Audio Video News

Panasonic may have a follow-up to the legendary Kuro plasma TV technology that it acquired from Pioneer in 2009. The company introduced a 65-inch “4K Pro” OLED TV at the IFA 2015 consumer electronics show in Berlin said to deliver its most accurate picture quality ever.

The curved-screen TX-65CZ950 is high dynamic range (HDR)-compatible and combines hardware and processing innovations with picture quality tuning by professional Hollywood colorist Mike Sowa to deliver a “new standard of picture performance that comes closer than ever before to the vision of film directors and cinematographers,” Panasonic said.

The set is the first to combine Panasonic’s 4K Studio Master Processor, which draws on decades of knowledge accumulated by the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory, with custom-built panels said to cover at least 90 percent of the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) color space.

The CZ950 offers a True Cinema picture preset with picture quality settings tuned and approved by Sowa and implements a version of the 3D Lookup Table system used in professional monitors said to reference cyan, magenta and yellow across 8000 registry points in addition to red, green, and blue. The system takes a “volumetric approach to color space control whereby a change in any one input color causes cross-color changes in all of the table’s output colors for a “more accurate rendition of color tones at different brightness levels than you get with normal TVs.”

Panasonic also said its experience with plasma technology has enabled it to overcome the challenge of shifting from complete blackness to a gradation step just above black to render detail in the darkest areas of the image.

“Panasonic is proving their commitment to excellence by engineering their newest 4K Pro TV to satisfy my professional standard of zero compromise,” said Sowa, who has worked on blockbuster films such as Oblivion and Insurgent. “My world of visual storytelling is based around color accuracy and the need for a display that complements the creative vision. Panasonic has engineered their newest 4K Pro OLED TV to a standard that I would only expect in professional displays."

Pricing and plans for a U.S. introduction were not announced.