Panasonic doesn’t sell many different TVs in the US, but its offerings here still span a wide range in terms of price and performance. On the high end is the company’s Z95A, a premium OLED TV with a built-in spatial audio system and a fantastic picture. On the low end is the W70B, a deep budget LED TV with no added panel technology like QLED, mini-LED, or even a local dimming backlight array. On the bright side, it's available in plenty of screen sizes and for reasonable prices; the 65-inch model I tested is $549.99, and it can go as small as 43 inches for $299.99 or as high as 85 inches for $1,099.99. The picture quality isn’t amazing, but it looks good for how little it costs. If you’re an avid Amazon fan, it’s a good choice because it runs the Fire TV platform and adds Apple AirPlay for some extra connectivity. The Hisense U6N is much brighter, more colorful, and still very cheap at $799.99 for 65 inches, so it remains our Editors’ Choice for budget TVs.

Design: Big and Unassuming

The Q70B is a pretty chunky budget TV with a plain black plastic shell more than three inches thick. You’ll only notice this bulk from the sides, though, as the front of the TV manages to muster the now-standard design of midrange-to-high-end TVs with no bezels on the sides and top and a single narrow black plastic bezel along the bottom textured to look like brushed metal. It doesn’t look fancy, but it doesn’t scream cheap, either. The TV sits on two narrow, V-shaped metal feet located near the sides, or you can wall-mount it.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Nearly all ports can be found on the back of the screen, about a third of the way inward from the right edge, facing right (the power cable connector is located opposite the other ports and faces left). They include four HDMI ports (one eARC), two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm composite video input, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an optical audio output, an Ethernet port, and an antenna/cable RF connector. Having all the ports facing right rather than back or down would make accessing them convenient on most TVs, but actually getting to them requires reaching in pretty deep from the right side.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The flat, slim remote is very similar to those included with Fire TV media streamers, with a few extra buttons for the TV functions. It features a large, glossy, circular navigation pad near the top with power and Alexa buttons above it, alongside a pinhole microphone. Menu and playback controls sit below the pad, with volume and channel rockers below them and dedicated service buttons for Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Netflix near the bottom. The only real additions over standard Fire TV remotes are the channel rocker and a programmable shortcut button below the rocker you can use to open an app or run a customized Alexa command.

Features: Amazon Fire TV With Apple AirPlay, But No Hands-Free Alexa

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Panasonic uses Amazon’s Fire TV smart TV platform for the W70B's interface and connected features. It’s a robust system that covers all major streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video (of course), Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube. It also features Apple AirPlay for streaming from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, a welcome addition that Fire TV doesn’t support by default.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is built into the system, so you can use your voice to control the TV and any compatible smart home devices, search for content, get general information like weather forecasts and sports scores, and check your schedule. The voice assistant isn’t accessible hands-free, though; you need to press the Alexa button on the remote and speak into it. If you want hands-free Alexa, you’ll need to make a significant upgrade to either the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED or Panasonic’s flagship Z95A.

Performance: Temper Your Expectations

The Panasonic W70B is a 4K LED TV with a 60Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG). It does not support Dolby Vision. It has an ATSC 1.0 tuner for over-the-air broadcasts. It does not have ATSC 3.0 for 1080p and 4K broadcasts. 

This is a budget TV with a full-panel LED backlight and no local dimming, and its brightness and contrast reflect that. We test TVs with a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. Out of the box, in Movie mode with an SDR signal, it shows a peak brightness of 274 nits with a full-screen white field and no real difference with a smaller 18% white field, along with a black level of 0.058cd/m^2. Switching to an HDR signal doesn’t make it much brighter, bumping it up to 333 nits peak brightness and 0.074cd/m^2 black level for a 4,500:1 contrast ratio. That’s brighter than the Amazon Fire TV 4-Series (283 nits peak brightness, 0.085cd/m^2 black level, 3,329:1 contrast ratio), but the local-dimming mini-LED-equipped Hisense U6N blows both out of the water (700 nits 18% white field, 0.003cd/m^2 black level, 233,333:1 contrast ratio). 

(Credit: PCMag)

The above charts show the W70B’s color levels in Movie mode with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. In both cases, whites run slightly cool/cyan, magentas also run slightly cool, and the other colors are generally very accurate, though they don't come close to covering the DCI-P3 color space in HDR. These levels are nearly identical to the Fire TV 4-Series, and the two TVs might use very similar panels. The Hisense U6N’s QLED panel is much more accurate and reaches further in HDR, though it still doesn’t quite hit the digital cinema color levels; if you want a picture that vivid you’ll need to spend more on a TV like the Hisense U8QG. 

Off-angle viewing of the W70B is modest but not awful. Color and contrast remain intact until you look at the screen from about 30 degrees in either direction, after which colors fade and black becomes gray. This is standard performance for a TV in this price range, but paying more to step up a tier to a TV like TCL’s QM7K will significantly widen the angles you can see a consistent picture from.

Considering its limitations as a non-QLED TV without local dimming, the W70B’s picture looks good. The greens of plants and the blues of water and sky in BBC’s Planet Earth II look well-balanced and natural. I’ve definitely seen more vibrant color on higher-end QLED TVs like the Hisense U8QG and TCL QM7K, but they are significantly more expensive. The W70B is vibrant enough to let you comfortably view the sunny shots of nature in a well-lit room, but the underwhelming brightness and mediocre contrast mean they don’t come close to looking lifelike. 

The party scenes in The Great Gatsby are well-balanced and very watchable on the W70B, even with its limited contrast. The blacks of suits and the whites of shirts and balloons look accurate and generally show strong detail in most shots, though the former can appear washed-out or lose a bit of shadow detail to muddiness depending on the shot. Skin tones appear accurate, and while the occasional flourishes of orange dresses aren’t as vibrant as they are on QLED TVs I’ve tested, they still pop out nicely against the rest of the frame.

(Credit: Panasonic)

The Spears & Munsil Ultra HD Benchmark disc has plenty of demonstration footage that serves as a torture test for TVs, and it definitely exposes the bigger cracks in the W70B’s picture. Highlight details in snowy nature shots get crunched down, eliminating clouds, falling snowflakes, and even the snow-covered ground in a blanket of flat white. This can also be seen in many landscape shots without snow, with sun-bleached stone and white clouds also losing detail. Shots of bright, colorful objects like feathers and flowers against a black background don’t show any light bloom since the backlight array is consistent across the screen, but that background isn’t exactly super dark, and the objects themselves don’t get bright enough or show enough detail in highlights to stand out as well as they do on TVs with local dimming. Colors are still accurate, and while it isn’t a terrible viewing experience, it is still very much budget picture quality.

Gaming: Few Frills, But Low Lag

Like most budget TVs, the W70B isn’t loaded with gaming features. Its 60Hz native refresh rate is the baseline standard, and there’s no AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync. It’s responsive, though, showing an input lag in Game mode of 10ms at 4K60. That’s less than one frame at 60Hz, which makes it quick enough to comfortably use for games.