Review: Panasonic TX-65CR852

Introduction and features

It's been a while coming but the Panasonic TX-65CR852 is the company's first curved 4K screen. While other TV brands have yet to embrace the curve as fully as Samsung, apparently brisk curved TV sales mean rivals are now feeling obliged to include at least one or two curved models in their latest ranges.

I recently tested Sony's latest curved model, the 65S8505C, and now my test bench is heaving under the weight of Panasonic's debut curved TV, the hulking 65-inch brute known as the TX-65CR852.

Actually, describing it as a hulking brute isn't entirely fair, as Panasonic has managed to wrap its curved debutante in a very trim frame and tried to hide the desktop stand by curving it back from the screen's bottom corners.

But still, while many people find curved TVs more attractive than flat ones there's no denying that they make more of an impact on your living room - especially if you're wall hanging them.

Stand or fall

There is one thing I should point out about the 65CR852's unusual rear-curving desktop stand. The way it attaches to the extreme right and left corners of the screen means you need to rest it on a piece of furniture that's at least as wide as the TV.

Otherwise the TV will just fall face down on the floor. Ouch.

The 65CR852's connections are hit and miss. On the hit side of things, the TV carries three USBs and - very usefully - an SD card slot for playback of multimedia files. There's also built-in Wi-Fi for accessing streamed media from networked DLNA-enabled devices or accessing Panasonic's walled garden of online content.

The miss part is the provision of just three HDMIs when most high-end TVs these days offer four.

To handle the many different content sources now available on modern smart TVs, Panasonic has this year worked with Mozilla to develop a version of the Firefox operating system designed specifically for TVs.

Fears that such a 'co-production' may have lead to another system as heavy handed and long-winded as the new Android TV system, sported by the latest Sony and Philips TVs, are quickly squashed. The Firefox engine turns out to be brilliantly simple and slick - as well as almost infinitely customisable.

The Firefox OS

The Firefox interface is ruthlessly efficient and logical in its structure and presentation, and also provides attractive and slick access to most of the key smart TV apps.

There are the 4K versions of both Netflix and Amazon, for instance, while the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4 and Demand 5 catch-up TV apps are provided via a new Freeview Play app.

While the Firefox engine is undoubtedly handy, though, it's not the TV's most important feature.

That, of course, is its picture quality, as defined by its glamorous combination of a curved screen, a native 4K UHD resolution, and Panasonic's 4K Pro video processing engine.

The 4K Pro system extends its tentacles into just about every aspect of TV picture quality. Particularly noteworthy is the 3D Lookup Table it uses for its colour reproduction. Only available in previous years on professional-grade monitors, these lookup tables should enable the 65CR852 to reproduce a much wider and more nuanced range of colours than most TVs.

LCD goes plasma

The 4K Pro engine also claims to use advanced light control techniques (in conjunction with a direct LED lighting system driven by a local dimming engine to boost contrast) adapted from Panasonic's plasma days to deliver more shadow detail in dark areas. Plus a combination of raw power and advanced picture algorithms are also reckoned to help the 65CR852 deliver superior noise reduction, better upscaling of non-4K sources and cleaner motion playback.

The 4K Pro system isn't just focussed on making picture quality generally better.

Panasonic is very clear about the fact that 4K Pro has been designed with the intention of making pictures look accurate to their creators' original intentions - which is exactly the sort of thing many serious AV enthusiasts want to hear.

One thing the 4K Pro system doesn't provide is any Samsung-like processing adjustment of the image to make them better suited to the curved screen. Though haters of video processing may consider this a strength rather than a weakness, especially as the depth-enhancement system can't be turned off on Samsung's curved TVs.

As you would expect of a high-end TV, with such a clearly defined 'enthusiast' market, the 65CR852 is packed to bursting point with calibration features. The list includes colour and white balance management, gamma adjustments, and plenty of options for adjusting the strength of various parts of the video processing system.

What no THX?

I couldn't help but notice, though, that the 65CR852 doesn't carry the same THX endorsement and picture presets you get with Panasonic's CX802 flat TVs, making it hard not to think that THX's independent test procedures came across some problem with the 65CR852's curved screen.

If you follow the AV world closely, you'll likely have heard that there's yet another big new picture quality feature in town: High Dynamic Range video.

HDR content is created with a much wider luminance range than normal video, resulting in a brighter, more contrast-rich picture on TVs that can support it. The 65CR852 can't support it yet, but Panasonic assures me that a firmware update is incoming that will unlock HDR playback on its curved TV.

