Panasonic Z95A OLED Unboxing | But How Does it Sound?
Hey, everyone! So let me know what you think in the comments, but I've always felt like not every TV needs an unboxing. We've definitely played with just unboxing every TV that we've got, but in the end, I feel like a TV needs to be unique in some way to deserve an unboxing. Maybe it's got something unique about how you set it up, or it's got some unique feature that we haven't seen before. Kind of want to dive into it a little bit. Or what's unique about it is that it's just over the top and outrageous, like the Hisense 110-inch UX or the TCL 115-inch TVs. I think those definitely qualified for unboxings. With that in mind, why are we unboxing the new Panasonic OLED? Welcome back, everyone! I'm Caleb Denison, and just a second—this TV has leaves on it, which is not a great look. So anyway, I wanted to do an unboxing for this Panasonic TV, not just because
Panasonic's back (and that's kind of notable—we already kind of covered Panasonic coming back and why that's notable). But this one, Panasonic has gone out of its way to fold in—I told you there were leaves on this thing—Panasonic has gone out of its way to fold in an audio system on this TV. And that's part of the reason why I still have the Sony A95L setup here, because it has a pretty top-notch audio system built in where the screen serves as the speaker. Panasonic goes a different direction than that, which we're going to see here shortly. But I wanted to take a second to kind of dive into not just the audio and its functionality but also how Panasonic went about it. With OLED TVs, we're used to very, very, very thin screens,
even if there is a little bit of a bump out at the bottom. I think this TV just eschews being thin entirely in service of having an audio system. I feel like that's worth taking a special look at. So let's go ahead and dive into this thing. I intentionally did not watch any other videos about this TV. I don't know how many there are, actually. I know Brian at Brian's Tech Therapy—shout-out, Brian—has looked at this TV, but I kind of wanted to be, you know, surprised by whatever is waiting for me on the other side of this box, to give sort of an honest, organic reaction to what I learn as we get into this TV. What I'm learning right now is that there is some tape oddly placed in here and that the foam has not held up so great. This TV has a big old dent on one of the corners,
definitely a byproduct of how the shippers handled it. And I feel like there's supposed to be stuff stowed up here that's not here, and that it was completely unnecessary for me to open the top of the box. I don't know. I'm still going to remove it just to remove it. Off comes the lid, and off to the side you already know—oh yeah, just foam blocks everywhere. All right, wow. I am glad that I kind of waited to get an honest reaction. So this is interesting. Zeke, let's get a profile, top-down, whatever. When I looked at the pictures online, the profile view made it seem like the bump out was uniform across the back. It's not. It has
a really interesting center column. The bump out definitely comes out higher on the sides, but you do still get some of that impossibly thin OLED vibe. And since some of the bump out is recessed on the sides, I can see how this might have kind of a cool look mounted up on the wall.
But to me, it definitely seems like Panasonic made some interesting design choices here. I'm not sure how much of this is, you know, based around the audio system. I'm also not in the least bit certain where the remote and screws are. I'm sure we'll come upon them here eventually, but normally that stuff is at the top of the box, and it was not in this particular case. Very heavy metal circular
stand—interesting design choice, definitely different than what we're used to seeing. Okay, I definitely got one of the models that Panasonic's been trotting out for demonstration because this has got all kinds of weird tape and markings on it. No wonder the box is not in great shape—it’s been around for a while. But we do have screws, a remote, and a manual. At this point, I think all that's left to
do is lay her down and get this base on, which hopefully is a nice, simple process. You know what, guys? Sometimes I'm reluctant to just, you know, speak out loud in real time about my thoughts and feelings on stuff because, you know, honestly, this is not the kind of experience that you will get if you buy this TV. You're going to get a factory-fresh unit. Everything's going to be fine. The foam's probably not going to be busted, the box is probably not going to be blown out—and it is blown out. This thing is not in great shape. But we're going to make it work. We are going to make it work. Feel like I've been doing a more sing-songy voice
in a lot of my unboxings lately. Hit this video with a like if you want to hear me sing more often. I feel like I already know the answer to that—it's a no. Okay, boy, this is just not going textbook here. The energy guide sticker is just unceremoniously hanging out in the bottom of the box—$64 per year, no doubt in eco mode. Well, I don’t know if it’s just ventilation or part of the audio system, but there are definitely a lot of vent holes here.
As expected, two 4K 144Hz ports. Um, one of them is the eARC port. That is not a surprise to anyone in the TV enthusiast crowd. As I’m picking up this base, I realize that it pivots a little bit. Well, I mean, it’s got computer monitor vibes going for it. Not mad about it—just wondering how useful that might actually be. Slides right into place, super easy.
