Panasonic Viera Shinobi Pro DS630 (TH-49DS630D) Review

Panasonic is a very good and known name as a Television manufacturer. And now they are also moving forward with Smart TVs and Smartphones. Recently, they have launched their new DS60 series of Smart TVs that comprises IPS LED Super Bright Panels.

Display and Hardware

Panasonic designed this TV in a very generic way which is Flat panel design. Most of the TVs in the market are of the same design. It has thin bezel frame without any curves. To give an elegant look to TV the frame and stands are silver in color.

The lower-left corner holds an indicator light that only turns on when the TV is powered on by remote, else remains red (in standby). The entire TV sits on two silver stands on both sides that hold it up securely and firmly. You can also mount the TV on the wall without the stand. The six physical buttons for power on, volume up/down, channels, input selection are housed at right corner.

All other ports such as RJ45 Ethernet port, HDMI, and other Analog controls are housed at back panel. Two USB port and one AV in HDMI port are at left corner.  The TV weighs 10kg with stand and 9kg without.

For producing quality pictures, the Shinobi assembled with IPS LED display that uses Panasonic’s Super Bright Panel Plus and Hexa chrome drive technology to provide better color reproduction and bright pictures. The Shinobi DS630 supports Full HD 1920 x 1080p screen resolution, which is a little bit disappointing as it does not support 4K. But still, it is good as it comes with a 400Hz BMR and Adaptive Backlight Dimming technology. The 49-inch display has very wide viewing angles and the color does not faint or dimmer when viewed from off-axis.

The Smart Features and Performance

The Shinobi TH-49DS630D is based on Panasonic’s propriety OS and has very clean and intuitive interface. The Apps icons are big and easy to locate and execute. The DS630D comes with a standard remote with loads of buttons. It comes with Wi-Fi to connect the internet and accessing Screen mirroring type features. YouTube browser works smoothly without any lag or glitches. Panasonic has categorized the various apps according to their relevant section such as travel, lifestyle, music, news etc. to reduce the hassle. The apps are limited and you cannot perform all your operations but enough to handle your minimum jobs. In the Apps, the best thing you find is a Netflix app so if you are a Netflix subscriber, this TV is made for you. Also, the remote has dedicated Netflix button and you can directly call the Netflix app from your Remote.

The 20W (10wx2) speakers produce a loud and awesome sound which is very impressive; the fidelity of bass production is not so good but as TV’s inbuilt sound, it can easily use in dining or living area of a house without any external home theater system. But the volume management of TV is little bit undistributed, when we increase the volume from 1 to 50% it shows the increment in sound but after 50% it flat doesn’t show any difference. The TV’s maximum sound output is at 50%. It can support almost all media formats for videos and audio like AVI, MKV, WMV, MP4, M4V, FLV, 3GPP, VRO, VOB/TS/PS, MP3, AAC, WMA, Pro/FLAC/WAV, JPEG etc.

The Panasonic Viera Shinobi Pro TH-49DS630D in our voltage test gave us 0.0 W at standby, average 71 W while surfing internet or YouTube and 79.5W at full volume.

It provides a lag free user experience while navigating the smart TV interface. The viewing angles are good and the display won’t let you down at all if you are watching HD content or even streaming some via the internet.

We watched movies like the Gravity and Revenant at 1080p. The images it produced are looked great and bright. Even in darker areas it did not let us down and produced good black levels. The picture is good, but still somewhere it lacks sharpness.