With this in mind it's worth pointing out that the 65CR852 uses a new high-brightness, wide colour phosphor design that should prove helpful in delivering HDR's advantages.

The 4K Pro system also includes an element that can make use of the 65CR852's high brightness with non-HDR footage by reintroducing the picture luminance typically lost during the digital video compression process.

It would be nice, too, if the screen's supposed brightness advantage helped its built-in active 3D playback system to avoid the dimness often seen with this 3D TV technology - though a combination of apparent public apathy about 3D together with the fact that you don't get any free 3D glasses with the TV mean I'm not sure how many people will ever watch 3D on the 65CR852 anyway.

Picture Performance

Having been seriously impressed by the picture efforts of Panasonic's flat CX802 series, I had high hopes of the 65CR852's pictures too. But unfortunately it doesn't quite make the grade.

The main problem is that despite ostensibly offering the same level of specification as the flat CX802s, the 65CR852's curved screen seems to pose some extra LED backlight challenges that Panasonic's engineers haven't quite been able to resolve.

While watching dark scenes on the 65CR852 it's clear that it falls short of the CX802s in two key ways. First and worst, there's more evidence of backlight clouding in dark areas, especially towards the screen's corners.

Distracting clouds

This is always distracting when you see it, and trying to reduce the clouding's impact also requires you to take more brightness out of the picture than you have to with the CX802 series. This leaves you with images that look less punchy, as well as raising doubts in my mind over how effective the set might be with HDR content once that arrives.

After all, my experience with other HDR-capable TVs is that they tend to lock the picture settings to a fairly bright level when they receive HDR content, and if this happens with the 65CR852 I'm concerned that HDR footage will be accompanied by quite heavy amounts of backlight inconsistency.

The other issue is that the 65CR852 doesn't hit the same black level depths generally as the CX802s. There's always slightly more greyness hanging over the 65CR852's darkest image parts, reducing their sense of naturalism and also reducing the sense of wider colour dynamism during dark scenes, as colours don't have such rich black tones to stand out against.

Unstable luminance

Achieving the deepest and most even black levels on the 65CR852 requires you to set its Adaptive Backlight feature (which controls the potency of the LED lighting's local dimming engine) to its highest Max level.

Yet doing this can cause some other distractions in the shape of noticeable fluctuations in the image's overall luminance level.

The sundry backlight issues are made to look all the more unfortunate by the fact that, under the watchful eye of the 4K Pro processing, the 65CR852 otherwise delivers the same level of picture quality prowess as Panasonic's CX802 models.

Fine detail levels, for instance, are superlative. Native 4K UHD footage looks blisteringly detailed and full of texture, while upscaled HD content also looks clearly higher in resolution than it would on a full HD TV while not suffering with exaggerated source noise or edge-stressing.

Shadow detail galore

What's particularly excellent about the the 65CR852's detailing is how well it holds up during dark scenes.

Even though this curved TV doesn't go as deep with its black colours as the CX802s, the remarkable ability of 4K Pro to deliver even the most subtle greyscale differentials helps its dark scenes look far more detailed than they do on the vast majority of other LCD TVs.

The 4K Pro engine can also be felt throughout the 65CR852's colour handling, as it reproduces everything from the most subtle of skin tones to the most dynamic of animated movies with a gorgeous combination of natural toning and truly exceptional nuancing.

This deftness of colour reproduction plays a significant role in underlining the advantages of the screen's native 4K UHD pixel count.

Motion

The 65CR852 isn't quite as assured with its motion handling as some rivals - especially Sony. The immense sharpness of static elements of the TV's pictures does slightly highlight some gentle blurring over fast-moving objects in the frame.

But the issue is pretty minor in truth - especially as Panasonic's motion processing is able to improve things a little without causing serious unwanted side effects.

The way 4K Pro clearly loves the smaller things in AV life means it sometimes produces images of exquisite beauty that will have the sort of AV fan who used to love Panasonic's plasma TVs salivating.

However, the backlight issues certainly won't be familiar to those plasma fans.

And there are unfortunately a couple of other negative points to raise before we're done. First, 3D on the 65CR852 looks frankly shocking. The amount of crosstalk ghosting noise visible over almost every frame of a 3D source is just horrible, making watching even a few minutes of 3D feel tiring and headache-inducing.

