this is absolutely outrageous who in their right freaking mind would pay this
much for a 65-inch tv when they could
have literally 10 of them for the same money
and then be happy with their purchase
a lot of people apparently everyone from the media to enthusiasts on avs forum is
absolutely raving about the sony a90j a
tv that costs 3 800 us dollars for the
65-inch model i thought we were past this i thought tvs were cheap now well
apparently not if you want to build one with lg's second generation OLED panel
and sony's unparalleled image processing
boy does this thing ever have a lot to live up to
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does all that money get you at first glance the super thin bezels of
the a90j will please all but the strictest minimalist wannabes at just
4.1 centimeters thick it looks great mounted to the wall or if a cabinet is
more your style you get two options elevated for soundbar integration or
full van damme style for a nearly bottomless look there's three usb ports
here and here Ethernet optical audio and a headphone jack alongside an array of
HDMI ports four in total but this is
where we hit our first speed bump only two of the a90j's hdmis are full fat 48
gigabit per second HDMI 2.1 which is a
real shame since samsung and lg are offering 2.1 support across every port
in this price tier but it makes sense at a hardware level
the reason lg and samsung are ahead of the pack is because they bit the bullet
and develops their own socs to process HDMI 2.1
sony on the other hand uses a mediatek soc
a cost savings for sure but one that has chained them to the features or lack
thereof of a third-party solution of course no one buys a tv to look at
the back anyway and from the front it's easy to forget that
whatever i was just talking about i mean look at it
it is hard to believe how far we've come in quality price and performance in just
a few short years i mean inky blacks as
always but the star of the show here is
the stars lg boasted that their second generation
panels were so named for their huge leap forward in brightness ben proceeded to
tell us to expect about a 20 uplift which to me sounded more like an
incremental step than worthy of being called second gen
then i got to experience them side by side and
yeah between the more precise color and
increased brightness it looks a lot better
but awkward thing lg has their own product
based on this panel coming soon the g1
and for a lower cost why would anyone buy a sony
sony's image processing for starters historically it's been the best in the
biz and the a90j is no slouch either with some tweaks you got your cinemotion
your motion flow your random and digital noise reduction and why not some smooth
gradation i'm i mean i'm grateful all these dials exist but reality creation sony reality
creation why not just call it ai assisted sharpening because it's
actually really good so it can be a little exhausting trial
and erroring all the dials but thankfully once you've got it just right
it looks amazing and your settings will be saved and synced to their respective
inputs dolby atmos also makes an appearance here alongside HDR 10 and dolby vision
dynamic HDR so these are more top tier features that are expected from a
flagship OLED but there's one glaring a mission the
lack of variable refresh rate support is something i just can't skip over
it is promised apparently by winter 2021
but the thing is sony this same company is now six months behind microsoft on
variable refresh rate for the playstation 5 which is a great reminder
that when you buy something you have to evaluate and purchase what it offers now
and not go based on what's promised so what that means is that lg c10 or c1
lineup is still the go-to for gaming on the big screen
once that update drops however sony will have a very strong contender here
cause here's the thing sony has another trick up their sleeves lg's second gen
OLED tvs actually lack a key feature
that sony has built into the a90j an
aluminum sheet lamination layer that
is why 20 brighter look by so much
because it's way more than 20 percent
thanks to that extra cooling sony is actually driving this thing as high as
1300 nits bloody hell that is right up
there with last generation quantum dot led backlit tvs and in practice it makes
for a fantastic viewing experience with 4k content especially in HDR
of course a lot of our content isn't HDR or even high-res for that matter but the
a90j shows its strengths here too bad upscaling can be worse than no
upscaling and most upscaling honestly speaking is bad but sony's algorithms
put in work here and really do make a big difference the bravia xr processor
is able to take what little information it's given and dynamically make local
adjustments to contrast and gamma to bring pop back to parts of the image on
screen and the addition of the low cinemotion setting it was previously
only an on and off toggle in the last generation x900h means that you now have
a nice middle ground for low bitrate streamed content enhancement essentially
what it does is tries to detect what sort of processing has already been done
to your image then tries to un it
so cranking it up to high for highly compressed content like netflix has a
profound effect on the experience now something that's plagued OLED's in
the past has been the lack of near blacks in very dark content dubbed as
near black chrominance overshoot by hdtv hdtvtest in our viewing of a handful of
dark scenes though we didn't see any blocking or lack of depth to the darks
so thumbs up from me there moving along to the other half of the tv experience
though how does it sound great
actually really great the surprisingly crisp sound profile
comes thanks to dual primary actuators that are mounted directly behind the
screen at 10 watts per channel along with dual 20 watt subwoofers for the low
end and as a result of the well-designed audio package
i would actually think twice before outfitting this tv with a sound bar i
mean a sound bar along with a dedicated subwoofer to bring some low end grunt
back yeah there's no replacement for displacement but even so i can
comfortably say that the sound here is best in class for being integrated
as they say though good hardware is nothing without good software and
included in the a90j's tool quiver is a super easy automatic room eq it
leverages the microphone and the remote to measure and adjust the speaker output
based on how your space reacts to sound and your seating location and i can
actually show you this yay
GPU and that's it there is no manual eq
thumbs down for that but we focused the auto configurator to a couple of
different seating positions and i can verify it does make a difference if
you're more of an av receiver person you can also use the tv as a center channel
over e-arc to add to a full speaker setup but if your other speakers don't
match sony's acoustic timber you might be better off getting something that's a
closer match anyway sony's new remote is a breath of fresh
air everyone else is trying to do simpler simpler simpler and this just
has all the features which personally i prefer it's larger longer there's four
shortcuts to the usual bunch of content providers and the aluminized top is a
nice touch pun intended it's sturdy and comfortable to use with nice grippy
backing and this might seem minor but having the remote light up when it's
jostled is so nice when you're looking for it in the dark all other tv makers
please take note and as for the software on the tv google
tv is a really nice improvement over the more dated Android tv and the experience
is much better for it finding content across all your services is easy with
the built-in cross-platform search and menu navigation is snappy with all the
google integrated services that you could wish for there's also apple airplay too if that's your preferred
flavor of device but hey maybe you don't like flavor at all you can just take a
clean refreshing sip of flavorless water
lttstore.com so where does that leave us we've got a highly featured very smart
tv that kills it in the image processing department and uses the latest
generation of OLED panel seemingly to its utmost along with a nice sound
package and a sleek aesthetic would i buy one
no not for what i would want to use it for anyway variable refresh rate makes a
huge difference for gaming and i suspect that matters to a lot of you as well
but if you're more of a passive content consumer and you play the occasional
game and you can stomach the price the a90j is a great tv as it is now and when
vrr gets added to the mix it will be scary tempting
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the video description if you guys like this video maybe take a
look at the other side of the coin with our video using lg's c10 48-inch as a
monitor