Reviews

Review: Panasonic TX-40GXW804 Ultra HD LCD TV

Review; Panasonic TX-40GXW804 is more than properly equipped. This model supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10 +, a very good choice from Panasonic. After all, it is these middle classers who benefit most from these advanced HDR standards.
4.6/5 - (584 votes)

The Panasonic TX-40GXW804 is a nice mid-sized car. Yet it is more than properly equipped. This model supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10 +, a very good choice from Panasonic. After all, it is these middle classers who benefit most from these advanced HDR standards.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – specifications

What: Ultra HD LCD TV, Edge Led with local dimming (2 × 1 segments) )
Screen format:
40 inch (100 cm), flat
Connections:
3x HDMI (v2.0, ARC, ALLM), 1x component video, 1x composite video, 1x stereo cinch, 1x optical digital out, 2x USB (1x 3.0), 1x headphone, 2x antenna, Bluetooth
Extras:
HDR10, HDR10 +, Dolby Vision, HLG, WiFi (802.11ac) built in, My Home Screen 4.0, USB / DLNA media player, In-house streaming (Client), DVB-T2 / C / S2, CI + slot, voice control, HCX processor
Dimensions:
901 x 574 x 236 mm (incl. base)
Weight
: 13.0 kg (incl. Foot)
Consumption:
48 / 0.5 watt (Energy rating A +)
Recommended price: 749 euro

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – design

You may not expect impressive design in this category, but this television can definitely be seen. It is entirely in black and the narrow glossy frame is not around the screen, but rather behind it. This gives the impression that the screen is on the back plate, as with some OLED models.

The device stands on a central base plate that supports the screen in two places, making it particularly sturdy. The base plate is finished with a brushed metal texture.

Connections

The Panasonic has three HDMI 2.0 connections. They are all ready for Ultra HD and HDR (for problems with older devices, you can adjust the HDMI setting via the menu (Settings, set HDMI auto. And then choose Mode 1). An HDMI 2.1 feature is available, ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) The device also has two USB connections, a set of older analog connections, digital optical output and headphone output.

The analog connections, one HDMI, one USB connection and the digital optical output are on the back and pointing to the wall, which can be difficult with wall mounting.The other connections are on the side (including network and the two antenna connections), and they are only 10 cm from the edge, to prevent the cables from being visible next to the TV So you have to tidy them away a little, so both feet have cable management slots.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Bluetooth is also provided if you want to use a wireless headset. [19659002] Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – ease of use

Installation is a piece of cake, you go through the usual choices for country, language, internet connection and channel settings.

Remote control

The remote control is unchanged compared to last year. The large black remote has a good layout, the keys are large and clearly labeled. It is comfortable to hold, not too heavy and not too light.

Remote of Panasonic TX-40GXW804

A handy tip is the image mode key on the top, right next to the on / off key. Via Menu, View, Settings Button “Picture” you can set which picture modes can be selected via this button. That is the fastest way to choose a custom image mode.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Netflix already has its own key on the remote. At the bottom left you will find the ‘My App’ button which you can assign to another favorite app such as YouTube or Rakuten TV in the app store via the ‘Option’ button.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Who are want to use a smartphone as a remote, the app installs ‘TV remote 3’. However, that app is more limited than the previous version, for example, you cannot view the image of the built-in tuners in this app. Fortunately, you can still use the old app ‘TV Remote 2.’

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – features

Smart TV platform

My Home Screen 4 is still the same fast, and responsive smart tv environment that we know from last year. The changes seem to us rather cosmetic. The settings menu is the only place where we would always like to see some simplification. Panasonic offers a lot of settings and sometimes it is quite a search to find something in the menus.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Smart functions

The smart TV environment, on the other hand, is very handy and well-arranged. The Home key displays a list of options at the bottom of the screen, in a bar. Initially you will find an icon here for all inputs, live TV channels and apps. The icons for Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video were also pre-installed. The interface takes up little space on the screen and you can look further undisturbed.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

My Home Screen 4 is primarily a small cosmetic upgrade compared to last year. You can still pin separate channels, inputs, or apps on the launch bar. With the arrow keys up and down you can bring out other bars. For example for Netflix, YouTube or live TV channels.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Via the settings of the start menu (at the bottom of the list), you can determine which items appear, in which order and which item first appears when you click on the Home key is pressed.

