Carbon Chemist

Tag: television

  • Panasonic’s Stateside Return: New OLED and miniLED TVs Hit US Soil

    Panasonic’s Stateside Return: New OLED and miniLED TVs Hit US Soil

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    You might have a hard time stretching your memory to the Obama era, but back in 2013, Panasonic’s plasma TVs were the critical darlings of the US market. They far outperformed their LED/LCD counterparts at a time when OLED was little more than a pipe dream for most. Then suddenly, under enormous pressure from ever-cheaper LED panels, Panasonic halted all plasma TV production. By 2016, the company had left the US TV space entirely. Now, over 10 years after its plasma models reigned supreme in the US, Panasonic TVs are back, baby.

    Outside the US, Panasonic has remained a global leader in the OLED era. Rumors about a stateside return have been swirling for nearly as long as the brand has been away, but a global partnership with Amazon announced at CES 2024 kicked things into high gear. Today, Panasonic officially revealed the US launch of three premium TVs powered by Amazon’s Fire TV smart interface: the flagship Z95A and “core” Z85A OLED TVs, and the W95A flagship mini LED TV.

    All three models are available now in limited sizes, as Panasonic begins its slow walk back to competing against LG, Samsung, and Sony. Here’s what you need to know.

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    Panasonic Z95A OLED

    Large flat screen tv with abstract art on the screen

    Photograph: Panasonic

    The Z95A is the brand’s top OLED model, launched earlier this year globally to general critical acclaim for its excellent performance. The TV offers advanced features like a dedicated gaming bar and a max 144-Hz refresh rate (though only across two of the four inputs, one of which is the eARC port), support for both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision/Dolby Vision IQ HDR, and AI-powered picture modes. It utilizes an OLED panel from LG Display (Panasonic won’t officially comment on this), enhanced by Panasonic’s in-house processing and proprietary technology.

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  • The Sonos ‘Ultimate’ Home Theater System Needs a Lot of Elbow Grease

    The Sonos ‘Ultimate’ Home Theater System Needs a Lot of Elbow Grease

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    It was at this point that my very excited husband became much less excited. He “decided to let me deal with it.” That’s fair, as this is my job, but this is not the attitude you’d expect from someone who had hailed all these boxes as a miracle a few weeks before.

    On a side note: To factory-reset a Sonos speaker, you must unplug the power cord, then press and hold the Bluetooth button while plugging the power cord back in, and then hold the Bluetooth button until the light on the front flashes orange and white. I had to do this for every speaker several times and also did this while on the phone with Sonos tech support.

    “I have a complaint,” I said. At the time, I was balancing the Sonos sub in my lap on one corner, holding the Bluetooth button on the front side of the sub with my left hand, while fumbling for the plug at the bottom with my right hand. “I don’t think the factory reset method has to be this hard.”

    “Ideally, the customer would not have to do this that often,” he said mildly.

    The final straw came when, after weeks of fiddling, everything was up and running. I just had one more thing to test, which is that when you add the Sonos Ace headphones to your app, you can turn on TV Audio Swap—that is, you can listen to TV audio on your Sonos Ace headphones without bothering someone else who is in the room.

    I turned on the Ace (factory-resetting it, of course, because my app couldn’t find the headphones for the first two tries). Then I clicked on Settings in the app, and the Ace headphones. I could not find the option to swap the audio. When I double-checked the instructions, I realized—to my dawning horror—that TV Audio Swap only works with the Sonos for iOS app.

    After weeks of fiddling, I could not bear the prospect of factory-resetting everything yet again to play out the same rigmarole on my iPhone. Sorry to folks who want to hear about audio swap: I sat down to write this instead.

    Gimme Some

    Sonos speakers really do work well. When I finally got the whole bundle set up and started playing Sabrina Carpenter in the living room, my 7-year-old son immediately ran in and started dancing. If you’re used to listening to tinny television speakers or propping a little Bluetooth speaker on the sink while washing dishes, the room-filling sound of a full home theater system is mind-blowing.

    Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my all-time favorite movies. I saw it three times in the theaters, and testing a home theater sound system is a convenient excuse to watch it over and over again. I would not have believed how much of the experience the Sonos system was able to replicate with Dolby Atmos.

