasonic’s ‘from Hollywood to your living room’ story and features image tuning by renowned Hollywood colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld. Its processing was developed with input from real film industry creatives through Panasonic’s Hollywood Laboratory, there are a couple of highly accurate picture presets and you’re provided with an extensive suite of calibration tools.

The high-end video features are backed up by a similarly premium audio system that includes eight channels of sound used to deliver a 160W Dolby Atmos experience.

Panasonic is no longer just a home cinema brand, though. The Z95A also delivers premium gaming features such as 144Hz frame rates, fast-response game modes for multiple HDR game modes, and support for both the AMD Freesync Premium and NVIDIA G-Sync variable refresh rate formats.

For the first time in generations, Panasonic hasn’t used its own My Home Screen smart platform on its latest flagship TV. Instead, perhaps with one eye on the US TV market, it’s switched to Amazon’s Fire TV system.

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Panasonic Z95A review: Price and competition

With a launch price of £3,899, the 65Z95A sits very high on the current TV price ladder. By comparison, the 65in LG G4, which also boasts MLA technology and a heat sink, costs £3,099, while Samsung’s flagship 65in QD OLED TV for 2024, the S95D, is now being discounted to just £2,500.

Even Sony’s multi-award-winning A95L now costs under £3,000. These are all excellent TVs in their slightly different ways (though the 2023-launched Sony A95Ls use first-gen QD OLED panels), and as such pile pressure on the Z95A to justify its much higher cost.

Panasonic Z95A review: Design, connections and control

The Z95A presents a fantastically well-built, no-nonsense face to the world as a heavy-duty Master OLED Ultimate screen sits within a bare minimum of supporting frame, while a promisingly imposing integrated soundbar runs along the bottom edge.

Viewed from a slight angle the screen looks as trim around the back as we’ve come to expect with OLED TVs, too. Sit a bit further down the sides, though, and a very chunky back end section heaves into view, caused by the need to accommodate the TV’s 360 Soundscape Pro audio system.

Despite its relatively hefty bodywork, the Z95A sits very stably on a small circular plate-style desktop stand that makes it easy to fit the TV onto even narrow bits of furniture. You can even manually rotate the screen through a few degrees.

Connectivity is good without being great. Four HDMIs lead the way, but an ample supporting cast includes three USB-A ports, an Ethernet port, a digital optical audio output, an RF input, a headphone output that can, unusually, be switched to a subwoofer line out, and the now expected Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless support.

It’s a bit of a shame that only two of the four HDMI ports on a truly high-end TV like this support the full HDMI 2.1 specification required to unlock key gaming features such as 4K/120Hz, 144Hz, and variable refresh rates.

The Z95A ships with different remote control handsets depending on where you buy it. In the UK and Europe, you get a traditional Panasonic remote that’s large, well-built, button-packed but reasonably helpfully laid out. In the US you get a remote based on the small, button-light handsets associated with Amazon’s Fire TV devices.

You can also control the Z95A just by talking to it (thanks to Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition platform). There’s even a far-field mic in the TV so that you talk to it without needing the remote control.

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Panasonic Z95A review: Smart TV platform

In terms of app negotiating power and widening the TV’s global appeal, Panasonic’s decision to switch from its My Home Screen smart system to Fire TV for the Z95A makes absolute sense. The only concern is that Fire TV has so far typically been associated with relatively affordable TVs, not seriously flagship sets like the Z95A.

Panasonic claims to have worked for months with Amazon, though, to ensure that Fire TV on the Z95A integrates deeply into Panasonic’s established menu system and feature set, rather than just taking over. And this effort seems to have paid off, as neither Fire TV nor Panasonic’s TV features appear in any way compromised by the new collaboration.

Fire TV carries a huge range of streaming services, including all of the big hitters such as Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV+ and Disney+. UK buyers will additionally be able to access the new Freely service, where BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 channels can be live-streamed rather than received through the tuner.

Fire TV looks a bit overbearing due to the sheer amount of content it includes on its home page, and can be a bit over-eager to promote Amazon content over other services. But its familiarity to users across the globe counts for a lot.

Panasonic Z95A review: Image quality

Panasonic sells the Z95A as being capable of producing images that look as close as possible to the way they looked when created in a professional mastering studio. And its Filmmaker Mode in particular delivers on this promise to spectacular effect.

Measuring the Filmmaker Mode’s SDR playback using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and new C6 HDR5000 colorimeter reveal DeltaE errors of two or less for every single test signal, from multipoint grayscale and colour space tracking through to luminance and saturation sweeps.

Any DeltaE error under three is considered imperceptible to the human eye, so the Z95A’s Filmmaker Mode looks flawless in terms of delivering the accuracy it promises.

Many other modern TVs also manage to deliver impressive measured accuracy in their Filmmaker Modes. Unlike some, even many, of those notionally accurate rival TV pictures, however, the Filmmaker Mode on the Z95A looks drop-dead gorgeous. The exceptional core qualities of the Z95A’s panel and processing ensure that there’s none of the dullness, flatness or loss of colour tone nuance the most notionally accurate modes on some rival TVs can suffer with.

What seals the deal for me where the Z95A’s SDR picture quality is concerned, though, is how good it looks with most of its other presets, too. The True Cinema and Cinema modes both deliver slightly more dynamic and expressive takes on the Filmmaker Mode’s accuracy, while in the most pleasant surprise of all, even the default Normal preset delivers its much more vivid, contrasty and bright images while still retaining the sort of finesse, balance and pixel-level light control that distinguishes the TV’s more accurate modes.

The Normal mode isn’t still measurably accurate, to be clear. But in delivering more of the screen’s colour and contrast extremes without generating the sort of distractions such modes typically can, it’s certainly spectacularly watchable.

