Panasonic W95A  TV Review

The Panasonic W95 Series has good HDR brightness, making highlights stand out during darker scenes. Combined with its outstanding contrast, this TV provides an impactful HDR viewing experience.

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
• Adaptive Backlight Control: Max
• Gamma: 2.2
• EOTF Type: Auto
• HDR Tone Map: Normal
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

The Panasonic W95 is slightly brighter when the TV is set into True Game, but it's barely noticeable.

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
• Adaptive Backlight Control: Max
• Gamma: 2.2
• EOTF Type: Auto
• HDR Tone Map: Clipping
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

The Panasonic W95 has excellent SDR brightness and overcomes glare in most bright rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Professional 1
• Ambient Sensor: Off
• Luminance Level: 100
• Contrast: 90
• Adaptive Backlight Control: Max
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Temperature: Warm 2

The Panasonic W95 has decent contrast. Its native contrast is great, but with local dimming enabled, the TV displays deep blacks that mostly stay deep when brighter highlights are also on screen. However, blacks are a bit raised during very bright scenes.

The TV has good lighting zone precision, but there's still noticeable blooming around bright objects set on a very dark background.

The TV has decent lighting zone transitions. Unfortunately, the leading edge of bright highlights when they quickly move across the screen is visibly dimmer, and there's very noticeable haloing.

Unfortunately, enabling VRR locks you out of using the TV's local dimming feature, so you can't use VRR and local dimming at the same time. This greatly impacts the deepness of blacks while gaming, which is unfortunate.

The TV has excellent black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, blacks are slightly cloudy and blueish. With local dimming enabled, blacks are deep and uniform across the screen, with only a bit of blooming around bright objects on a dark background.

The Panasonic W95A has satisfactory SDR color volume. Its coverage of the DCI-P3 color space is very good overall, but it doesn't perform quite as well with lighter shades. It's not nearly as good with the wider BT.2020 color space, and it struggles to fully display both dark and light shades.

The TV has excellent HDR color volume. It displays a wide range of colors at high luminance levels, and most dark saturated colors are displayed well due to its effective local dimming.

The TV has sub-par pre-calibration SDR accuracy. Reds are overrepresented in all shades of gray, which makes the TV's color temperature much warmer than the 6500K we target. Gamma is close to 2.2, but brighter scenes are displayed a bit too brightly. Its color accuracy is good overall, but there are inaccuracies with whites and most lighter colors.

The TV has exceptional SDR accuracy after calibration. All issues prior to calibration are gone, and the TV's white balance, color temperature, gamma, and color accuracy are close to perfect.

See our full calibration settings.

The TV has decent HDR pre-calibration accuracy. There's too much red in mid-gray and light grays, which makes the TV's color temperature noticeably warmer than 6500K. Colors have alright accuracy overall, but there are mapping errors throughout, so colors don't stay true to the content creator's intent.

After calibration, the TV has outstanding HDR accuracy. Its white balance isn't perfect, but it's much better now, and the TV's color temperature is almost exactly at 6500K. Color accuracy is excellent now, but there are still minor inaccuracies throughout, with reds and blues being undersaturated.

The TV has unremarkable PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks are slightly brighter than intended, and dark shadows are a bit darker than intended. Everything else is displayed a bit brighter than it should be. With content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, there's a sharp cutoff near the TV's peak brightness, but no roll-off is necessary since it's bright enough to fully display content mastered at those brightness levels. However, there's a gradual roll-off with content mastered at 4000 nits to preserve details in very bright specular highlights.

The Panasonic W95 has good low-quality content smoothing. It does an excellent job at preserving details, but it's only decent at actually smoothing out the image, so there is 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 has good HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in all grays, but other color gradients have minimal banding.

This TV has low input lag when set into True Game, especially at 120Hz and 144Hz, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience. However, it's input lag is higher at 60Hz, so gaming feels a bit less snappy at that refresh rate.

The Panasonic W95 supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 144Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. 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 important for text clarity.

The Panasonic W95 supports FreeSync, HDMI Forum VRR, and G-SYNC, 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.

Unfortunately, enabling VRR locks you out from using the TV's local dimming feature (Adaptive Backlight Control).

The TV has okay CAD at its maximum refresh rate of 144Hz. It struggles most when going from dark shades to very bright ones, and although it performs a bit better going from bright shades to dark ones, it's still pretty slow. This leads to noticeable blur behind quick motion.

The TV's CAD at 120Hz is mediocre. It's slow across the board, which leads to blurry motion. Furthermore, it overshoots some dark RGB values when leaving a black state, so there's some inverse ghosting.

The TV has bad CAD at 60Hz. On top of the persistence blur due to the nature of a 60Hz refresh rate, its pixel transitions are incredibly slow when leaving dark states, and there's some bad overshooting, which leads to very blurry motion and inverse ghosting.