    Ovalshaped speaker on a black table

    Photograph: Adrienne So

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  • People Are Big Mad About the ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Finale

    People Are Big Mad About the ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Finale

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    YouTuber Preston Jacobs wasted no time when he started his House of the Dragon after-party livestream: “I’m going to say right up [top], I think at this point this is my jump-the-shark moment. I don’t think that this show is salvageable anymore.” Sunday’s season finale, he says, “really ruins everything.” Plotlines contradicted each other, some story arcs went nowhere, he said. It was a mess. And while Preston has had divisive Game of Thrones opinions in the past, on this point, lots of fans agreed with him—both in his livestream’s comments and across the internet.

    This is not the place for House of the Dragon Season 2 finale spoilers—you’ll have to watch for yourself for that—but the long and short of it is that the episode abruptly ended just when it was starting to get good. After weeks of promoting a major battle between the Greens and the Blacks of the Targaryen family tree, no such battle materialized. As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “HBO cutting to black hasn’t annoyed this many TV fans since The Sopranos ended.”

    The Sopranos comparison is both hyperbolic and little apropos. House of the Dragon is far from the beloved critical darling that Sopranos was, but it does now get the kind of scrutiny that its prestige predecessor once did. Following Game of Thrones’ womp-womp 2019 series finale some fans have hoped House could regain some of its predecessor’s former glory, while others worried it would make the same mistakes. Sunday’s episode seemed to indicate to many it might be all dragons, no fire.

    “Y’all basically made this season a build up now we gotta wait a whole fkn 2 years” for the next season, wrote @Tata_Onika on X, referring to rumors that the next season won’t come until at least 2026. “Really pissed me off,” wrote another X user. “Did I just watch a 70-minute trailer for Season 3?” asked another—a sentiment that others echoed. Over on Reddit, fans were “mildly butthurt” and lamenting, “I didn’t see a CRUMB of consequential action.”

    Another personal fave: “We had to deal with Freud dreams for this?!!”

    Season 2’s finale may also be a sign of the times. HBO, Max, and all of its affiliated properties have been going through a lot of upheaval since parent company Warner Bros. merged with Discovery. While big shows like Dragon and The Last of Us haven’t been hit as hard as other properties, this season was only eight episodes, whereas last season was 10, and this one was shot during the Hollywood strikes, thanks in part to many of its cast being in a different union that wasn’t striking. Deadline also reported last year that a “major battle” was moved from Season 2 to Season 3, and in so doing the show may have been left with a humdrum finale.

    Will House of the Dragon recover? Eh, probably. Season 2 already didn’t quite hit the viewership heights the show’s first season hit. But as the streaming wars continue and people drop services or contemplate, in the case of Max, switching to ad-based tiers that are also going up in price, comparing one season’s numbers to another’s feels like a fool’s errand. HBO greenlit a third season—cocreator Ryan Condal revealed Monday it’ll end with the fourth season—which could very well open with the confrontation fans had hoped for. Until then, everyone is just going to have to wait while this drags on.

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  • Roku Pro Series TV Review: Bright and Easy to Use

    Roku Pro Series TV Review: Bright and Easy to Use

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    When my husband and I swapped out our Vizio OLED for Roku’s Pro Series QLED and switched it on, both of us gasped. Even my two children (7 and 9) were mesmerized when they turned on Steven Universe. “Why does it look so much better now?” my daughter asked.

    The difference between OLED and QLED is palpable (as you can also read in our How to Buy a TV guide). OLED technology is beautiful, but it lends itself to truly black blacks; it’s best if you’re watching movies or gaming in an optimized, dark, home-theater-like environment. A QLED is just … brighter. That makes a huge difference when you’re 7 and 9, watching cartoons while jumping on the couch and waiting for dinner, or when you’re a mom who is trying to catch a bit of the Copa America games on the couch with her dog while working.

    This is the first of Roku’s in-house-made TVs (Roku TVs made before last year were made by other companies, just with a Roku brain). My colleague Parker Hall tested the entry-level Roku TV, the Plus Series, and was very impressed. For a month now, my family and I have been testing the upgraded Roku Pro Series and have also been thrilled.

    User Friendly

    Specs and performance aside, one of the main reasons you buy a Roku anything is because of how easy it is to use. I really liked my Vizio OLED and just accepted that every time I turned it on, I’d have to spend five minutes sorting through the Vizio Smart interface and fiddling with cables if I wanted to play on my gaming PC.

    Large screen tv with a video game on the screen

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    It was with a deep sigh of relief that I plugged in my Sonos soundbar, PS5, and gaming PC into the Roku TV and watched everything just … show up in the Roku interface. (It has two HDMI 2.1 ports, HDMI eARC, USB-A, USB-C, and cable inputs.)

