Flagship OLED hits AV highs

With a brighter OLED panel and upgraded Atmos sound system, the LZ2000 delivers on all fronts, says Steve May

- Steve May

I've seen marble less polished than Panasonic's new LZ2000 4K HDR OLED. This update on what has been a consistently impressive flagship TV design for the brand, with its signature rear-mounted height and side speakers, builds on what has gone before, but further refines picture and sound performance with less obvious upgrades.

Panasonic has long pushed the picture envelope for OLED, but this year it can claim a significant advance, thanks to an overall boost in image brightness that better positions OLED as a rival to LED LCD when it comes to bright-room viewing.

The screen is built around the latest OLED EX panel design from LG Display, augmented with a proprietary heatsink plus custom modifications inside the cell itself. The LZ2000's heatsink literally drains heat away from the panel, to maximise brightness headroom. Panasonic has been using this style of heat management on its high-end OLED models since 2019.

The brand also carries out pixel-by-pixel uniformity compensation on this particular high-end display. There's clearly a lot of black box R&D at work behind the scenes.

Full-frontal audio

Yet the LZ2000 story isn't just one of improved brightness. Sound also gets an uplift. New for 2022 is an advanced front array speaker system that introduces novel sound steering technology, where beamforming allows the user to steer the output left or right, to better serve a particular listening position.

This sonic steerage is surprisingly effective. Using an onscreen graphic, you can point the output from a centre default either left or right (it doesn't work with Dolby Atmos audio), so you can favour one seating area over another. This could be helpful if you have a large open-plan space, or for some reason - your chosen seating position is off-axis. Maybe the dog has claimed the sweet spot.