The Panasonic W95 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 to get the lowest input lag. However, local dimming doesn't work when VRR is enabled.

The Panasonic W95 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 to get the lowest input lag. However, local dimming doesn't work when VRR is enabled.

This TV has visible stutter when watching low frame rate content, especially in slow panning shots. It's not quite as bad as TVs with OLED panels, like the Panasonic Z95B OLED, but it's still visible if you're sensitive to it.

The Panasonic W95A's motion interpolation feature does a very good job of mitigating stutter in 24p content. Choppiness during slow panning shots is reduced, and the cadence of motion is very consistent, so you get smooth-looking motion.

The Panasonic W95 automatically removes judder from 24p and 25p sources, like an Apple TV with the 'Match Frame Rate' feature enabled, and from the TV's native apps. To remove 24p judder from 60p and 60i sources, like a cable box, you must enable the Accurate IFC setting. Unfortunately, it doesn't remove judder from 25p sources that are sent to the TV via a 60p signal, and frame times are pretty inconsistent, which leads to jerky motion.

The TV is free from micro-judder with both 24p and 25p content if you're using the TV's native apps or an external device that can send a 24Hz or 25Hz signal, like a blu-ray player. However, there's apparent micro-judder present in 24p and 25p content when it's being sent to the TV via a 60p signal, so scenes with complex motion aren't as smooth as they should be. 

The Panasonic W95A has a very good response time when watching content, so there's only some blur behind fast-moving objects. However, it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions.

The Panasonic W95A does a mediocre job of avoiding artifacts during color transitions. The edges of fast-moving objects and characters are noticeably blurrier than the center. Furthermore, unintended intermediate colors occur during transitions in fast-paced scenes and sports. For example, you might notice hints of blue around a football player's red jersey if they're moving quickly across the playing field.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight. Fortunately, it's flicker-free, with the brightness set from 80-100 in all picture modes. With the brightness set between 42-79, it flickers at 480Hz, and it flickers at a very fast 1,920Hz with the brightness set between 0-41.

The TV supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. Unfortunately, the BFI feature on the TV doesn't work very well, and there's still some image duplication and blurriness present.

The Panasonic W95A has poor direct reflection handling. It barely reduces the intensity of direct light sources like a lamp placed opposite the screen, which is very distracting.

Black levels barely raise on this TV in a room with ambient lighting, so you still get deep blacks regardless of your lighting conditions.

The total reflected light of this TV is inadequate. Reflections are very noticeable on this TV during dark scenes, and there's some distracting light banding.

The perceived saturation of colors is great in a bright room, so you still enjoy punchy colors when you have your lights turned on.

The Panasonic W95A has a mediocre viewing angle, so it's not suitable for a wide seating arrangement. There's significant gamma shifting and brightness loss, and black levels raise as you move off-center. Additionally, colors shift and look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides.

The TV has sub-par gray uniformity. There's some noticeable dirty screen effect towards the center of the screen, the corners are darker than the center, and there are particularly bad splotches of uneven brightness on the right side of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, the corners and sides of the screen are lighter than the center.

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. This doesn't cause any issues for video or gaming content, but it can be a problem for PC monitor use as it impacts the text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The TV uses quantum dots to achieve high color peaks with excellent separation between blues, greens, and reds. This gives the TV great color purity and allows it to display a very wide color gamut.

The Panasonic W95 has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth 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. The TV supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+. ATSC 3.0 support was added in early 2025 via firmware update RS8112/2491.

The Panasonic W95A TV has a nice overall design, with slim metal bezels and sturdy aluminum feet that make it look premium.

The two feet are made of aluminum and hold the TV in a stable position. The feet lift the TV about 3.5 inches above the table, so almost any soundbar fits underneath.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 46.2" x 12.5".

The back of the TV is made of textured plastic. When you touch the back, it leaves chalk-like marks, but these can easily be wiped away with a cloth. All of the inputs except for the optical audio out are located on the right side of the TV when facing the front, and they're easy to access if you have the TV wall-mounted. Unfortunately, there's no form of cable management.

The TV has excellent build quality, and there are no issues with quality control to report.

It runs the Fire TV OS, which is smooth and easy to use. Unfortunately, a bug prevents certain settings, like motion interpolation, from working despite being turned on. To fix this, you must enter the 'Home' menu and then 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 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.

• Setup guide
• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• Velcro ties
• 2x mounting screws
• Power cable

The Panasonic W95 has a mediocre frequency response. It barely produces any bass, but the sound profile is well-balanced at most listening levels, making dialogue easy to understand. However, the sound is very unbalanced at the TV's maximum volume, which is too bad since it doesn't get very loud.