Now, Sony coyly avoided words like OLED
killer and they wouldn't even confirm the peak brightness of their next-gen TV
technology. But, I will say this, with the kind of giant throbbing
confidence that only a performance leader displays, they sponsored me and
other media from around the world to fly all the way to their Tokyo headquarters
to not only view their new hotness, but even to compare it directly to the
legendary BVM-HX3110 master monitor. I'm talking about a
$30,000 professional display. Now, I can't show
you that footage yet, because they're not ready to unveil their new bezel and
stand design. But, what I am allowed to do is talk about the comparison and
guys, I'm talking to the folks out there who own a display, so to speak. This is
the real deal. This is by far the closest that I have ever seen a consumer
TV to reference image quality. But, how?
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Like several of their competitors, Sony has been
working on RGB LED backlight technology.
That is, using colored backlight zones rather than white or blue in order to
harness the brightness of mini LED and dramatically boost color volume. And
that is what we're seeing today. Except, wait a second. Linus, every
other time you've talked about this technology before, it's carried downsides that you called unacceptable
for flagship picture quality. You might have heard me describe it in
the past as the future. That's the nice way of saying there's work to be done.
But, that's the thing. Sony did the work. Starting back in 2004 with the
Qualia 5. So, the pedigree is there and
bringing it to today, they stripped down the front panels of both their own new
TVs and ones from their competitors to prove that theirs is, as the branding
would indicate, true RGB with three independent diodes and precise color and
brightness control. All of which looks like it's going to make it pretty
hard to compete with. But, let's back up for a second and talk about the basics
of this technology. Whether we're talking about mini LED or QLED or
whatever kind of LED, most TVs are just
LCD with extra steps that might help to
optimize black levels by selectively dimming the backlight in zones or boost
colors by adding a quantum dot film or enhance image quality with an
anti-reflective film. But, all of them are going to be bound
by the same fundamental limitations. An LCD cannot block light perfectly. And
the very idea of achieving color by taking white light and then blocking
everything except the color that you want is inherently inefficient. So, your
color with LCD, it can never be pure and pushing brightness past a certain point
is always going to take way more power and wash out that color. That's where
the idea of a colored backlight comes in. You want green, let's say. Well,
instead of blasting white and then blocking all the red and blue, you just
open the pixel up wide and let the green shine through. In theory, it's a really
great idea, but in practice you know how with traditional white dimming zones,
you can get white halos around bright objects?
Well, with RGB dimming zones, you can get colored halos that personally I have
found to be way more distracting than white halos.
So, I don't see any though. How's Sony
avoiding that? Well, one way to do it is by increasing the number of dimming
zones. So, how many do they have? Well, Sony carefully avoided getting
into the specifics, but also pointed out that since the
displays are torn down, it's pretty easy to count them. And compared to their
competitors, they're using slightly more dense arrangements of their RGB LED
clusters, about 1 cm in between, and
this one is probably more important, unlike a competitor whose TV I nearly
installed in my home, Sony's control zones are square. So, that's four LED
clusters per, rather than being rectangular. This is huge, because it
means they should be able to avoid, say, accidentally throwing up a huge green
backlight zone for, say, a military uniform, and then having it destroy the
nearby skin tones. But, as it turns out, that's only part of the story. The other
big part is in here, the processing. As you might
know, different colors of LEDs have different characteristics in terms of
their power consumption and their light output. This is one of the coolest demos they
showed us. They had a 4,000 nit sunrise
just peeking over the horizon. Strong hint, by the way, about the peak brightness of the upcoming flagship TV
in the spring. And gave us a look at the thermal monitoring that's happening
behind the scenes that's dynamically tracking hotspots and then tuning, in
real time, both the backlight intensity
and the color, which, with a color backlight, right, is going to change
depending on the intensity, as well as panel compensation in order to maintain
accurate color if they have to turn down one of the higher energy channels, for
instance. I just about crapped my pants when I realized exactly what I was being
shown. So, basically, this compensation means
that that downside that I've talked about before is it's gone.
It's still a local dimming zone technology, guys. So, I did find some
off-axis bloom or some halos around bright objects compared to a
self-emissive display. But, guys, in the sweet spot, which you can see a lot of
it yourselves through the camera, it is damn near perfect, even in a freeze
frame, right next to the BVM series mastering monitor. I was really
struggling to find image quality differences in many scenes. I'm talking
bright scenes that take advantage of that 4,000 nit peak that we're not
confirming, and even dim scenes. And,
from talking to Sony, all of that is very much by design with
these consumer TVs using the same dimming algorithm as that professional
display. Another benefit of Sony's approach is that by simply allowing the
colored backlight through, there's much less color shift when you're viewing it
off-axis. Now, I'd have to see it next to an OLED before I could call this
industry leading, but to say that it crushed the other flagship RGB backlit
LCDs that Sony had for competition, that would be an understatement. When Sony's
engineers tore apart their competitors' products, they actually discovered that
there were situations where some RGB backlit models
had RGB LEDs on them, but they were falling back to a white-only mode that
sure, improved color halos like the ones that I complained about, but um
gave up the benefits of RGB backlighting.
I wish I could show you that cuz it was a jaw-dropping demo.
Like, it would be test pattern and it would have an RGBI backlight, and then
they would change it up a little bit or they'd put real content on it and the
whole backlight turns white and starts behaving like a traditional backlight.
This seems to be down to processing since the physical hardware of the
colored LEDs is obviously there, but that's just my best guess from hearing
other brands talk about the challenges that they face. And it's worth noting that I and Sony
don't know for sure how this is going to compare to upcoming models from those
other brands. They seem confident that one more year
in the oven won't be enough for others to close the gap, but uh only time will
tell. In fairness to them though, no other company seems likely to roll the
same 3 by 22-bit processing,
uh and no one else is lens to living room as Sony puts it with completely
unfettered access to experts all the way from studio filmmakers to colorists to
their own imaging and professional display engineers. Fair enough, Sony,
since it seems to have resulted in a package that It very very hard to compete with.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why don't you check out the last time we compared a mastering monitor to a
consumer display? It might give you some appreciation for
this being close being a pretty big deal.