Dramaqueen
Member
Panasonic has quietly put a better panel in the back of an economy seat than a fair number of people have in their spare bedroom. The Astrova displays on United's A321XLR are 4K OLED across the cabin - 13 inches in economy, 16 in Premium Plus, 19 up front in Polaris. Given that seatback screens have spent twenty years being washed-out, off-axis LCD with a permanent grey haze on them, that is a genuine jump.
The thing is, the panel was never the bottleneck in in-flight entertainment. Two other things were. First, the encode: what gets loaded onto the aircraft server is compressed hard because storage and certification are both expensive, and no OLED on earth rescues a soft, low-bitrate file. Second, the environment. You are watching in a tube with a light source a foot from the screen, and OLED's infinite contrast advantage collapses the moment ambient light hits the glass. The one scenario where these panels will genuinely sing is a night flight with the shades down, which admittedly is most long-haul.
For my money the bigger upgrade in that cabin is Bluetooth 5.1 pairing. Being able to use your own headphones instead of the two-prong jack and the free earbuds does more for the experience than moving from LCD to OLED does. The wireless charging and the Starlink connection are in the same category.
Nobody should expect it to behave like a proper TV, and the review that prompted this said as much - no serious processing or upscaling behind it. It is a good panel fed modest content.
Has anyone flown one yet and looked at a genuinely dark scene mid-flight with the window open?
The thing is, the panel was never the bottleneck in in-flight entertainment. Two other things were. First, the encode: what gets loaded onto the aircraft server is compressed hard because storage and certification are both expensive, and no OLED on earth rescues a soft, low-bitrate file. Second, the environment. You are watching in a tube with a light source a foot from the screen, and OLED's infinite contrast advantage collapses the moment ambient light hits the glass. The one scenario where these panels will genuinely sing is a night flight with the shades down, which admittedly is most long-haul.
For my money the bigger upgrade in that cabin is Bluetooth 5.1 pairing. Being able to use your own headphones instead of the two-prong jack and the free earbuds does more for the experience than moving from LCD to OLED does. The wireless charging and the Starlink connection are in the same category.
Nobody should expect it to behave like a proper TV, and the review that prompted this said as much - no serious processing or upscaling behind it. It is a good panel fed modest content.
Has anyone flown one yet and looked at a genuinely dark scene mid-flight with the window open?