So, I will say unboxing and setup, I think for customers, is going to be super, super easy, and I do like that—well, at least the hardware setup. When it comes to Fire TV… well, we’ll find out. I did not have the best experience on the W95A, the mini-LED. Which reminds me, somebody really got on me in the comments of that video about how status bars are a complete farce and I shouldn’t be complaining about them not implementing a status bar. Look, status bars—if they’re a complete farce,
fine. They still have a psychological impact, and for me, that psychological impact is meaningful. So yeah, I mean, call me a sheep—I don’t care. I want a status bar. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, what I mean is when a TV is doing an update or a software download, some kind of indication that it’s making progress and not just frozen. I feel like that’s really important because even though smart TVs have been around for a long time, they still kind of brick themselves sometimes. And so, I want some assurances that’s not going to be the case.
That is a pretty generous amount of pivot. And then, yeah, I mean, we’ll get a closer look at this in a moment, but you can now see some of that—here, let me foot-model this. That’s sexy. You can see some of that speaker built-in down at the bottom there, which I gotta say, if you’re going to build a premium sound system onto a TV, better to go this direction than have them coming out the sides. We saw Sony try and do side speakers once—the Hisense 110UX had those side
speakers, and yeah, man. I feel like you just want to put it down at the bottom instead of the sides. What do you think, though? Do you think this is the better play from a design standpoint? Let us know down in the comments. Hey, check it out—right angle on the power plug. More TV manufacturers should do this. I feel like LG is pretty good about doing this,
but I don’t see it often enough. This is smart. Really good for installation situations where your wall outlet is directly behind the TV—this keeps everything shallower. Thanks to the help from Zeke—shoutout, Zeke—we’ve got this thing up and running, or at least up. It’s about to be running. And, um, yeah, I’m not going to drag this out too long. I will point out that the anti-glare/anti-reflection is pretty solid—looks pretty good. A little bit of a magenta or purplish hue to it. Every anti-glare has its side effects, and that would be the case here.
Understand, this is an LG MLA panel on this particular TV. And here we go—four minutes and counting. I am so impatient. To be fair, it does say, “Which may take several minutes.” Down at the bottom—yeah, I noticed that too. I wonder if the red light is to indicate that it’s always listening for Amazon—you-know-who, which is currently disabled—and then the other one is a power indicator. Because I did not notice the
red light being on when the TV was turned off, but that’s just a guess. I’ll figure it out. Six and a half minutes in—we’re still updating. But speaking of updates, I did want to mention that after we reviewed the W95A, Panasonic got a hold of me and let me know that ATSC 3.0 tuner functionality is going to be provided via an update. Don’t know if that’s happened yet, and I suppose we’ll find out once I connect an antenna to this thing. But I did want to just update everybody who may be following along with the Panasonic story—that ATSC 3.0 tuning capability is apparently addressable via an update, which Panasonic intends to do. See? Status update lost. And I’m sure that it’s doing what it needs to do, but you know,
anytime you get seven and a half minutes deep into something, you’re kind of wondering. Mostly, that’s because there isn’t a single TV I’ve set up that’s taken this long—except maybe Roku. Roku OS—there have been moments, but that at least puts up dorky little, you know, cutesy messages as it’s doing its job. This just leaves you hanging.
It’s definitely beyond dusk out there. Beyond dusk—I was going to say, a men’s fragrance that works. It would be “Beyond Dusk Musk.” Nit Nerds. Calebrated. Oh man, yes, that's the new merch! I feel like... yeah, oh man, that's it. Look, we're going to be rich now. I got to cut you in for 20%. Ten minutes! I mean, that's real behind-the-scenes. Oh, the TV is turning off. Uh, it would be smart to mic you up.
Oh, that OLED cleanliness! Alexa, please hurry the F up. I know from experience that it should connect to the network automatically. Oh, the remote is updating now with important security and software updates that might take 1 to 2 minutes. Do not press any buttons on the remote—which I totally just did. Keep it close to the TV. I am... okay, cool, and we should be connected to the internet, but I'm going to double-check anyway. I'm going... oh no,
it's checking for updates. So it made me think we were cool, uh, but we're not. Also, considering the fact that it literally just updated, feel like checking for updates might—you know—maybe that should go a little faster. All right, we're moving along here. This is worth exploring. So, there's a full and basic option here. Full gets you live TV, you know, all the apps and Alexa skills, voice control—you have to sign in with an Amazon account, which can be free. The basic is limited to live TV and just five streaming apps. Alexa and the full App Store are not included.
