Reason number one that I don't need a new TV is that I already have a great one.
The Sony A95K has a first generation Quantum Dot OLED panel
that is bright enough to use during broad daylight while still having those inky blacks
that we all love with OLED. Reason number two is that Sony is almost certainly
working on a successor to my new TV.
Meet the A95L, whose main claim to fame
is being, according to Sony, up to 200% the brightness of the last generation
while also including Wi-Fi 6. They don't want me to talk about
that it still has only 100 megabit wired networking,
but hey, too bad. You guys are just in time.
Grab the other end and we're gonna lift the box over the top. Ready?
One, two, three, lift! Lift! Lift!
All right. Whoa, look inside! What?
What's inside? Oh, well what? It's foam, darling.
Okay, actually, I need someone to crawl inside. Can you get that? What?
Wow, this is so much easier. Now I can see why they had child labor.
How would the adults fit in the chimneys? Let's have a look at what we got.
We got two feet, one for each side.
We got a couple little pieces of decorative plastic.
We're probably not gonna need any of that. Digital audio connector adapter.
Oh, it goes into a three and a half millimeter jack
and it gives us a spittiff output. Oh.
Don't sound too excited. Hey, do you guys remember when we called Uncle Asher
and I had to put a webcam on the laptop? This appears to be the solution to that.
It's a camera that goes on the top of your TV.
I really am not sure how I feel about having a camera on my TV,
but as a plus, it does have a physical shutter button
even if that doesn't necessarily mean that these dual microphones aren't doing anything.
Oh, we'll give it a shot. This module also handles automatic audio adjustments
and ambient light compensation, but we had a way of doing that before it was called an ambient light sensor.
So maybe it's a lot better. I would certainly hope so. I really don't know how I feel about this.
Whoa, look at this, it's Future Linus and Colin's made an exciting discovery about my old TV.
What is it, Colin? Colin, speak up.
He says the old one does include a camera and just I never knew, which I guess is fine
because if it sucks on the current one, it probably sucked on that one too.
Good to know. Oh, okay, we're doing a remote comparison behind you, Lin.
Very similar to the old one, except they compressed the top buttons
and they added another row of licensing fee generators.
I mean, buttons. Making a return is a handy dandy feature
that I wish I was aware of before. Do you guys know how much time I spend looking
for this remote? No. It has a speaker on it.
All you have to do is click a thing on the TV and it makes a noise.
Here we go. There's only one button. A sound will play for two minutes.
I mean, eventually. Oh, there we go.
That would have saved me so much time.
Thankfully, the new one has it too and now I know about it. Before we go any further,
I feel like we should talk about my top picks for you here. John Stewart, no problem, big fan.
A lot of this other stuff. Let's talk about Sony's Google TV implementation.
There's a lot of really good things about it, like the ability to quickly and easily install
any apps you want, like the usuals, your Netflix, your YouTube, your Plex,
but also pretty much anything, because it's flipping Android, which is awesome.
But there are certain things that you cannot get rid of.
And that, as far as I can tell, contains some recommendations that,
let's just put it this way, could lead to awkward conversations
with the kids or misses. See, it's Tubi. It's this Tubi thing.
I can't get rid of it. And you can say, dislike,
but you can't say, don't show me anything from Tubi anymore.
In general, the interface is pretty responsive, but it is something I would like to see improved.
And I will not be getting that for this particular Christmas
because as far as I can tell, this has pretty much the same onboard processor.
All right, there we go. And now she comes.
Okay. The new model is substantially lighter than the old one.
Not that that makes an enormous difference. Please don't roll on the TV.
I don't see a very big difference except the thing which is in the back
and the big gap cable. Yeah, I'm noticing a little downgrade already
that I'm not super happy about. Instead of using a standard C13 power cable for the AC in,
it's got whatever this is. Really? Why?
It doesn't even take up less space. One nice thing though is the simplified IO.
Instead of having it spread out on the side and the bottom, it's now all on the edge,
which I personally find quite a bit easier to access. Wow, it's measurably thinner, hey?
And that's in spite of the fact that they had a heat dissipating layer on this,
which is a big part of how they're achieving that increased brightness.
You can't get them in kid sizes. This was a one-off, but hey, when hoodies.
49.99. Something we can get a good look at back here
is the built-in speakers. They've got a total of four speakers
and Sony is using their screen vibration tech that allows you to turn your TV into a center channel.
What's cool about that is that while they do support
their proprietary input with S center speaker in
from their brand receivers, they also support just a simple plus minus speaker wire input,
which is uncharacteristically Sony. Really refreshing to see.
Mr. Grigory, were you kneeling on the back of the TV? No.
Were you sitting here? Oh, okay.
Was he? That other?
I wouldn't describe the quality of that center channel as amazing, but for built-in TV speakers,
they're pretty darn good, even though I did ultimately end up putting in a dedicated center channel.
All right, we're ready to fire this thing up. Oh, I need another helper.
Who's gonna crawl back there and plug it in? This TV has support for up to 4K, 120 Hertz, HDR10,
Dolby Vision, pretty flippin' awesome, but we've only got two ports that are 4K, 120 Hertz,
port four and port three, which is the ERC port.
A little bit more here. Okay.
Apparently I didn't do a good enough job, so I said, fine, you can do it.
Oh, that's awesome. This is legitimately kind of awesome.
