Panasonic's flagship HZ2000 OLED TV goes on sale
Panasonic's flagship HZ2000 OLED TV goes on sale
By Mike Wheatley - 3 August 2020

Panasonic’s HZ2000 OLED television, the successor to last year’s highly-rated GZ2000, can now be purchased in the U.K. It's priced at £3,299 for the 55-inch version and £4,299 for the larger, 65-inch model

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The new Panasonic HZ2000 was first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, and features an updated custom OLED panel, an improved audio system and the new Filmmaker Mode. 

Last year’s Panasonic GZ2000 was notable for being the first TV fitted with a customized version of LG Display’s standard OLED panel, which is used in all OLED TVs on the market today. The bespoke panel is once again the main feature, and improves the peak brightness by around 20%, bringing it up to 1,000 nits. The panel has also been fine-tuned by renowned Hollywood colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld, so that the content displayed on screen is closer to the creator’s original intent. 

As well as the enhanced brightness, the HZ2000’s custom panel features an improved Black Frame Insertion system. The BFI technique is common on OLED TVs, and involves inserting a black frame between each frame of moving content in order to make the picture smoother and minimize blur. Panasonic said that it has improved on this technique with the OLED HZ2000 TV. It has done so by dynamically adjusting the duration that each black frame appears for. Doing this helps to get a better balance and enhance smoothness while reducing flicker, Panasonic said. 

The HZ2000 TV is also equipped with a superior 3.0.2-channel speaker system that supports Dolby Atmos and enhanced Audio Return Channel. It also supports Filmmaker Mode, which is a new preset mode that delivers movie content on screen as the original creator intended, and Dolby Vision IQ, which is a new feature that optimises Dolby Vision content according to the brightness of the room, to deliver an even more immersive viewing experience. 

Of course, the TV also supports HDR formats such as Dolby Vision HDR, HDR10+, HLG and HDR10, just like last year’s GZ2000. Panasonic has updated the MyHomeScreen TV platform interface. 

It’s worth pointing out that Panasonic still hasn’t made the move to HDMI 2.1, which means the HZ2000 is not able to support 4K resolution gaming at up to 120 frames per second. So anyone who’s looking at investing in a new OLED TV to play PlayStation 5 games on might want to look at alternatives from Sony or LG instead. 

Panasonic said the HZ2000 is on sale now.