    Although you can mount it, I just placed it on our console table with the two included feet and it fit easily. Adding all your apps—Netflix, Disney+, Fubo—takes about as long as clicking on the Add Channels button and signing in on your computer, which is basically zero time unless you’ve forgotten your login information.

    Having an easy-to-navigate interface also makes it much easier to figure out other things to watch. Vizio’s interface was so cluttered that my kids often just went straight to Steven Universe. On Roku’s, the CuriosityStream and PBS Kids tiles are so easy to find that they ended up watching more educational content just out of, well, curiosity. That was an unexpected gift in summer, when all the neighborhood kids just end up watching TV at our house in the air-conditioning.

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  • LG C4 OLED Review: The Best High-End TV for Most People

    LG C4 OLED Review: The Best High-End TV for Most People

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    The C4 supports Dolby Vision and other leading forms of HDR, which means you get excellent color highlights when watching HDR-enabled content. I was particularly wowed by the performance when streaming the latest Dune film, which has exceptional color grading. It also does super well with darker content, like any Game of Thrones or Star Wars episodes that you might find annoying to watch elsewhere.

    Speaking of color: This TV is finally bright enough to compete with the LED displays from Samsung and others. It peaks at more than 1,000 nits, which is eye-watering stuff in most instances. You can place it in a well-lit room with no fear. I did find that the panel can get a bit wonky when viewed from extreme side angles—another reviewer called it a bit green from the side, but I see more of a teal blue tint—so I wouldn’t pick this if you plan on having a lot of seating at the edges of your space.

    You’ll want to upgrade your audio. Down-firing speakers don’t sound particularly awesome on any TV, and the C4 is no exception, but the TV can sync up with soundbars (like the pictured LG S95TR) in order to help contribute to a larger soundstage. That’s a nice option for folks who like to same-brand their purchases and are doing a whole-theater upgrade. Just remember to buy a soundbar or outboard speaker system for a TV like this, or you’re missing out on the real theater-like experience it can provide.

    Exceptional Picture, Normal Money

    When I think about just how good this TV looks, whether I’m in gaming mode, sport mode, or filmmaker mode, I am astonished that the price starts well below the $2,000 mark. This TV would have easily been tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago, not that the technology it uses even existed.

    It used to be that you had to make compromises to color, brightness, or backlighting to get a TV that could play games as well as it could play Spielberg, but that is no longer the case. With the C4, you can plug in and play your gaming PC with equal perfection as you can with a 4K Blu-Ray player and your favorite releases. Soon enough, the differences between gaming monitors and TVs will disappear completely.

    For now, if you’re looking for an excellent viewing experience and are willing to spend more than a thousand bucks for a TV—lest we forget, you can get also-great models for well under that—you really won’t find many models, at any price, that look better than the LG C4. Given how things have gone, I expect to have similar thoughts about the C5 next year.

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  • Fans of ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Say the Stakes Have Never Been Higher

    Fans of ‘Interview With the Vampire’ Say the Stakes Have Never Been Higher

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    When a new episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape,” was an impeccably written and acted horror film in miniature—the sort of thing you watch with your mouth hanging open, before pointing at your TV and saying, “Are you seeing this, too?!?!”

    Yet when thousands took to social media to ask that very question, much of the commentary was underscored by confusion, even concern, that people were, in fact, not seeing it, too—that they weren’t seeing Interview With the Vampire at all. For a show so good, many said, it was criminal that more people weren’t watching and discussing it, and that more critics weren’t covering it. “This is the best show on TV right now,” New York Times culture reporter Kyle Buchanan wrote in one widely shared tweet. “I feel gaslit that you’d all rather talk about mid or bad shows rather than watch the golden standard!”

    Some fans had already noticed the diminished critical coverage compared to the first season, which was met with near-universal acclaim and earned the show and the performances of its lead actors, Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, places on many end-of-year best-of lists. If anything, the show’s sophomore season had received an even higher percentage of glowing reviews, but the big splashy event coverage that other lauded shows often receive (and are receiving as we speak) was absent from notable mainstream outlets.

    Plugged-in fans had also noticed a drop in viewership from the first season, at least according to publicly available metrics, and in advance of the June 9 episode, Slate published an article titled, “Interview With the Vampire Is the Best Show Almost Nobody Is Watching,” which laid out the those numbers plainly. Word started to spread—especially on up-to-the-minute platforms like X but also fanning out to places like Reddit, TikTok, and even my home base, Tumblr, which is far more likely to host gifsets, shitposts, or graduate-seminar-level analyses of the show than discussions of terrestrial television ratings.

