Panasonic introduces its first OLED UHDTV

Panasonic announced its first OLED TV on Wednesday. The TX-65CZW954 is a 65″ TV with 4k resolution, which should be available in November for an unknown price. The television supports display of HDR material.

The OLED TV with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels is slightly curved. The TV supports HDR playback based on the ‘ST2084’ and ‘ST2086 SMPTE’ standards. Televisions with HDR support can display a larger dynamic range, so that bright parts in the image are considerably brighter than with TVs without HDR. With LCD TVs, fine-grained local dimming is required for this, but because the brightness of OLED televisions is controlled at the pixel level, HDR is easier and more accurate to use. However, there is still a lack of widely supported standard and content.

The TX-65CZW954 features four HDMI 2.0 interfaces with support for HDCP 2.2 to receive 4K video at 60fps with 24bit color depth. In addition, there is a USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports. The panel that Panasonic uses is likely to come from the LG factories, which have had OLED televisions on the market for some time.

Panasonic is especially happy to be able to sell a TV with good black display again. “The OLED TV achieves even deeper blacks than the legendary Viera plasma TVs,” the company said. Panasonic discontinued plasma TVs in 2013 to the dismay of many customers; the black value of the display technology was seen as superior to that of LCD. In the years that followed, Panasonic regularly hinted that it was working on an OLED successor, including together with Sony.