Pat PilcherPAT PILCHER attends the launch event of Panasonic’s rather astounding new line-up of super-smart TVs and reports on their exceptional intelligence.
It must be one of the ultimate ironies of our time. 4K OLED TVs have improved to the point where watching them is more like looking through a window than watching the boob tube. The sad truth, however, is that most smart TVs are anything but smart. From clunky, slow interfaces that seem to have hit every branch of the ugly tree on their way to the ground, to a lack of any easy way to find the content you actually want to watch, most smart TVs don’t really do anything smart. Then there’s also their near-complete inability to play nice with smart home gadgets. Simply put, many smart TVs are really just big-screen dummies rolled in marketing glitter.
At least that was until Panasonic and Amazon teamed up to announce their latest flagship OLED TVs, the Z95A (65″ and 55″) and Z93A (77″). Witchdoctor got to see these at the recent Panasonic launch event. Here are our first impressions.
Changing settings on most TVs typically involves clunky menus that block most of the video playing. The New Fire TV interface features a quick settings menu that pops up on the right-hand side of the TV with a semi-transparent background, allowing you to keep up with on-screen action as you tweak settings. It’s not a big thing, but it’s super handy. Anyone familiar with Amazon’s FireStick will feel right at home with the Z95A or Z93A’s user interface.
The flagship models of the TVs also feature a built-in far-field mic, allowing them to showcase their niftiest party trick – Alexa integration. Instead of searching for the remote, now you can just say the Alexa wake word to find content, change TV settings, volume, inputs, etc. No remote is needed but one is still bundled.
The other cool thing is that the new Fire TV-capable tellies will work with your smart home. This handily means you can use the integrated Alexa to control hue lights, get a pop-up picture-in-picture window to see who’s at the front door (via a Ring smart doorbell) and a tonne of other useful smart home stuff. In short, Fire TV has the potential to transform Panasonic’s new TVs into the hub of your home.
This isn’t hype, either. There’s literally a hub interface just like the one on the Echo Show hub baked in, so you can get an at-a-glance overview of the status of all your smart home widgets via the TV. Then there’s Ambient mode, which fires up after a preset period of inactivity (prolonging the life of the TVs gorgeous OLED display). This enables your TV to show upcoming calendar events, sticky notes, photos, and a host of other useful widgets while a gorgeous backdrop renders in real-time.
The Fire TV-equipped tellies also solve one of the biggest annoyances of streamed content. While they won’t pay for your streaming services, they do make it insanely easy to find which streaming service has what content. For example, finding movies starring Denzel Washington no longer involves endless scrolling. Instead, you ask Alexa, and she’ll do all the legwork, displaying all the relevant movies regardless of which streaming service they’re on.
Panasonic has also baked in loads of video and audio refinements into the Z95A and Z93A thanks to a brand-new HCX Pro AI Processor MK II chipset, and an even brighter MLA OLED panel (which Panasonic says is capable of going an astounding 50 per cent brighter than last year’s, allowing it to crank out an impressive brightness of around 3000 nits!). The demo video at the launch event really popped. Where most TVs support a limited range of HDR formats, the Z95A and Z93A support all current HDR standards, including Dolby Vision IQ, which adapts to on-screen content and your TV room’s ambience.
Panasonic has also added an AI mode to intelligently tweak picture settings using machine learning, so you don’t have to fart about with the settings menu. As with the earlier MZ2000 TV (which I gave a 10/10 rating), Panasonic has added 360 Soundscape Pro, tuned by Technics, which delivers an astonishingly good amount of immersive 3D sound too, and you can even add an external subwoofer directly to the TV.
We’ll go hands-on with these genuinely innovative new TVs shortly, so watch this space.
https://www.panasonic.com/nz/consumer/television-audio/televisions.html
