I just picked up a sick new OLED TV and
okay adamir 11 diagonal Ines the Sony X1
isn't going to impress your friends with its size anymore but back in 2008 this
thing stunned the world with its organic LED screen its shockingly thin profile
and of course its astronomical price
according to OLED info.com Sony initially viewed this product as more of
a prototype but by the end of its run tens of thousands of these little guys
had made their way into the hands of wealthy eagle-eyed enthusiasts kind of
surprising given that even by 2008 standards it was woefully Impractical
what's more surprising is that as far as OLED technology has come in 16 years it
still holds up shockingly well today I
mean just look at the definition of this segue to today's sponsor see Sonic
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for Prime day using our Link in the description back in 2007 OLED had been
invented and even featured in commercial products like this Pioneer car stereo
but most people had only ever seen one in a magazine or in an online article
and I still vividly remember the buzz around this thing both from the
optimists who saw it as a window into the future and from the haters who
criticized well everything cuz they're
haters I'm really excited to try it cuz I never got a chance back then but first
let's do a quick tour shall we all the brains are in this bottom box down here
and then it's attached using this kind of funky ARM to what is true to Sony's
marketing a shockingly thin panel though
it kind of reminds me of LG's earlier OLED models where they had the really
really thin display but then a pretty big caboose down at the bottom of them
there isn't much in the way of viewing angle adjustments other than tilt though
if that's what it took for them to have this tank like build quality honestly
I'm okay with it so many of these survived that you can still readily find
them on eBay we got a big fat speaker girl in the bottom that kind of makes it
look more like a Bluetooth speaker now with display technology new product
category anyone huh music video
players uh anyway unlike a lot of old display Tech that we look at it's modern
enough that we've got an HDMI input a USB port in case we want to play our
MP4s RF coax a landport because we've
got the Japanese version and a handy dandy headphone jack on the side in case
you want to quietly game or watch TV next to your sleeping partner you know
if I hadn't been porish back in 2007 I
might have been able to see what a sick bougie bedside TV this thing could be as
it was I was just like fairness to me that's a pretty
reasonable reaction too let's give it a shot almost feels wrong playing
PlayStation 5 on it but hey it can doesn't support the most modern features
there's no variable refresh rate it's only 60 HZ and even the resolution is a
little bit of an oddball it runs 960x 540 which is exactly one4 of the
pixel count of 1080p which even at the
time was weird because HD was often 136
6X 768 for some reason kind of makes me
wonder if like a 22in full HD model was
ever considered but then scrapped out of concerns for cost I mean it have
probably been like 20 grand there's definitely things about the display that
are not perfect by modern standards but if you didn't tell me that this was 16
years old I would not know the motion Clarity is awesome there's a bit of a
weird flicker almost like Black frame insertion but it's super clear even just
like input leg is fine like dude this
plus a PS3 back in the day I mean yeah
you got to sit kind of close and everything but like holy crap at this
size the resolution's fine overall the most surprising thing about this to me
is how close it is to a modern device even the marketing is the same uh Sony
boasted rapid pixel response times super high contrast ratios thanks to Inky
blacks high peak brightness on a per pixel level and they talked about the
thin panel all stuff that's only just starting to give way to new marketing
Focus points like AI goodie now for
funsies what we wanted to do is take it another step and compare it to Apple's
new Ultra Retina xdr Display with tandem OLED this thing incredible not only does
the SDR and HDR accuracy rival the $20,000 reference display that we looked
at last year but this thing get bright and while 1600 nits isn't as high
as some of the newer OLED TVs this can do a th000 nits full screen sustained
and there's just nothing else like that at the moment though with that
said if we account for the differences in
time boy is this ever impressive like
damn it looked good in games and I was like wellow this looks really good for
the time in games but it's it's not even
HDR it just has nice Punchy SD HDR
didn't exist yet as a standard holy crap
what is going on right now this should not look this close you can really see
it in a couple spots like when she brings up the flame the flame gets really bright like even there that it's
way brighter on the iPad Moon looks like more highlighted on the iPad like you
can tell yeah and the colors are a
little off y I am super impressed right
now right it's so good oh yeah the highlights look way better on the on the
iPad little bit of a green cast to that brown we'll get to color accuracy later
but if I took this away and you said
watch this movie enjoy this movie I would enjoy this movie I was dude when I
pitched the comparison to this for the video cuz this was something I asked
plof to arrange for my expectation was
that it was really going to put in the development that had been done over the
last 16 years instead all it's really