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Panasonic Z95A review: HDR performance

The first thing to report here is that the Z95A’s combination of MLA and heat sink technologies delivers pretty extreme levels of brightness for an OLED screen. My Calman Ultimate software recorded a steady 1,720cd/m2 across 1%, 2%, 5% and 10% windows, making it the second-brightest OLED TV in town – marginally behind Samsung’s S95D.

Impressively, the Z95A’s ground-breaking brightness hasn’t led to any compromises in its delivery of the beautifully deep, rich black colours that have made OLED so popular with film fans. So you really can have a 1,700nit-plus pixel sitting right next to a practically zero-nit pixel without there being any compromise between the two.

The result is some of the most stunningly dynamic and intense pictures I’ve ever seen on a consumer TV. Crucially, though, the Z95A isn’t just good at image extremes. It manages to deliver the brightest colour and peak white highlights without those image areas losing detail or subtlety more effectively than any other TV I’ve seen.

The same level of control extends to inky black colours, too. Remarkable granularity in the way the Z95A handles near-black picture information ensures that dark details avoid the noise and coarseness commonly seen on other OLED TVs.

The Z95A’s immaculate control of every nit of light allows it to paint even the most subtly lit scenes and shots with so much precision that even the most mundane footage looks like a work of art, full of immaculate 4K detail, bags of depth and awe-inspiring realism and authenticity. As with its SDR pictures, too, nothing is going on across any of the Z95A’s HDR picture presets that might throw you out of your immersion in what you’re watching.

The Z95A proves capable of covering an excellent 98.85% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut associated with most HDR content creation, too, as well as nearly 75% of the BT.2020 gamut. This means there’s a huge range of colour tones waiting to be unlocked by all of the Z95A’s fantastically controlled light, contributing still further to its astounding sense of precision and balance.

Everything I’ve said about HDR so far refers to the set’s basic HDR10 performance, using the TV’s tone mapping (for most presets) under the immaculate control of the HCX AI Pro Mk II processor. The set also supports both the premium HDR10+ and Dolby Vision HDR formats (most rivals only tend to cover one or the other). Surprisingly, however, Dolby Vision is responsible for one of only two niggles with the Z95A’s imperious performance. Its Dolby Vision Dark preset leaves pictures looking too dull for comfort and can cause subtle details to become lost in the darkest corners, while the Dolby Vision Vivid preset comes on a bit strong, looking a touch oversaturated and peaky in a way HDR 10 playback even in the TV’s Normal preset never does.

The other niggle is that despite a new component of the latest HCX processor being focused on removing it, I still spotted slightly more banding over subtle HDR colour blends than I’ve seen on some high-end rivals.

These flaws of the Z95A are so small in the context of the quality on show elsewhere, though, that I almost feel I should apologise for mentioning them.

To test the Panasonic Z95A I used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Panasonic Z95A review: Gaming

While it would have been nice if all four of the Z95A’s HDMI inputs supported 4K/120Hz and VRR, that’s where the bad news about the Z95A’s gaming experience ends.

Particularly brilliant is Panasonic’s decision to include two Game mode options, one of which, in keeping with Panasonic’s messaging for the Z95A, attempts to deliver an accurate rendition of any game’s HDR and colour design.

Game graphics look crisp, textured and full of depth and nuance, while colour and contrast both enjoy serious punch and boldness without this feeling forced or crude. I found myself appreciating the artistry of in-game landscapes such as the Viking-era Britain of Assassins Creed: Valhalla and the campaign levels of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to a degree I never had before. 

The screen displays 120Hz games with all the fluidity and sharpness you’d hope for, and the ability to handle all three main variable refresh rate systems means there’s never any screen tearing.

The Z95A’s game modes get input lag down to a very good (if not quite class-leading) 13.8ms at 60Hz, and the Game Control Board onscreen menu offers a good mix of incoming video information and gaming aids.

Panasonic Z95A review: Sound quality

The Z95A takes Panasonic’s long-running 360 Soundscape Pro concept to a much higher performance level than it’s ever hit before.

Thanks in particular to the addition of new side-firing drivers and a much more impactful bass system, the Z95A produces a larger but also more coherent soundstage underpinned by some proper low-frequency heft. The enhanced bass stays largely free of distortion even under the most extreme movie soundtrack pressure, too, while the up-firing and side-firing drivers place specific location details quite accurately within a soundstage that extends convincingly beyond the screen’s physical boundaries.

Sealing an excellent audio deal for me is the way the bar running along the bottom of the screen propels sound directly towards you, making the most important soundtrack elements seem more impactful and direct. Especially as the TV lets you steer this sound directly towards your seating position, even if you’re not sat directly in front of the screen.

Panasonic Z95A review: Verdict

Despite arriving relatively late in a year that’s been stuffed with excellent TVs, the Z95A makes a spectacular mark. Tweaks to its already stellar video processing allow it to take full advantage of the improved capabilities of its MLA-bolstered OLED panel, delivering an image that combines fearsome punch and dynamics with a degree of subtlety and granular light and colour management. It’s sensationally accurate out of the box and this accuracy is arguably unmatched by any other TV released this year.

Some serious AV fans may still quibble about having to pay for a built-in multi-channel sound system when they potentially already own a high-quality external sound system. However, the Z95A improves on Panasonic’s 360 Surround Sound concept so much that for me it would now actually feel weird if a TV with such outstanding pictures didn’t also feature such a premium sound system.

A more serious limitation for home cinema enthusiasts is the fact that Z95A tops out at 65in. But that is what it is. If 65in is big enough for you and you can afford the price of entry, the Z95A delivers a combination of accuracy and jaw-dropping spectacle that has to be seen to be believed.