4K TV Reviews

In contrast to Panasonic’s past TVs—plasmas, mainly—the AX800U series has a sleek, contemporary appearance. At about half an inch, this TV’s bezel is thin and tinted black to create an “all-screen” look. A metal bar runs along the bottom to help balance it on a TV stand, and there’s a hefty pedestal (adding 40 pounds to the TV’s total weight) that keeps the panel safely stable. With the Information Bar screen enabled, a tiny camera pops up from the TV’s top when it senses someone in the room; this can recognize your face and automatically display time, weather, and other custom info in a horizontal bar along the screen’s bottom.

Setup
Along with that DisplayPort connection, AX800U sets have three regular HDMI inputs plus one HDMI 2.0 input that lets the TV display up to 2160/60p-resolution Ultra HD content. Picture presets include THX Cinema and THX Bright Room, and there are two Professional presets designed for storing calibrated day/night settings. You can easily copy any picture adjustments you make from one input to one or more of the set’s other inputs—a time-saving convenience.

You select the level of local dimming you want using the TV’s Adaptive Backlight Control. The Max setting turned out to deliver the strongest contrast, both subjectively and measured. There’s also a Letterbox setting with Normal and Dimmer presets to make letterbox bars on ultrawide movies appear darker (I selected Dimmer). The Motion Picture setting provides three presets to reduce the effects of motion blur/judder. Strong and Mid delivered the best motion resolution with test patterns, though they both added a noticeable level of the so-called soap-opera effect. The Weak setting proved a better compromise: It boosted motion resolution on test patterns up to 900 lines but introduced only a slight degree of soap-opera effect.

A Pro Settings menu provides all the controls you need to dial in a perfect picture. It includes both White Balance and Color Detail (with hue, saturation, and luminance sliders for primary and secondary colors) and a Gamma Detail adjustment that lets you change the gain separately for each IRE level. A huge benefit to Panasonic’s TV Remote 2 app is that it provides access to all of these settings on your tablet’s touchscreen. This lets you fine-tune the image without having to navigate menus on the TV’s screen—yet another time-saver.

2D Performance
The Panasonic’s 2D performance was for the most part very good. With the Max Adaptive Backlight Control selected, contrast was punchy, and black letterbox bars on movies looked uniform and solid. I watched a Blu-ray of the horror film The Conjuring, which includes a scene where the father descends to the cellar of the family’s new house. Here, blacks were deep, and there was enough shadow detail to expose objects strewn about the space. When he lit up a match to get a better look at his surroundings, I saw no overt “blooming” or other backlight-related artifacts. I did notice picture noise in a few dark scenes, but it wasn’t so bad as to be consistently distracting.

Color accuracy was another one of the TV’s strong points. In an earlier scene from The Conjuring, where the family is shown moving in, an exterior shot of the house displayed a strikingly natural color palette. The white clapboard and columns came off as crisp and chalky, while the family’s station wagon had a distinctly creamier tone. The patchy lawn, meanwhile, was the right shade of green, and leaves on the trees had a convincingly autumnal reddish-brown hue.

3D Performance
The Panasonic’s 3D performance was also good—at least, what I was able to see of it. For some reason, my Oppo BDP-105 Blu-ray 3D player didn’t play nice with the TC65AX800U. Every time I tried to spin a Blu-ray 3D disc, I’d get an error message claiming that the connected TV wasn’t a 3D-compatible display. (And yes, the Oppo had been upgraded to its current firmware version.) Fortunately, Netflix now streams 3D titles, so I watched a Wim Wenders dance documentary called Pina directly from the TV’s built-in app. The 3D image was solid on the Panasonic, with no visible crosstalk. Actually, I’d have to say it was one of the better-looking 3D images I’ve seen, so I certainly anticipate checking out this movie on Blu-ray.

Conclusion
Panasonic’s 65-inch TC-65AX800U is a full-featured, good-looking, and very well-performing TV. I wish I could say something about how it handled 4K movie content, but neither the Sony movie server nor Netflix 4K streaming was compatible with this set during my time with it. Those purchasing this Panasonic now won’t have those limitations, though, and can also look forward to the arrival of 4K Blu-ray. It should be a treat watching those discs on a set as good as the TC-65AX800U.