showing us is how far ahead Sony was now
there's issues it falls short of the coverage of even the srgb color space
and while it's average Delta e 2000 of 6.36 is about in line with high-end LCDs
at the time it's on a completely different planet from our calibrated
tandm OLED even if it's the sort of thing that only a big nerd is likely to
notice frankly these ended up looking so close to each other that we were digging
around in the shield menu to find out if it was doing some kind of HDR to SDR
tone mapping or something that was giving the xcl1 an advantage but it just
looks really good I mean I ran into the same thing on my TCL TV at home where
SDR content looks great on it because it
just allows itself to take full advantage of its full brightness giving
it a more poppy HDR look even if you're
definitely missing some color volume and in How to Train Your Dragon that
difference in color volume we saw that in the night scenes where there wasn't
enough saturation also the difference in
color accuracy are very noticeable you can really see the pink cast in the sky
here compared to a properly calibrated display one thing that's come a really
long way in the last couple decades is audio performance in compact devices so
I'll be curious to see how the speakers
are and now spinning not too loud you got to kind of
crank it useless reptile okay I'm sorry I'm sorry just
get me off of this thing good dialog Clarity though God this is a good
soundtrack and these speakers do not do it
justice plug your headphones in yeah plug your headphones
in which isn't a guarantee they'll sound good hold on I'd watch theit out of
movies like this yeah it's almost like dialogue
enhancement is on yeah so the music
score is not standing out enough the clarity if I was an elderly person
watching content on here though is outstanding there's a whole other
paragraph scripted talking about how they compare to each other and I just
don't know if we need it because you can have the conversation of well which one
is the more bestest in these specific ways but at the end of the day for most
people that's not what they're asking what they're asking is am I enjoying
this experience and I am even seeing it
next to the State ofth art I am I don't
need it but one area where a lot of
advancements have been made are in OLED longevity we did notice some reverse
burning on the display where the sides
are a little bit brighter than the middle and our suspicion is that this is
because a lot of content back then was letter boxed so those pixels probably
weren't used as much now part of why our Sony looks so good is it's taking
advantage of modern processing trick that didn't exist back when it came out
it's hooked up to an NVIDIA Shield but
part of why it looks so good is that it's just kind of incredible so I guess
the question is why did it take so long
to get from this to this well research
and development costs a lot even at the best of times and unlike with LCD which
can be manufactured in a few separate parts before being assembled OLED is put
together in mostly a singular package so
instead of a product ecosystem with a few companies that are focused on
components like backlight Liquid Crystal layer color filter polarization film and
then tossing individual components if there are errors within the batch it's
one company focused on one finished good for the most part speaking of Errors you
can get notified about our next round of scribe drivers at LTT Store.com every
pen is made of a failed screwdriver shaft so you can own your own piece of
one of my most expensive mistakes another huge Factor making OLED
expensive is the difference in yields from a single sheet of motherg glass due
to the Precision and cleanliness that are required at the deposition step to
make an OLED panel display companies needed to learn to work more like a
semiconductor Fab you vaporize organic
material in a vacuum and you deposit the sublimated particles perfectly onto the
mother glass a bit too much material or a bit too much moisture or heat during
this process and that entire sheet is ruined necessitating the use of clean
rooms on the other hand LCD is a lot
more tolerant to dust and defect so in a less perfect environment you could still
get a perfectly working panel and don't forget just like with our OLED here LCD
prototypes and little concept models were coming out decades before we saw a
mass adoption of that technology companies like Epson and sharp were
releasing early LCDs as far back as the 1980s and it wasn't until about 20 years
later that big for the time 40 50 60in
LCD TVs started replacing the bulky CRTs
in everyone's living rooms so the progress here is largely thanks to LG if
we're being realistic who really banked on making OLED a premium but obtainable
option and who contined to invest in new Innovations like the tandem OLED panel
that this iPad has that Stacks two OLED layers on top of each other to produce
that Brighter Image now that the competition's heating up though and
Manufacturing processes are a lot more mature and there's some actual demand
thanks to HDR advances on the content side of things who knows in another four
years OLED whether it's tandem QD W or
otherwise could be your standard issue and future Technologies like microed or
man those emissive quantum dot ones woo
might finally start popping up in the premium consumer space just like this
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check out the CRT versus OLED video I think the results might surprise you wa
this thing gets hot dude 38 Watts
passively cooled in a chassis this size she toasts