there is a gaping hole in my family room wall and a matching tv size budget
burning a hole in my wallet why haven't i spent the budget to fill the hole
well because i've fallen into the same trap i'm always warning you guys about
in my search for the perfect tv we already reviewed two of the hottest sets
on the market samsung's s95b qd OLED and
lg's g2w OLED but i couldn't bring
myself to pull the trigger because i knew there was something better around the
corner fortunately the corner
is this one this is it
for a whopping thousand dollars more the
a95k from sony features the best of all
worlds at least on paper a qd OLED panel sony's
outstanding image processing dolby vision and a special cooling layer to
push it beyond the performance of its south korean competitors will this be
the one that ends up in my family room i really hope so because it's getting
harder and harder to convince my sponsors to keep buying me new tvs
sponsors like grid studio using the art
of knolling grid studio's art frames show off the art hidden inside
technology learn how you could win your own frame at the end of this video
between our last two contenders the lg g2 and samsung s95b i'm leaning toward
the s95b and it's all about samsung's qd
OLED panel technology it is super bright
color accurate out of the box has top-notch viewing angles and we suspect
that it won't suffer from permanent image retention or burn in to nearly the
same degree as earlier oleds yes the lack of polarization does mean
that in a brightly lit room it doesn't look as inky black as lg's w OLED but
when you've got two scenes side by side that aren't super dark it just plain
wins or at least it did let's take a look at our
newcomer for 4 grand for a 65 inch this
better blow me away there's a good
chance it will it's you know we're still using cutie OLED panels and just like
with the samsung but it's got an extra twist like lg's g2 it's got that big
thermal layer on the back so it should dissipate heat a bit better but they're
not using it the way you might think lg seems to be using the thermal
dissipation layer to boost brightness without cooking their oleds
sony seems to be more focused on reducing image retention because it's
not any brighter than the vanilla samsung version yeah there's more though
compared to samsung it has dolby vision to go along with its dolby atmos and its
bravia which means this or something else from sony's lineup is the only way
you'll get dolby vision in your ps5 on my ps5 or ps5 your ps5 can't say i'm a
fan of this kind of ecosystem walled gardening and also i don't have a
playstation 5. yeah well anyway it has
HDR 10 and hlg but not HDR 10 plus
why can't they just have all of them yeah i mean i guess it's a lot of work
but that's another swing and a miss to me i thought you said i was going to like this thing you are you are double
vision's pretty good the good news is i'm expecting those supported HDR modes
to look really good on here and we measured around 960 nits in HDR with
full field white hitting about 210 nits but the big thing is almost 320 nits in
sdr really yeah which is really good for an OLED wow okay this already looks
great with the studio lights in my eyes
i know and as long as the g2 isn't that right there yeah it still looks black it
still looks black like it's you know it's a pretty minor difference it's a
funny thing because the issue with the black bars on an ips is that they glow
yeah so in the night they bother you because they're glowing they're
distracting from the immersion in the content
but on these tvs they only look gray they don't actually
emit light they just have kind of a gray look compared to the inky blacks of a wo
lead yeah and the fire looks so good like even his pant leg there it looks
like his legs are actually on fire like they are they filmed it on fire probably
with like a fire resistant pants or whatever but but without over juicing
anything yeah no it doesn't look cartoonish all the grass looks as green
as it should and it's like the yellow patches there like it looks like you're
staring at an actual field i hate the term it looks like i'm looking through a
window but like that's as close as it's gonna get i
think we haven't talked about reflections that was a big advantage on
the samsung compared to the lg and it's pretty solid here when it's
full black i can see myself yeah but otherwise like even here it's kind of
dark and i can kind of see us a little bit but it's not that distracting and
we are lit by studio lighting right now this is totally unfair yeah this is an
unfair situation and when we look at the numbers that makes sense
sony boasts nearly 90 coverage of the bt
2020 color space and straight out of the
box we got a delta e average of 1.85 in
sdr technically that is a slight loss to
the s95b but that's only after using
samsung's onboard calibration and a difference of 0.16 is an insignificant
price to pay for our 75 nits of extra
brightness as for HDR we measured both imax
enhanced and cinema modes and ladies and gentlemen we figured out where most of
that thousand extra dollars is going sony's processing
not ltcstore.com where they could have picked up a sweet man hoodie or a swag
even after using samsung's calibration app the a95k
crushes the s95b in HDR without
luminance errors we are getting a delta e average of 3.6 with a max of 6.5 like
it's not even close the sony also
handles reds significantly better skin tones look so
natural like that looks like a fire lit face it doesn't look like a yellow light
on a face and while some of the other colors are slightly more accurate on the
samsung that lower maximum deviation is
more important here it wasn't easy getting to this state
though while we didn't dig into the 10-point white balance and color
adjustment on the bravia we did have to tinker with some of the other settings
and it comes with some trade-offs to get the most color accurate image in both
sdr and HDR you can't use the same
settings in both modes
we found that the best results in HDR were with gradation preferred HDR tone
mapping advanced contrast enhancer set to medium and live color set to high
conversely sdr wants ace and live color
off if you keep the sdr settings you end up
with less accuracy and more luminance errors in HDR when you keep the HDR
settings color accuracy plummets in HDR
