Panasonic has launched the world’s first Ultra HD Premium TV.
Unveiled at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas, the DX900 is said to be the first LED LCD TV to meet the stringent Ultra HD Premium standards set out by the UHD Alliance – a cross-industry group comprising consumer electronics manufacturers, broadcasters, leading film studios and technology companies.
Panasonic said the UHD Alliance assessed the DX900 and decided that it met a range of picture performance criteria, including resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) performance, image precision and wide colour gamut.
According to Panasonic, the DX900 manages to combine, for the first time, the extreme brightness that’s LCD’s strong point with the sort of contrast and black level that people used to love about Panasonic’s plasma TVs.
It said the DX900 proves that an LCD can indeed deliver both the brightness highs and black level depths of a great HDR experience – thanks, in particular, to its new Honeycomb structure local dimming technology.
The TV’s new LCD panel design divides the picture into hundreds of individually controlled lighting zones, which are kept rigorously isolated from each other to ensure that there’s minimal light leakage between them.
The result, said Panasonic, is a picture able to contain extremely bright peaks and deep blacks simultaneously without the light halo or ‘bloom’ effect around the bright objects that LCD technology usually produces.
The manufacturer said its new panel design can deliver its brightness peaks across more of the screen than conventional HDR LCD TVs.
Panasonic calculates that the DX900 can hit 1,000 nits across a much wider portion of the screen than other HDR screens launched to date have been able to achieve. This means that consumers get to see a much more dynamic and vibrant image.
To accompany the DX900, which will be available in the spring in two screen sizes – 65in and 58in – Panasonic has launched a 4K UHD Blu-ray player – the UB900.
