Panasonic W95A: what it ships with and what can come off

There is a contradiction in this television worth stating up front, because it explains why you have ended up reading this.

On one side, the W95A is a Panasonic with everything that implies: a Mini LED with 1,380 measured nits, the four HDR formats that exist —Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, HDR10 and HLG, something almost no manufacturer offers— and the image processing of a brand that has spent decades tuning televisions for people who pay attention.

On the other, its operating system is Fire TV, which is to say Amazon's store. You buy a set built to show films the way the director left them, and you switch it on to a screen designed to sell you content.

This page is for someone who already has one in front of them.

Four ports, two fast ones, and eARC on one of them#

Panasonic publishes the breakdown port by port, and credit is due for that because almost nobody does. Its spec sheet lists it like this:

• eARC: on input 2.
• VRR, 4K at a high refresh rate, FreeSync Premium and auto game mode: on inputs 1 and 2.
• ALLM: on all of them.

Put the first line next to the second and the clash appears: of the four ports, only two are any use for high refresh rate gaming, and eARC takes up one of those two. With a soundbar connected, you are left with a single fast port. Console on HDMI 1, soundbar on HDMI 2, and everything is spoken for.

If you plug the console into 3 or 4 without looking, nobody warns you: you simply will not have VRR or the high refresh rate, on a set that offers both.

Five minutes spent on this pays off better than any app clear-out. Do it first.

What it is, in two lines#

A 2024 4K set with a VA panel and Mini LED backlight and an HCX Pro AI MK II processor. Panasonic quotes the refresh rate as 'up to 144 Hz': it does not use the word 'native' anywhere on its spec sheet. On the 55-inch model, 1,380 nits have been measured on a 10 % window and 777 full screen, which is a great deal for a room with light in it.

Panasonic does not publish the number of dimming zones. The figure that circulates for the 65-inch model is 192 zones; for the other sizes there is no reliable number, and saying so is more honest than filling the gap.

Inside there are 4 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage, running Fire OS 8, which is Android 11 with Amazon's layer on top.

What changes because this is Fire TV and not Google TV#

If you have just read the page for a set running Google TV, forget the names you learned:

There are no Google packages. No com.google.android.tvlauncher, no com.google.android.gms. Here the prefix in charge is com.amazon..

There is no Play Store. The store is Amazon's Appstore (com.amazon.venezia), with a smaller catalogue. If you overdo the clear-out, going back is less comfortable than on a Google TV.

The home screen belongs to Amazon, and it is among the most commercial on the market. On a television at this price, that is complaint number one among its owners.

ADB works the same. Fire OS is Android underneath, so the commands are the ones used on every other page of this site. What changes is the list of names, not the method.

The 16 GB, on a set at this price#

Four gigabytes of RAM is plenty for a television: the set moves freely and you will not feel short of memory. The 16 GB of storage is another matter.

It is not a problem the way it is on a 200-euro set —there it decides whether the thing will ever update again— but it is tight for a high-end machine you intend to keep for ten years. Every streaming app you do not use takes up space you will miss a few years from now.

How to tell whether this page is about your set#

Under Settings → My Fire TV → About you will find the model and the Fire OS version. With ADB connected, getprop ro.product.model returns the set's internal identifier, which in this family begins with AFT.

Panasonic documents the 55 and 65-inch models on its European site, under references that change from country to country: TV-55W95AEB and TV-65W95AEB in the United Kingdom. The 85-inch model only existed in the United States: if yours is an 85, it is not this one.

What ships on it#

Amazon's. The launcher (com.amazon.tv.launcher), the store (com.amazon.venezia), Prime Video and a good number of services carrying the com.amazon. prefix. It is most of what is there, and it is what decides what you see when the set comes on.

Everybody else's. Netflix, Disney+ and the rest arrive installed, and the remote usually has dedicated buttons. The button stays after you remove the app; it simply stops going anywhere.

Panasonic's. Very little, and this is the interesting part: Panasonic's picture settings —the Filmmaker modes, the calibration, the processing— are not apps. They live in the firmware, below Fire OS. No package list reaches down there, which is why nothing you do here can spoil them.

What comes off without much thought#

The streaming apps you do not use. They take up room, they update themselves, they appear in the recommendation row and they talk to their servers. If you subscribe tomorrow, they reinstall from the store in two minutes.

The games and associated services that ship on it and that you have never opened.

What to look at first#

On Fire TV two settings remove a good share of the noise with no risk and no ADB: under Settings → Preferences → Privacy Settings you turn off device usage data collection and interest-based ads. Start there.

And the recommendation engine, which on Fire TV is woven more tightly into the home screen than on Google TV: you can empty the row, but do not expect to leave it blank.

What not to touch#

The launcher (com.amazon.tv.launcher), as long as you have no other one installed and working. On Fire TV this is more delicate than on a Google TV because there are fewer alternatives and Amazon's store does not offer them.

The store (com.amazon.venezia): without it you cannot reinstall anything you remove.

Everything to do with HDMI and with the control of external devices, above all if you have a console: VRR, ALLM and the 144 Hz all pass through there.

And anything starting with com.android. that you cannot identify: com.android.systemui is the system interface and com.android.settings is the settings app itself.

Write down what you remove#

This holds for any television, but on a Fire TV it counts double: Amazon reinstates things with updates more often than Google does. Keep the list in a text file with the full command beside each entry, and save the complete package list before you touch anything.

Six months from now, when an update puts the home screen back the way it shipped, restoring your version will be a copy and paste rather than an afternoon repeating the work.

What you actually notice#

A considerably less commercial home screen, which on a Fire TV is a bigger change than on a Google TV because it starts from further away. Some storage recovered. And less background activity.

What does not change, and here that is the whole point: the picture. The 1,380 nits, the dimming zones, the four HDR formats, the 144 Hz and Panasonic's processing carry on exactly as before. That lives in the firmware, not in the apps, and it is precisely what you paid for.

All of this comes undone#

Packages disabled over ADB come back with one command, and a factory reset returns the television to the state it left the box in. Nothing here touches the system: you are only telling the set not to load something that was already installed.

If you own one#

The app list from your own W95A, exactly as the set reports it, is especially valuable: there are far fewer Fire TV entries about than Google TV ones, and on a Panasonic fewer still. If you feel like sending it, the next person searching for this model finds the work already done.