    AMC had announced IWTV’s second season before the first even aired, but halfway through the second there hadn’t been a peep about a third—and with a narrative brewing about “the best show nobody’s watching,” especially in the wake of an episode that so many were raving over, fan anxiety started to ratchet up about its fate. On X in particular, that groundswell quickly started to focus on AMC’s marketing efforts—and fans’ accusations that the network wasn’t doing enough to promote its own show set off a firestorm that brewed for days. “The marketing choices AMC is doing with Interview With the Vampire is self destructive,” one fan wrote. Or, in the words of another: “So mad they got me googling who is head of marketing at AMC.”

    There can be a huge range of reasons why a show in 2024—this one or any other—doesn’t have the reach it deserves; endless pixels have been spilled on streamer fatigue and fractured audiences in the past few years. AMC, a darling of the prestige-TV-on-cable era, is in an especially strange position: Even when Interview’s first season was a hit on its streaming service, AMC+, it was still held up as an example of a troubled industry in transition. Two years and two Hollywood strikes later, the situation is even more complicated. As the industry restructures and changes who can watch what where, a disconnect has emerged between what viewers like and what critics do. At the same time, social media platforms—the loci of 21st-century word of mouth—continue to implode, fracturing the conversation of an already dispersed audience.

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  • A Blatant Attempt to Generate a 'House of the Dragon' AI Overview

    A Blatant Attempt to Generate a 'House of the Dragon' AI Overview

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    How many gallons of blood are there in the second season of House of the Dragon? How many wigs? Click here for an overview.

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  • Hisense U8N TV Review: Loaded Package, Shades Required

    Hisense U8N TV Review: Loaded Package, Shades Required

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    The U8N also lets you control the volume output of its optical port with the TV remote, making it much simpler to control older audio systems that don’t support HDMI ARC/eARC, like my original KEF LSX speakers. If you decide to settle for the onboard sound, the U8N’s 2.1.2 speaker system offers some decent detail, and a bit of extra bass punch for its woofers.

    The TV is well stocked on the gaming front, including VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and AMD FreeSync Premium Proto for fluid high frame-rate gaming, as well as ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) for low input lag. Gaming feels realistic and responsive, with impressive HDR performance. I like the variety of available picture settings, including both Theater and Game modes, which provide rich contrast and vibrant colors for details like Kratos’ ruby red armor in God of War Ragnarok.

    Peaky Blinder

    The U8N provides an almost intimidating level of picture settings for deep-dive adjustments. The Peak Brightness setting is the most confusing. When applying my usual picture modes during setup, like Theater Night for standard dynamic range (SDR) and HDR Theater mode for HDR10, Peak Brightness was set on High by default, which really pumps up the overall picture. This can result in raised black levels and white-hot highlights in content and menu bars, especially with HDR video, leading my wife to call the U8N “the hurty TV” at first.

    There are a few things going on here. First, Peak Brightness is primed for daytime watching in bright rooms with sunlight pouring in, allowing even the darkest scenes to pop. Hisense also includes an adjustable Automatic Light Sensor under the General picture settings, something most reviewers tend to turn off for consistent performance but is all but necessary for Peak Brightness. It does a relatively good job taming the splashy brightness in low lighting, even if I don’t always love how it reacts to each environment.

    Still, Hisense’s decision to quietly set Peak Brightness on High (often without the light sensor engaged) in picture modes that are usually more restrained is confounding, even for someone used to digging through picture settings. A colleague suggested that the TV’s default Energy Saving mode—a dimmer setting that includes the light sensor on for Peak Brightness—is the one Hisense expects most viewers to experience since most folks apparently don’t change their picture settings. The light sensor is also helpfully engaged by default in some other modes, like Dolby Vision Dark.

    If you decide to use Peak Brightness, which is necessary to reach the TV’s highest brightness levels, I suggest starting on Low and turning the light sensor for night viewing. This worked well for illuminating challenging SDR content like Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows during daylight hours, where the darkest scenes seemed to have even less pop than the U8K without the peak brightness setting on.

    My brightest HDR testing content often looked overcooked and oversaturated in this mode. That’s not surprising, considering the TV can reach over 3,000 nits, or triple the brightness at which most videos are currently mastered (though this baseline will change with the latest mastering tools). I usually left the setting off for HDR, but it can be useful in brighter rooms, especially for the always murky Dolby Vision Dark mode. I couldn’t help but marvel at how vibrant and flashy some scenes looked with the setting on, such as the monster scene in Moana, where the giant crab Tamatoa’s golden shell burst to life in disco psychedelia.