and i just wish we didn't have to make this trade-off though realistically an
average delta ef4 is still really good for the average viewer so what i would
probably do is leave it dialed in for HDR and then take that hit in sdr
of course we need more than just great color performance what about the
features it runs it up to 4k 120hz refresh rate
we will talk about gaming shortly integrates with every relevant voice
assistant through the mic in the remote and has sony's cool behind the screen
speakers these can either be used as better than average integrated sound or
this is really cool as a stealthy center channel in a surround config like the
one we set up in this sponsored video on the a9ht speakers it's even got a
freaking webcam this wow that's kind of weird looking this
definitely merits a closer look those
flashes are so crisp yeah and fast
normally i don't care about pixel response time while i'm consuming
passive entertainment sure right like when i'm gaming when i'm controlling the
action i do but wow it's
on and off yeah yeah and so there's this difference between
the display not being fast and there being kind of an after effect to a
bright flash like that and your eyes
being what causes the the after effect of seeing something bright yeah but this
is just boop and then it's gone that's
cool do you like the remote you've only used it for like 20 seconds
i haven't had any complaints right because it just feels correct look at
that it has buttons you need like a dedicated input button oh dedicated
bravia core button i certainly plan to use that i don't
think it has like disney plus no it does it does netflix
but why would i want those if i have braviacore i could watch such wonderful
movies as spiderman and other more different spiderman
it just makes the atmosphere so much more immersive
the glitter on the light fury and
it's glitter it's not just a white spot you know what
i mean yeah yeah look at it look at them
yeah yeah sparkle that's over and you can only do that with individually lit
pixels just
now you said we got 100 megabit in one of the other files but is the tv
actually limited to 100 megabits i tried speed test
and i got 100 megabit up and down yeah put gigabit controllers on these things
you guys they cost nothing and here this feels like sun behind
clouds yes it looks like an overcast gray sky yeah
i just love this scene in HDR man the thing is
HDR is not about a brighter image or
even making out more details in the dark parts of the scene it's about
light and materials and them behaving on
screen in a way that's like what we'd expect in the real world it's about immersion
it's about having a high dynamic range yes thank you
it is kind of right in the name finally it's time to talk gaming we
gamed on all three displays with an rtx 3080ti and a core i9 12 900k we're gonna
have our tvs and our test bench parts listed below by the way if you want to
check them out surprise surprise because they're all OLED they're all
freaking great actually panel latency testing was done using a
new tool from our friend andrew over at tech team gb
speaking of tests we just went around trying to find out who's the fastest
typer at LMG and you can only check that video out on Floatplane so go get
subscribed andrew developed the os rtt or open
source response time tool it's a device that is similar to NVIDIA's ldap but
it's open source obviously and it runs its own unreal engine 4 program in the
background to simulate flashes and light changes we got pretty similar results
from each display with the lg and the sony hitting about 8.4 milliseconds
going from zero to 153 so black is zero
and 153 is gray and the samsung marginally beat them at 7.9 milliseconds
in the same test putting all three of them in the upper echelon of living room
gaming displays now while the g2 is the only one with proper NVIDIA g-sync
compatibility all three displays have variable refresh rate and automatic low
latency mode so i'm not expecting that to be a big differentiating factor now
to dive deeper into qdo led versus w
OLED and whether or not it has the same lightning fast pixel response time we've
ordered a new sensor for our oscilloscope so make sure to get
subscribed for all the Labs content that we have in store
but to the eye all three of them are
definitely fine which leads us to the conclusion
despite the higher price tag i think i'm gonna go with the sony bravia a95k
it might not get quite as bright as the samsung and HDR but it's sturdier our
s95b has actually started to warp just from unboxing and re-boxing it a few
times and we're not the only ones seeing the problem it's more color accurate in
HDR brighter in sdr and dolby vision is
just too good to pass up even if we think sony's being kind of butt heads
about dolby vision the thing though is that my budget isn't exactly limited i
actually bought two of the three tvs
rather than wait for review units so that i could get an answer quicker and
get my family room built out so it's important to give a more grounded
perspective for almost anyone else saving a thousand
dollars is a no-brainer for the still
very outstanding picture that you're gonna get from either the lg g2 or
samsung s95b really i think the main takeaway here is that if you've got the
budget for a flagship tv it is pretty tough to pick the wrong one
for a change and if you don't mind waiting a year or two
there are going to be some amazing home
viewing experiences available at just wild prices as the competition heats up
here just like my segways heating up
to our sponsor grid studio grid studio's art frames
show off the art hidden inside technology using the art of knowling
every part of your favorite phone or console gets carefully extracted laid
out and labeled in clear view they've got over 30 different frames available
from the game boy color to the iphone 10 and grid studio wants to give you the
chance to win your very own frame to enter all you have to do is click the
link in the description and let us know what you think is the best designed tech
product for a chance to be one of 10 lucky winners enter to win or buy your own grid studio
frame using the links down below thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video
make sure to check out the other two videos dedicated to the s95b and the lg
g2 both of them are really nice even if
i did choose this one instead