Panasonic W85 vs XIAOMI S Mini 2026 (55"-75") 60Hz

Unfortunately, we don't have good news here. The Panasonic W85B is rather dim – its peak brightness does not exceed 300 nits, so it's hard to talk about any true HDR effect. In practice, this means that scenes which on other screens can "shine" and make an impression, here look simply like regular SDR with a slight boost in colors. Our measurements and film tests confirmed this – regardless of the content, the W85B won't extract anything more from HDR. So if someone is looking for a TV specifically for HDR, it's better to look towards other models. As a consolation, the fact remains that in terms of colors, the W85B performs quite well. It's a QLED TV, so its color gamut coverage is wide, and most films and series look natural, without a distinct "washed out" effect. The colors are saturated, so during regular viewing, there is no sense that something is quite wrong.

When it comes to HDR, the capabilities of the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 are really good, especially given the segment this model belongs to. The set reaches roughly 1,000 nits of brightness without much trouble, allowing it to deliver a very pronounced HDR effect in bright scenes. Sun highlights, reflections, and brightly lit parts of the image can be very intense and at times almost blindingly bright. It’s a little different in dark scenes, though. Very small light sources surrounded by black are shown at significantly lower brightness, so they lack the point-like intensity seen in the best TVs. This is not unusual for a Mini LED. The local dimming algorithm limits the backlight to keep blacks as deep as possible, which in those scenes matters more than a few extra nits.

HDR Colors

Color reproduction also performs well. Xiaomi markets the S Mini 2026 as a QLED TV, although the solution used here is practically based on a PFS phosphor. What matters most is the result, and it’s quite good. Our measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut, while in the much wider BT.2020 space it was around 74%. That means the TV can reproduce most of the colors used in HDR films with suitably high saturation. Its limitations are most visible only with very saturated shades of green, where the color range starts to fall short.

While testing the Panasonic W85B, we of course started with the Filmmaker mode, as it is the gold standard today for watching content "as the director intended." The problem is that this TV is quite far from those intentions. The biggest issue turned out to be an excess of red – in both SDR and HDR. The picture often looked overly warm, and in some scenes, it appeared almost "blazing." Additionally, there’s the issue of brightness management. When we looked at the gamma and EOTF charts, it was clear as day that in most scenes, the TV brightens the image more than it should. The effect was easy to predict. Details can get lost, leading to flattening and clipping across the entire screen. Of course, we know how to improve this, but it must be said honestly that it requires quite a bit of work in calibration. Out of the box, the W85B does not provide a reference-level picture – it is rather a TV that will always interpret colors and brightness a bit "its own way" without professional adjustments. Unfortunately, this is to the detriment of the viewer.

We tested the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 in 55–75-inch sizes in Film mode, which offered the most accurate colors compared with the other presets. That said, the picture wasn't perfectly set up out of the box. In our unit the white balance was clearly shifted toward warmer tones. There was too little blue and too much red, so whites and grays had a slightly warm tint. The TV also tended to brighten darker parts of the image too much. This came from the gamma, which instead of staying around 2.4 sometimes dropped to about 2.0. That made more shadow detail visible, but the picture lost some depth. The factory settings weren't bad, but they still needed tweaking to reproduce the image correctly.

Fortunately, calibration made a significant difference for the Panasonic W85B, especially in SDR content. Here, the improvement was really noticeable – we managed to balance the white and reasonably tame the TV's tendency to excessively brighten the entire image. The picture became more coherent, and the colors gained a naturalness that was lacking in the factory settings. Admittedly, the results from the Color Checker are not perfect, as the W85B has visible issues with green saturation, but overall, we assess the post-calibration effect in SDR very positively. The situation with HDR is a bit different. Here, we were also able to limit the tendency to warm up the entire scene, so the image turned out much better than in the factory settings. However, the same problem we mentioned earlier is still evident – the TV interprets the image too "in its own way" and brightens the entire frame. The lack of local dimming only exacerbates this effect. In summary, briefly in SDR content, the W85B performs really well after calibration and is perfectly suitable for everyday viewing. However, in HDR, even after adjustments, it is still hard to unequivocally recommend it for serious viewing sessions.

Contrary to appearances, the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 responds quite well to calibration. After our adjustments we were able to noticeably improve the white balance, and the picture stopped leaning too warm. With SDR content the result is really good, the TV can display such images very accurately, and it's hard to find major faults in its color reproduction. We applied similar corrections in HDR as well, though not everything could be fixed. Colors look better than at factory settings, but the TV still tends to render the image slightly brighter than it should. You can see this in the EOTF curve, which sits above the reference value. In practice this means some HDR scenes are brighter than the creators intended. This is a quirk of this TV and we can't do anything about it.

