Panasonic Z95 Series (2024 Model) 65-inch OLED 4K Ultra HD Smart Fire TV, Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, 144Hz Refresh Rate and Hands-Free Alexa – 65Z95AP

Picture quality is amazing!
First, let me say it took 3 deliveries before the right tv was delivered without damage, so get the installation option so you can have them take it back immediately if broken! Packaging actually seems adequate, I just think these large screen tvs have to be treated gently in transit, and amazon is not good at that!Picture quality is great, I think it sounds great, but I don’t really turn music/tv up very loud so I can’t really speak for the bass or anything.I wish they used roku or ANYTHING other than firestick as the OS. Every firestick I’ve owned has had issues, like having to force-stop apps occasionally, and this tv is no exception. It took a while to figure out a way around the firestick’s energy-saving crap that would kick you out of your app and turn off the screen after 5 minutes on pause, but it can be done. It still goes to the Screensaver, but does not log me out of whatever show I was watching unless I walk away for like 15 minutes. Default is like 5, and firestick removed the ability to shut off this “eco friendly option”. I was able to successfully sideload apps, probably the only thing I like about firesticks.Anyway, I’m very happy with my purchase.

The TV spies on you and turns off 95% of features if it can’t spy on you
What is good?:The picture quality is really good if you have good source. I paired this TV with a SAMSUNG Q990D 11.1.4ch and it works well. I would recommend turning the TV’s video onto Cinema or True Cinema, otherwise you can get problems with highlights during dark backgrounds. This may be something that could be solved with having high quality source material.What is bad (and how to fix it – below)?TLDR: Spend your money on a basic, unintelligent TV with an amazing screen and buy a Nvidia shield pro that plugs into it and acts as the “brains/smarts” for the TV. Don’t buy this.The biggest reason why I would return this if I still could is the fact that if the TV cannot talk to Amazon or one of it’s many services running to collect your data, THE TV BECOMES UNUSABLE. Even if you have internet access, the TV will give you two options – live TV (if you have it) or HDMI input. It blocks you from having the ability to load apps like Plex, Netflex, etc, even if you have connectivity to those (especially plex as it’s usually locally ran). I setup Pihole (dns/ad-blocker) because of this TV because it’s always sending data back to Amazon _very aggressively_, without the ability to opt out. This is when I realized that they designed the TV to become an expensive wall mount if it can’t talk to their back end.A continuation from the above is that Alexa is always listening. ALWAYS. You can’t turn it off. I blocked all traffic to Alexa domains, but it still finds a way somehow (assuming some type of tunneling DNS is used by the TV’s OS). If I knew that you couldn’t disable this, I wouldn’t have gotten it. I assumed that like any other device, you could fully disable it if you wanted because we all know, they are always listening (see Google just had to settle because they were always listening) and taking data points about you. This is a huge break in trust.One of the most annoying aspects is that this TV touts itself as being capable of running 4k at 144Hz but fails to direct play HIGH quality 4k from a local plex server. I believe this is due to a couple reasons, one being that THE TV ONLY HAS A 100Mbps ETHERNET PORT — in 2024!!! The only potential saving grace is that the TV supports 802.11ax 6Ghz and 02.11a/n/ac/ax 5Ghz, which can easily play at raw blue-ray speeds ~(I max at ~600Mbps with direct play) if the wireless network isn’t over saturated and the TV has a good SNR to the router. For a $2000 TV (what I paid), it’s crazy that they chose to skimp on the Ethernet connection when the TV is supposed to play at Dolby 4k. For whatever reason, my TV won’t fully connect to the WiFi but it fails to phone home resulting in the TV again being a dumb box. For me, this means I have to use Ethernet which stutters video if it tries to play over 100Mbps.How to fix it?Buy yourself an Nvidia shield Pro (2019 version) (or Apple TV if you’re an Apple user). Factory reset your TV and skip sign in, etc. Don’t connect the TV to the internet. Connect the shield to HDMI 1, setup the shield, and disable the settings/phoning home that you want.Once the shield is setup, you can use the TV’s remote or the shield’s remote – either works. What’s even better is that the shield is capable of doing image up-scaling for all of your content. The biggest upside to me is that it’s doing the video processing and sending it through the HDMI to the TV which just acts as a monitor. I have tested this with raw Blu-ray and it works flawlessly and looks amazing.