To be fair, the 65CR852's 3D pictures look bright, colourful and detailed too. But the impact of the crosstalk is so excessive that looking through it to find the 3D strengths requires an effort of will nobody not being paid to test a TV will be willing to take on.

Does the curve help or hinder?

The other issue is that I don't really feel that the curve brings much positive to the table.

In fact, if you watch it from an angle the curve causes extra geometry issues you don't get with a flat screen. Also, while Panasonic has actually done a decent job of suppressing reflections on the 65CR852's screen, when they do appear the curve causes them to distort across more of the screen area than happens with a flat TV.

I guess if you're sat so close to the 65CR852 that it pretty much fills your field of view then its curved nature can help you feel a little more immersed in what you're watching. But most living rooms will struggle to deliver such a 'sweet spot' seating position.

So in the end it's hard to escape the feeling that the 65CR852 delivers an overall worse picture experience than its flat CX802 equivalents while at the same time costing more.

Usability, Sound and Value

The Firefox OS operating system Panasonic has developed in conjunction with Mozilla for its high-end 2015 TVs is outstanding.

Its bright, colourful, icon-based presentation sets an instantly friendly tone, and the intuitive way it organises content makes it brilliantly easy to hunt down whatever content source takes your fancy. Best of all, the system is exceptionally easy to customise, enabling you to create your own bespoke home screen containing only those apps you use the most.

Panasonic hasn't managed to integrate its picture set up features into the Firefox OS environment, but the set up menus are reasonably logical, if a little cluttered looking due to the sheer number of adjustments available.

Panasonic ships a 'smart' remote control with the 65CR852, too, which does a solid job of reducing the button count and allowing you to navigate the TV menus using a touch pad rather than the normal up, down, left and right buttons. The touch pad isn't quite as responsive as I'd like, though, and it's a shame the smart remote doesn't support the excellent 'point and click' functionality you get with the latest smart remotes of LG and Samsung.

Sound

While the 65CR852's audio isn't as precise and detailed as its pictures, it's still pretty strong overall.

It's got enough power to produce a soundstage wide enough and loud enough to match the large scale of the images, and it delivers its high volumes without sounding muddy or overloaded - even though there's a greater sense of bass in the mix than you get with most modern TVs.

I was impressed to find, too, that the speakers remain free from 'phutting' distortions unless you use a volume setting far beyond a level most people would consider comfortable.

Value

While the 65CR852's £2,800 price tag isn't excessive by the standards of the 4K UHD TV world at large, it does make the TV around £100 and £300 more expensive than its flat sibling, the 65CX802.

Which means it doesn't feel like a very good deal when you consider that it doesn't perform as well as the cheaper flat model.

Verdict

Panasonic's first stab at making a curved TV certainly doesn't lack ambition. It crams a 4K UHD pixel count into that curved screen, while its high brightness/wide colour design could make it a fine friend of the new HDR picture format that's just starting to cause a stir.

Its carriage of Panasonic's top-tier 4K Pro video processing engine will also be a significant attraction to serious AV fans who like their pictures to be accurate rather than showy.

Unfortunately, though, while that processing still delivers moments of joy, the 65CR852's backlight system falls significantly short of that of its cheaper flat CX802 siblings, surely making its price hike look tough to swallow to all but the most ardent of curved screen lovers.

We liked

The 65CR852's knack for delivering the small details and subtle colour nuances most other TVs cannot reach really sells the benefits of its 4K UHD resolution.

Its Firefox operating system is brilliant too, and its audio quality is strong by LCD TV standards.

We disliked

The curved screen causes some backlight and distorted reflection problems not found on Panasonic's equivalent flat models.

Those stronger performing flat screens are cheaper, too.

Finally the 65CR852's 3D pictures are pretty much unwatchable, while the stand design requires that you put the TV on a bit of furniture at least as wide as the TV.

Verdict

The 65CR852 is packed with features, boasts a brilliant operating system, and wears its curved design nicely.

However, while Panasonic's curved screen debutante delivers 4K UHD pictures of exceptional detail and subtlety thanks to the talents of its 4K Pro video processing system, these talents are undermined by some backlight issues not found - at least to the same extent - on Panasonic's equivalently specified flat TVs, the CX802 series.

So, unless you really can't live without a curved TV, if you like the sound of Firefox OS and Panasonic's 4K Pro processing engine, it clearly makes sense to go for the 65CX802 instead.

from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1ZJIVZU