With native SDR content, the Panasonic W85B performs very well – tonal transitions are smooth and natural, without artificial bands or clear contours. However, the situation looks worse with lower resolution materials. This is where the television has the biggest problem with "beautifying" the image. The lack of any option in the menu that would allow for improving gradation means that with older films or materials from YouTube, one can sometimes notice slight issues with color blending.

Fortunately, upscaling, or increasing the quality of lower resolution content, performs much better. This is definitely a strong point of this model – the image is scaled cleanly and in detail, and the television handles this better than one might expect from such an affordable device. This is thanks to the HCX processor, which Panasonic has been developing for years, and it shows that even in the lower series, it can do a good job.

Digital image processing in the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 is handled by the MT5896 processor. Unfortunately, in this respect the TV performs rather average. Low-resolution content is not upscaled very well, and its limitations become quickly apparent on a large screen. The image looks quite digital, and the TV can't extract many additional details from it. Additionally, you cannot disable overscan for low-resolution material. Things are even worse when it comes to smoothing posterization. On the smaller models there isn't even a dedicated feature to reduce the visible banding between similar shades. So if such imperfections are already present in the source material, Xiaomi effectively does not mask them.

At first glance, everything looks good – the Panasonic W85B has a 120 Hz panel and even a 144 Hz mode, so it seems that it should handle smooth motion well. The problem begins when we look into the settings. The options for improving fluidity are supposedly present in the menu, but in practice… they change nothing. No matter what we choose, the image looks the same. On top of that, there's a lack of BFI, which is the black frame insertion mode that helps sharpen motion in many TVs. And suddenly, it turns out that despite having a strong panel, the W85B doesn't give us any real tools to adjust that motion to our needs. It only works well when the source itself operates at a higher frequency – for example, games at 120 Hz. But when it comes to movies or sports, we just have to take what the TV shows us, because there's nothing more we can do about it.

The smaller variants of the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 use a 60 Hz panel, and that's their biggest limitation when it comes to motion. For movies and TV series this isn't yet a major issue, because the TV has a classic motion smoothing for 24/30 fps content. So we can reduce the characteristic judder and adjust motion to our own preferences. Sports and other 50/60 Hz content fare worse, because there is no additional feature to improve smoothness. With that kind of material we are therefore limited by the panel itself.

In terms of motion blur the TV performs quite typically for a VA panel. Most trailing is visible behind objects moving on a dark background, while in brighter scenes the effect is noticeably smaller. It's not at a level that completely ruins motion perception, but in dynamic scenes you can tell the panel isn't among the fastest.

On paper, the Panasonic W85B looks really solid. Here we have two full HDMI 2.1 ports, support for ALLM, variable refresh rate, Dolby Vision in games, and of course, a high refresh rate for the panel itself. Additionally, there’s the characteristic Panasonic game bar that allows you to check key parameters with one click and quickly change them if necessary. Sounds great, but the problem arises when we activate HDR. Here, the W85B significantly falters because it lacks proper HGiG implementation – the TV manages brightness poorly, and instead of faithful image rendering, we get scenes that are too bright, sometimes even blown out. The solution? The simplest – turn off HDR in the console settings and leave everything in SDR. And here it gets really interesting, because in this scenario, the W85B shows its better side. Low input lag, high smoothness thanks to 120 Hz – all of this makes gaming look phenomenal. Yes, HDR can be sacrificed, but if responsiveness and smooth gameplay are priorities, the W85B provides a lot of fun.

In larger sizes the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 becomes a far more interesting option for gamers. The panel natively runs at up to 144 Hz, so when connected to a PC we can take advantage of the high refresh rate even in 4K. At lower resolutions the TV can go even further and reach up to 288 Hz. There’s also ALLM, automatic switching to game mode, and a Game Bar with the key settings at hand. Of course, the TV is equipped with two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. In terms of smoothness, the difference compared to the 55 to 75 inch versions is therefore substantial and especially noticeable when using a PC or console. Not everything works perfectly, though. As with the smaller variants, we have reservations about the HGiG implementation. The HDR setup screens on the PS5 and Xbox don’t exactly match the TV’s real capabilities, so if you configure the consoles according to those prompts the brightest parts of the image can be blown out and lose some detail.