    Slackjaw Spectacle

    However you utilize the U8N’s picture settings, it’s capable of the signature beautiful picture we’ve come to expect from the series, with deep black levels, fabulous backlight control, very little “haloing” around bright objects, and intense colors that sparkle like jewels in sunlight.

    This is showy performance, especially for high-quality 4K HDR productions like Netflix’s Our Planet. Episode 4’s coral scene looks incredible, with dashing neon yellows, sapphire blues, and lifelike sunlight sparkling across it all. Occasionally the TV tends to oversaturate reds, especially when using the Warm1 color temperature, but even so it’s stunningly beautiful. It’s the kind of picture that makes you just want to sit there, slackjawed and dumbfounded, as the pretty colors and bright sparklies dance before your eyes.

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  • How to Take Advantage of the Samsung Free TV Promotion (2024)

    How to Take Advantage of the Samsung Free TV Promotion (2024)

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    Earlier this year at CES, Samsung announced its 2024 TV model lineup, which includes screens with Mini LED displays, quantum-dot-enabled OLEDs, and other, more affordable TVs. We like what we’ve seen so far, which makes Samsung’s current TV promotion pretty exciting if a new TV is in your budget for this year.

    If you preorder a select Samsung screen between now and April 11, 2024, you can qualify for a free 65-inch Samsung TU690T Crystal UHD model while supplies last. Full disclosure: We have yet to test any of the upcoming 2024 models, but we have spent years testing Samsung TVs and recommend several in our Best TVs buying guide.

    By no means will the free model be as nice as your preordered screen. The TU690T usually hovers around $500, and it doesn’t have modern features like local dimming, which helps make blacks appear darker and whites look brighter, and improves the contrast of the screen. But a free 65-inch TV can be a fantastic way to upgrade a friend or loved one’s aging TV set, or you can put it in a spare bedroom, work area, garage, or any other space where you might’ve wanted a screen but didn’t want to spend the money for it.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    The Nitty Gritty

    Samsung TU7000

    Photograph: Samsung

    How is Samsung able to give away free TV sets as a part of this promotion? We reached out to Samsung for comment but it hasn’t given us an answer yet. But hey, free TV! Here are the 2024 TV models that qualify for the deal:

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  • A Max Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming

    A Max Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming

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    Be warned, all ye who watch House of the Dragon thanks to your parents’ Max account: A password-sharing crackdown is coming.

    Warner Bros. Discovery, Max’s parent company, plans to launch the restrictions in late 2024, WBD’s head of global streaming and games, JB Parrette, said at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Monday. Details on the crackdown are scant, but the push toward paid sharing is expected to roll out more widely next year.

    Max, formerly HBO Max, is just the latest streamer to look to password-sharing limitations to keep streaming viable. Netflix started cracking down on users sharing their passwords outside the household last year. Disney recently informed Disney+ and Hulu subscribers of plans to convert suspected account sharers to paid subscribers. Disney emailed customers in February letting them know that their terms of service would be changing and that the sharing of login information with anyone outside their household would be forbidden starting March 14. Netflix, similarly, rolled out its restrictions last year by emailing users suspected of sharing their login details and telling them users outside the household would be shut out.

    These moves come as providers struggle to hang on to their user bases and streaming becomes an even more crowded field, forcing consumers to make tough choices about which services they can afford. Netflix, following a couple rough years, bounced back and saw a boost in subscribers and revenue late last year following its password crackdown.

    Disney+ has been adding subscribers but struggling to hit profitability. Still, Disney CEO Bob Iger believes streaming can start making money by the end of 2024, thanks in part to its new ad-supported tiers and a combined Disney+/Hulu “one-app experience” coming this year.

    Meanwhile, Max has changed shape repeatedly following the Warner Bros. merger with Discovery, which ultimately combined HBO Max and Discovery+ into one streamer. The move yucked the yum of longtime HBO Max fans, but it led WBD to become the first Hollywood heavyweight to turn a full-year profit from streaming.

    Password-sharing crackdowns also come at a time when piracy is on the rise—something that’s keenly impacted WBD’s offerings. For years, HBO’s Game of Thrones was one of the most pirated shows on TV. More recently, The Last of Us and House of the Dragon have taken the top spots.

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