Sony, can we take it one step further and have me be able to, like your receiver,
which has a settings lock on it, set it up the way that I like it, not default,
and then lock it. If you got kids, you'll get it.
Google Assistant, I get personal results.
You know, maybe that's the problem, because I turned all this stuff off,
so that's why I'm getting like, butts hanging out of everywhere on my thumbnails.
If anyone from Sony or Google is watching this, I'd love to know what this is.
I just signed into my account. What are you doing? If this is account specific,
what data are you unpacking and doing anything with?
You're not downloading any apps. I know that. And if it's not specific to my account,
why weren't you doing it in the background? Well, I was typing in my username and passwords.
Like, why? All right. See, this is how I know that they weren't installing
any apps, because my apps aren't here. That took like four minutes.
See, Tubi. It won't stop talking about Tubi.
All right, I want to see that scene where Gandalf comes back.
Oh God, that's smoothing. I forgot, I factory reset it
so it doesn't have Brandon from Labs' tweaks yet.
Let's fix that. First of all, we are not gonna be in vivid mode.
Or actually, maybe we should, because we were only able to hit Sony's advertised
2000 nits peak brightness in a 1% window in vivid mode,
which Brandon from the lab found to be less accurate than the professional mode.
Sony is doing a really good job of retaining detail on this extremely bright backlit scene.
Obviously, not as good as a mastering monitor with a third generation panel, but pretty darn good.
Considering how brightly this room is lit right now, I am extremely happy with this picture.
With that said, once I get it dialed in to the settings I would actually use,
I'm gonna be expecting more like 1700 nits peak brightness
or even a little bit less. Also, the HDR color accuracy was okay.
Though that's what we expect from a retail set.
Oh, this is so cool. You can make adjustments app by app.
I actually love that. So not only will it detect certain sources,
like say for example, you plug in a PlayStation 5, it'll go, oh, hey, games,
and switch everything over into game mode, but I don't remember seeing this.
Oh, they've moved some stuff around. Sound settings used to be here
and you could have like a quick access to flip between TV sound and external audio system sound.
I can't say I'm a big fan of how they've re-cajiggered this into two different settings menus.
I don't lie, this thing kind of slaps.
That's, it's starting to get a little distorted. Yes, I'm not at max,
but I wouldn't go above that on this TV anyway, but that is very usable.
Oh, interesting. It not only auto adjusts brightness,
according to ambient light, it also adjusts color temperature, which I actually definitely prefer that.
However, this is what it's doing without the camera. Why don't we go ahead and throw the camera on it?
Come here, buddy. Am I allowed to put this on while it's powered?
Let's hope so. Oh, hello, set up Rabia cam.
No way. Detect your viewing position
to optimize picture and TV. What would it adjust about the picture?
I mean, this thing already has QD OLED viewing angles.
I could watch it from here. Interesting. It changes the volume balance
of the left and right speakers. I can't see that working with an external AVR,
but hey, if you're only using built-in speakers, then I guess that's kind of,
okay, I gotta try the gesture control though. Gesture control.
Ah, tutorial. Hey, there we go, it got it.
Slide your hand. Wait, what?
Oh, oh, oh no. Wait, are you messing with me?
Are you guys? No, okay, you're not.
Oh wow, this.
If this is the killer app that is supposed to make me want to put a camera on my TV,
if only there was some way to do this. Can I just demonstrate I know how to do that
and can we be done? Yeah, I'm never gonna touch that ever again.
Cool. What else we got with this camera?
Okay, so if I go closer, theoretically,
it should go dimmer.
Okay guys, this is a thing, it's pretty subtle.
Here we go. Finally, the same piece of content on both TVs,
even if this is a TV, I'm not sure if this is a TV, but I'm not sure if this is a TV.
It's a content on both TVs, even if this isn't really an ideal comparison scenario.
If there's a difference, it ain't easy to spot, at least on YouTube.
Okay, are we on it? What are, are you kidding me?
What just happened?
I just want to see them side by side, okay? I'm not asking for that much.
I'm not using this TV anymore, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
See you later, buddy. Forget the side by side. As far as I can tell,
they haven't done anything in particular for the anti-glare treatment, but the brightness is great.
This is something I really like on the TCL downstairs.
SDR content pops like mad,
because it just applies kind of a boost
to the brightest parts of the frame, even though there is no HDR metadata.
Normally, it wouldn't be able to go so bright, but one of my favorite movies ever,
How to Train Your Dragon, is not available in HDR,
and so that boosted brightness SDR mode that the TV downstairs has is an awesome way to enjoy it,
and this TV can't hit 5,000 nit's peak brightness
like that one, but this definitely pops more than I'm used to seeing an SDR,
and I'm really happy to see that. It's not as good as the one downstairs.
That said, the differences between this and last gen,
at least subjectively watching it, are pretty negligible.
So yeah, if you have an older TV and you want a big picture quality upgrade,
you want to go QD OLED, in spite of some of the software struggles
you guys saw today, I've actually been extremely happy with this thing,
and this, other than moving a couple of menu items around
in ways that I'm not sure I agree with, appears to be more of the same.
Truthfully, if I wasn't doing it to make a video, I would say that unless you're a massive cinephile,
the upgrade is not even worth the effort of pulling the mount off the old TV
and putting it on the new one, let alone spending all the extra money on it.
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