There is no way to pass keyword arguments down to the histogram call in pandas.tools.plotting.scatter_matrix. I understand that it's sitting on top of a few interfaces and so intelligently deciding which keyword arguments go where is complex.

A simple solution would be to add a hist_kwargs={} keyword argument to which users could pass values like {'bins': 100} and then use this in the hist call like so

ax.hist(values, **hist_kwargs)

Comment From: TomAugspurger

It looks like this feature was implemented in #3673 (merged ~ 4 months before this issue).

@mrocklin can you confirm if that does what you needed it to?

Comment From: mroeschke

Looks like this has been addressed so closing