That's, um, an interesting selection of apps. HBO Now—okay. Uh, but, you know, at least you have Netflix and Prime Video and Hulu there. Sling as well. HBO Now is really the odd man out. But this is interesting because it's like it's not a smart TV, but it is a smart TV. I don’t know who's going to pick that, but I'll go ahead and sign in. We're at 14 minutes—definitely not dawdling here. And stop. 15 minutes, 26 seconds, give or take. 15 minutes total setup seems a little excessive to me. Oh man.
So for now, we'll just do picture settings for apps and video. Looks like by default, it is in normal mode, which I actually don't think is the default move. Although I think what we're going to need to do is look for an eco mode to turn off here. Ambient sensor is on by default, so we're going to turn auto-brightness off and auto white-balance off just because I need to do that for reviewing the TV. I am going
to bump the luminance just a little bit to make it more camera-friendly. Peak luminance is at low. I'm definitely going to put that at high again, just for the camera. And HDR settings—we're going to leave those at their defaults because they've been fine in the past. We're in filmmaker mode, so motion stuff should be turned off—and it is. Good stuff. Sound settings for apps and video. All right, so there's an AI mode: standard, music, speech, stadium, user. Guaranteed, I am going to have zero use for stadium. I don’t—when
has stadium ever sounded good on anything? I'm going to go out on a limb and say never. So the sound focus mode has a pinpoint spot or area option, and I do not know what that means yet. So that'll be fun to investigate later. The last thing I want to do for this unboxing is hear how the TV audio is. And for that,
I usually pull up this one music video that I've seen a million times—that everybody's probably super tired of seeing. But I'm going to pull up Dirty Loops doing Thriller because I know exactly how it should sound. And it's an immediate reveal for how good the audio system is on a TV, at least the fidelity portion of it, and how much bass it has—whether it's harsh, whether it sounds pinched or tiny, or brash. I'll dig into how well it pulls off Atmos effects and that kind of thing for the full review. Right now, I just want to get a feel for, you know, is this soundbar kind of built into the bottom of the TV worth having there or not? So, fun fact: I just recorded the Best OLEDs 2024 video, and in it, I say there are four top-tier OLEDs, and they're all outstanding. The Z95
A is among them, right next to the LG G4, the Samsung S95 D, and the, um... hello, Sony A95 L—which technically is not a 2024 TV, but it exists as the flagship for Sony's lineup. Yep. Good start. Hard to tell how deep the bass is going, but it's definitely well-integrated bass. There's
some punch and depth to it. Man, the picture is good, though. I'm going to crank it a little. Okay, the answer is yes. Was it worth putting a soundbar built in at the bottom of this TV? That's probably not the right term for it, but the answer is a resounding, absolutely yes. If you're going to try to have a premium audio system in a way where the screen itself is not acting as a speaker, this is definitely the best way to do it. At least, I think it looks the best, and it's effective.
In the Z95 A, the fidelity of the audio system straight off the bat is solid, which I'm super, super, super happy about. I do want to see if there's any sound coming out of the back of the TV, so give me a second. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there are some transducers pointing up. I don't know how effective they're going to be for Atmos effects, but yeah, both sides. Okay, yeah, and that... oh wow. Okay, so top center here is backfill. So I think that is designed to refract off of the wall behind. And then that lower vent that we showed you on the back of the TV earlier? That's the subwoofer. So we definitely have a separate bass transducer in addition
to what's here on the front array. And then we have three sections of speakers at the top to kind of enhance, I assume, the height effects from the TV. And like I said, for absolutely worth it. Definitely one of the better-sounding TVs I've heard, and I would say that it's going to probably be giving the Sony A95 L a run for its money. But
that, my friends, is going to be part of the full review for this TV, which will be coming soon. Because I have done a lot to make it possible to stay focused on this TV for the remainder of this week so that we don't have an extended turnaround on time. You should be seeing the review for this TV not too awfully long after you see this particular video, and I can't wait to have you back to hear how this TV is competing against the other top three OLEDs that are available in the U.S. this year. Definitely charging a premium price point, so it needs to stand right up to the rest of them. But I think it will. Everything I'm seeing so far indicates that indeed will be the case.
Thanks so much for joining us for this unboxing. I hope you enjoyed it. What do you want to know about this television? Now is your opportunity to weigh in down in the comments section. I'll be sure to check those out before I finish the review. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and share this video with a friend if you know somebody who might be interested in this particular television. I'll see you on the next one, everyone. And until then,
here are two other videos I think you might like. I don't give a [ __ ].
2024-11-23 02:45
