If you’ve seen Digital Trends TV reviews, you know that all of the TVs we get our hands on can produce a beautiful image. However, even the best of the best TVs don’t necessarily come out of the box that way. Before evaluation or collecting video footage, we make a few important changes to the settings to ensure that each TV produces its best possible picture. That goes for every TV brand across the board, including Panasonic.
Panasonic is back in the US market in a major way, and we’re really excited. However, its return doesn’t mean it’s a plug-and-play situation. If you want to take full advantage of what Panasonic has to offer — especially if you have the stunning Z95A OLED — the tweaks we’re about to suggest will make it beyond gorgeous.
Here are a few simple changes you can make to your Panasonic TV to make it really shine.
Turn off these default settings now
The TV’s optical sensor detects the brightness of your room and how warm or cold that light may be. When this setting is turned on, the TV adjusts the picture automatically, attempting to optimize brightness and color temperature accordingly. However, instead of letting the TV be the decision maker, you can control these settings yourself — and to better effect.
Turning off the optical sensor within Panasonic’s interface is simple. Press the Settings button on your remote. Navigate down to Picture, and then go to Ambient Sensor. Make sure Auto Brightness and Auto White Balance are both Off.
With these critical settings now under your control, choose a picture mode. Press the Settings button, then head to Picture, and select Picture Mode. Of the several options available, our favorites are Filmmaker or True Cinema: Both are a little warmer and more natural, and generally good to go. Cinema is a little bit cooler and brighter than these two. If you want something even cooler — more blue is another way to think of it — try Normal. Avoid Sport or Dynamic, which tend to juice up the picture too much and make things feel blown-out and unnatural.
Better brightness, lush luminance
There are a few ways to fine tune the brightness of your Panasonic TV. Some folks like a brighter setting for watching during the day, while some who watch at night prefer less brightness. On your Panasonic TV you can set different brightness levels to different Picture Modes. That way, one can be your daytime picture mode with full brightness, and the other can be a little darker for nighttime viewing.
Recognize that sometimes you’ll be watching SDR (standard dynamic range) content, while other times, you may be watching in HDR (high dynamic range), so you’ll want to set your preferences for both.
To set the brightness for SDR content: From the home screen, press the Settings button on your remote, go to Picture, and then Brightness. Here you can use the slider to adjust the Luminance Level to set the brightness of your choosing.
For HDR, you’ll want to test out some HDR content. This could be a show on a streaming service that has HDR programming. The easiest source is a YouTube video, such as Eugene Belsky’s HDR work (we’re big fans). While playing HDR content, follow the same steps for changing SDR settings: Go to Picture, then Brightness, and then Luminance Level. For HDR, we like Luminance maxed out to 100.
There’s one more thing you can do to make your Panasonic TV even brighter. While still in the Brightness menu, head down to Advanced Settings and select Peak Luminance. This setting increases the overall brightness, allowing the TV to make the brightest areas of the image even brighter.
You’ll notice significant differences between Low, Mid, and High. To elevate the contrast and make bright objects really shine in HDR, we recommend High Peak Luminance paired with maxed-out brightness.
Super smooth movement
Motion smoothing really comes down to personal preference: Some people like it, some think it makes everything look fake (the soap opera effect), and some don’t even notice it. If you’re not a fan, it’s hard to unsee it, and you’ll want to make adjustments.
Here’s how to make tweaks on your Panasonic TV. Start with Settings, then go to Picture, and navigate down to Motion. You’ll want to experiment with Intelligent Frame Creation, which can be set to Min, Mid, Max, or Custom, or it can be turned Off entirely.
In Custom, you can use sliders to adjust Blur Reduction and Film Smoothing from 0 to 10. At the bottom there’s a Clear Motion setting that reduces motion blur in fast moving scenes. This can make content displayed at 24 frames per second look a bit jarring. For movies and shows, which are typically 24 fps, consider setting Clear Motion to Off. For content with higher frame rates, like live sports, you may want to turn it On.
Effortless connectivity and control
There are a couple of settings that can make using your TV and any external devices easier.
If you’re adding devices like a soundbar or Blu-ray player or gaming system, it’s usually most convenient to control everything with one remote. Here’s how to set that up. On the home screen, navigate all the way to the right to the Settings cogwheel; this brings up all of the available settings. Navigate to Display & Sounds, then down to HDMI-CEC Device Control. If you want to control all devices through your TV, set all of the available settings to On. ARC/eARC allows the TV to send sound to your soundbar or receiver. Power Control will turn your soundbar on at the same time as your TV. Remote Control Pass Through will allow your TV remote to control things like your soundbar volume or navigate through the basic menu on your gaming system.
Here’s one last tweak, which perhaps should have been first on the list. Panasonic TVs use Amazon’s Fire TV platform. If you don’t want video and sound to play automatically on the home screen, you can disable it. Start with the All Settings menu, then head down to Preferences and select Featured Content. Turn both Allow Video Autoplay and Allow Audio Autoplay to Off.
The main takeaway: Most modern TVs, especially those in the upper tiers of each brand, look really good. But with a few quick adjustments the picture can be transformed to look utterly spectacular.
Have a different brand of TV and want to make similar adjustments? Most modern TVs have similar features to Panasonic, however, they might be labelled differently, and it can get confusing. If you’re looking for LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, or TCL, we have instructions for those, too.