Panasonic offers a full set of tuners (DVB-T2 / C / S2), a CI + slot and with the help of a USB disk you can record programs. This is not a double tuner.

The built-in media player rejects one of our Ultra HD video files and all of our Dolby Vision samples. He does not play DTS soundtracks. Apart from that, it is very complete, also subtitles (srt and sub format) are no problem. The audio player, on the other hand, is very universal and even plays FLAC and ALAC, although it only reads tag information from MP3 files.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – Image quality

The GXW804 uses an Edge LED backlight and local dimming “. However, we only had two columns, so this “local dimming” will not have a huge impact. The screen is of the VA type.

Most important settings

In our article about the professional calibration of a TV you can read all about the possibilities to work with a professional. the best image settings. Here you will find an explanation of the most important picture settings and tips for setting up your TV. With the basic settings we have arrived at the following settings for this TV.

The best choice starts from the Cinema Pro mode.

Image Image Advanced Settings
Image mode: True Cinema

Backlight: 20-80 *
Contrast: 90
Brightness: 0
Color: 50
Tint: 0
Sharpness: 30
Heat Color: Warm2
Vivid Colors: Off
Adaptive Backlight Control: Min

Ambient Sensor: Off (On) *
Noise Reduction: Min *
MPEG Remaster: Min *
Resolution Remaster: Middle
Dynamic Remaster Range: Off
Intelligent Frame Creation: *
Sharp movements: Off
Contrast control: Off / Auto *
Gamma: 2,4Image settings / 16: 9 Image scan: Off
  • The True Cinema setting provides the best start, but is quite dark. No problem if you look at full eclipse, but for most people it will not hurt to bring the Backlight to a minimum of 40 and in a typical living room even to 60 or 80.
  • You can activate the light sensor if you want, the background lighting certainly at 80.
  • Noise Reduction and MPEG remastering were kept to a minimum. A higher setting is recommended if you defy a bad source (old DVDs or low quality YouTube).
  • Intelligent Frame Creation: Off for purists, but the Center position gave extra detail, and smooth images without obvious artifacts. [19659053] Advanced, you can set Contrast control to Auto for a slight boost in contrast.
  • For a slightly more edited image, but still very true to nature, select the Cinema setting. Set “Warm Color” to Warm2, and take the above recommendations into account.

General image properties and image processing

Panasonic’s HCX processor provides excellent results for image processing. It quickly and reliably detects the most common film and video frame rates, and ensures excellent deinterlacing. The noise reduction works well, but with compression noise (blocking) the processor has a bit more difficult time. For that reason, and because we notice that the screen has a tendency to show color bands in dark images, we left both noise suppressions in the minimum position. The upscaling is very good, but the impact of “remastering resolution” is very limited.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

One of the points where he clearly has to give up some terrain compared to more expensive models is the sharpness of motion. A lot of detail is lost, and moving objects always have a slightly blurred edge. Avoid the “Sharp images” setting, which gives you a double border around moving objects and that is even more annoying. “Intelligent Frame Creation” will certainly leave you at the minimum setting, although we recommend “middle”. The highest position may cause some image errors around fast-moving objects, although that is not so bad, but ensures the smoothest images.

The VA panel has an excellent contrast (ANSI contrast of 3,700: 1), which with the local dimming (‘Adaptive Backlight control’) still slightly improves (to 4,500: 1). You can certainly leave that activated in the minimum position, it does not cause any visible artifacts. In very exceptional cases and when you look in pitch-dark circumstances, it is possible that you can see one half of the screen a little brighter. In practice, this seems almost impossible to us.

The True Cinema mode is well calibrated, but certainly not flawless. The gamma value is approximately 2.3. That is slightly clearer than expected (2.4) but not a problem. The black values ​​are clearly visible. The color temperature is slightly too cool (slight blue-cyan overtone). Especially in the color rendering we see that the screen shows red and blue light less saturated. Red, blue and magenta tones are slightly less intense than desired.

