Panasonic NA-140VX4 review

WASH PERFORMANCE

Our lab tests place heavy emphasis on cleaning performance. We use strips embedded with stains commonly found in your laundry to see how well each of the machines cope with removing them. View our gallery to see all the cleaning examples: dirty cloth is at the top of each sample; the clean one at the bottom.

The Panasonic NA-140VX4 comes with an exciting Stain Master feature which promises to tackle your everyday stains with gusto, automatically combining the right temperature, washing power and soaking power to beat the stain.

Our results showed how the 40C cotton wash was more efficient than the 30C wash, as we’d expect to see, removing more of the stain in each sample. We found that the 30C wash left a fair amount of the blood/milk/ink sample behind, with the end result looking rather blotchy.

The 40C wash (top) did better than the 30C wash (bottom), particularly in our blood/milk/ink test

Interestingly, we found that the 15C cycle performed better with most of the stains, which would be good news for running costs and overall efficiency. Even the blood sample seemed lighter than in both the 30C and 40C, though it did leave a line of the stain running through the centre of the sample.

The 15C wash was good, although it left a line in our blood stain sample

40C Easycare had a very similar result to 40C cotton and we couldn’t tell the two apart to decide on which was a better wash.

Overall, we’ve seen better cleaning performance in other machines, but we’ve also seen a lot worse. Suffice to say, this isn’t a bad washer, giving an average performance that didn’t quite have the oomph to blow us away, despite the Stain Master feature.

We often find Panasonic’s washing machines are very quiet, not giving off too much vibration on spin settings. Despite having such a large drum to spin, the NA-140VX4 is pretty good too, with sound quoted at 53dB for the wash, and 71dB for the spin cycle.