WEBVTT

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Now, Sony coyly avoided words like OLED

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killer and they wouldn't even confirm the peak brightness of their next-gen TV

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technology. But, I will say this, with the kind of giant throbbing

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confidence that only a performance leader displays, they sponsored me and

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other media from around the world to fly all the way to their Tokyo headquarters

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to not only view their new hotness, but even to compare it directly to the

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legendary BVM-HX3110 master monitor. I'm talking about a

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$30,000 professional display. Now, I can't show

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you that footage yet, because they're not ready to unveil their new bezel and

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stand design. But, what I am allowed to do is talk about the comparison and

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guys, I'm talking to the folks out there who own a display, so to speak. This is

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the real deal. This is by far the closest that I have ever seen a consumer

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TV to reference image quality. But, how?

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Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Like several of their competitors, Sony has been

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working on RGB LED backlight technology.

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That is, using colored backlight zones rather than white or blue in order to

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harness the brightness of mini LED and dramatically boost color volume. And

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that is what we're seeing today. Except, wait a second. Linus, every

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other time you've talked about this technology before, it's carried downsides that you called unacceptable

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for flagship picture quality. You might have heard me describe it in

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the past as the future. That's the nice way of saying there's work to be done.

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But, that's the thing. Sony did the work. Starting back in 2004 with the

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Qualia 5. So, the pedigree is there and

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bringing it to today, they stripped down the front panels of both their own new

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TVs and ones from their competitors to prove that theirs is, as the branding

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would indicate, true RGB with three independent diodes and precise color and

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brightness control. All of which looks like it's going to make it pretty

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hard to compete with. But, let's back up for a second and talk about the basics

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of this technology. Whether we're talking about mini LED or QLED or

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whatever kind of LED, most TVs are just

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LCD with extra steps that might help to

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optimize black levels by selectively dimming the backlight in zones or boost

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colors by adding a quantum dot film or enhance image quality with an

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anti-reflective film. But, all of them are going to be bound

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by the same fundamental limitations. An LCD cannot block light perfectly. And

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the very idea of achieving color by taking white light and then blocking

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everything except the color that you want is inherently inefficient. So, your

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color with LCD, it can never be pure and pushing brightness past a certain point

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is always going to take way more power and wash out that color. That's where

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the idea of a colored backlight comes in. You want green, let's say. Well,

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instead of blasting white and then blocking all the red and blue, you just

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open the pixel up wide and let the green shine through. In theory, it's a really

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great idea, but in practice you know how with traditional white dimming zones,

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you can get white halos around bright objects?

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Well, with RGB dimming zones, you can get colored halos that personally I have

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found to be way more distracting than white halos.

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So, I don't see any though. How's Sony

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avoiding that? Well, one way to do it is by increasing the number of dimming

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zones. So, how many do they have? Well, Sony carefully avoided getting

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into the specifics, but also pointed out that since the

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displays are torn down, it's pretty easy to count them. And compared to their

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competitors, they're using slightly more dense arrangements of their RGB LED

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clusters, about 1 cm in between, and

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this one is probably more important, unlike a competitor whose TV I nearly

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installed in my home, Sony's control zones are square. So, that's four LED

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clusters per, rather than being rectangular. This is huge, because it

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means they should be able to avoid, say, accidentally throwing up a huge green

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backlight zone for, say, a military uniform, and then having it destroy the

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nearby skin tones. But, as it turns out, that's only part of the story. The other

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big part is in here, the processing. As you might

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know, different colors of LEDs have different characteristics in terms of

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their power consumption and their light output. This is one of the coolest demos they

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showed us. They had a 4,000 nit sunrise

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just peeking over the horizon. Strong hint, by the way, about the peak brightness of the upcoming flagship TV

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in the spring. And gave us a look at the thermal monitoring that's happening

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behind the scenes that's dynamically tracking hotspots and then tuning, in

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real time, both the backlight intensity

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and the color, which, with a color backlight, right, is going to change

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depending on the intensity, as well as panel compensation in order to maintain

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accurate color if they have to turn down one of the higher energy channels, for

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instance. I just about crapped my pants when I realized exactly what I was being

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shown. So, basically, this compensation means

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that that downside that I've talked about before is it's gone.

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It's still a local dimming zone technology, guys. So, I did find some

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off-axis bloom or some halos around bright objects compared to a

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self-emissive display. But, guys, in the sweet spot, which you can see a lot of

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it yourselves through the camera, it is damn near perfect, even in a freeze

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frame, right next to the BVM series mastering monitor. I was really

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struggling to find image quality differences in many scenes. I'm talking

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bright scenes that take advantage of that 4,000 nit peak that we're not

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confirming, and even dim scenes. And,

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from talking to Sony, all of that is very much by design with

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these consumer TVs using the same dimming algorithm as that professional

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display. Another benefit of Sony's approach is that by simply allowing the

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colored backlight through, there's much less color shift when you're viewing it

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off-axis. Now, I'd have to see it next to an OLED before I could call this

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industry leading, but to say that it crushed the other flagship RGB backlit

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LCDs that Sony had for competition, that would be an understatement. When Sony's

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engineers tore apart their competitors' products, they actually discovered that

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there were situations where some RGB backlit models

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had RGB LEDs on them, but they were falling back to a white-only mode that

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sure, improved color halos like the ones that I complained about, but um

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gave up the benefits of RGB backlighting.

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I wish I could show you that cuz it was a jaw-dropping demo.

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Like, it would be test pattern and it would have an RGBI backlight, and then

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they would change it up a little bit or they'd put real content on it and the

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whole backlight turns white and starts behaving like a traditional backlight.

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This seems to be down to processing since the physical hardware of the

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colored LEDs is obviously there, but that's just my best guess from hearing

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other brands talk about the challenges that they face. And it's worth noting that I and Sony

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don't know for sure how this is going to compare to upcoming models from those

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other brands. They seem confident that one more year

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in the oven won't be enough for others to close the gap, but uh only time will

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tell. In fairness to them though, no other company seems likely to roll the

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same 3 by 22-bit processing,

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uh and no one else is lens to living room as Sony puts it with completely

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unfettered access to experts all the way from studio filmmakers to colorists to

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their own imaging and professional display engineers. Fair enough, Sony,

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since it seems to have resulted in a package that It very very hard to compete with.

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If you guys enjoyed this video, why don't you check out the last time we compared a mastering monitor to a

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consumer display? It might give you some appreciation for

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this being close being a pretty big deal.