HDR

With a peak luminance of about 425 nits on a 10% window, in the True Cinema HDR image mode the GXW804 falls just below the 500 nits limit that we set priority. Since he can also show that maximum brightness stably on a full screen, we want to see that narrowly. The color range is remarkably good and achieves 91% DCI-P3 (67% Rec.2020), which is clearly above the 90% limit that we would like to see reached.

The TV supports HDR10 and HLG, Dolby Vision and HDR10 +. This makes this middle class unit perfectly equipped for HDR playback. The calibration is decent, but just like in SDR it is not flawless. The TV nicely shows all the white detail, but often also shows more than necessary based on the metadata. For example, if the metadata indicates 1,000 nits max, higher white detail up to 1,500 nits is still visible. This makes the image slightly less clear than it should be. You can also see on the graph that below 200 nits the image is a bit too clear (not a real problem), but loses clarity above that sharply. We also see that almost all colors are not saturated enough, so that the image loses its impact.

You can improve the image by checking the ‘Dynamic HDR Effect’ setting under ‘HDR Brightness’ . The Panasonic then analyzes the entire image itself and performs a tonemapping that is adapted to each image. All white detail is then visible and colors in bright parts of the image are lightly boosted. This generally gives very good results, although small errors are not excluded. For example, it is possible that you lose a bit of color detail (with very intense colors), and that the processor sometimes adds a little too much color to parts of the image that should actually be white.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Panasonic TX-40GXW804

Note how the influence of Dynamic HDR Effect is quite strong in the image above. The image gains in color and impact and comes closer to a reference that we viewed on an OLED screen.

Reflections and viewing angles

The weakest point of this Panasonic is its viewing angle. Already at a relatively small viewing angle of 20 ° the screen loses considerably in contrast and the color is watered down. Red in particular is affected by this, and therefore skin colors that are strongly inclined to yellow / green.

Gaming

In normal image modes we measure a lag of 136 ms, which is too much for decent gaming. In lag game mode, the lag drops to 14.6 ms, which is an excellent result.

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – Audio quality

A 40-inch mid-sized car, you can’t expect top sound on that. The audio is decent, but as soon as you ask for a bit more volume and you play a big blast of metal, you regularly hear how the TV delights the highs and lows to prevent distortion. That is not uncommon in this category, but the Panasonic does intervene quite hard. For daily use, no problem. For real movie pleasure or music you need external audio.

The TV supports Dolby Atmos and also plays Atmos tracks as long as they are in a Dolby Digital Plus version.

Review equipment

For the lag measurement we use a Leo Bodnar Display lag meter. For all other measurements we rely on a Spectracal C6 HDR2000 Colorimeter Xrite i1 Pro spectrophotometer, a VideoForge Pro pattern generator, and the Spectracal Calman for Business software. To analyze any HDR problems we use a HDFury Vertex .

Panasonic TX-40GXW804 – Conclusion

You cannot expect high-performance audio performance from this Panasonic, who really wants to enjoy film and music provide an external solution. His weakest point is the very limited viewing angle, in addition to the contrast reduction, there is also an impact on the color. The device is equipped with local dimming, but with only two segments the improvement is very small.

But those who can accept those limitations will get a nice package of performances. The TX-40GXW804 delivers excellent image quality with excellent contrast and solid color reproduction. Even in HDR, it performs well (in this category), certainly thanks to the “Dynamic HDR Effect” which makes images gain in impact and the brightness and color saturation that are falling short are somewhat corrected. That you also get Dolby Vision and HDR10 + support on this model is excellent. My Home Screen 4 remains a good smart TV environment that only LG and Samsung should take precedence.

Cons

  • Sound quality
  • Viewing angle
  • Brightness and color range narrowly ok for HDR

Plus points

  • Good image processing
  • Contrast and black detail
  • Dolby Vision and HDR10 +
  • Good HDR processing, despite limitations
  • My Home Screen 4