Sony Spent 20 Years Making This TV

0:00 [exhales] [L] Now, Sony coyly avoided words like OLED killer,

0:06 and they wouldn't even confirm the peak

0:08 brightness of their next-gen TV technology.

0:10 But I will say this.

0:11 With the kind of giant throbbing [clears

0:14 throat] confidence that only a performance leader displays,

0:17 they sponsored me and other media from around the world to fly all

0:21 the way to their Tokyo headquarters to not only view their new hotness,

0:24 but even to compare it directly to the legendary BVM-HX3110 mastering monitor.

0:30 I'm talking about a $30,000 professional display.

0:34 Now, I can't show you that footage, yet,

0:37 because they're not ready to unveil their new bezel and stand design,

0:39 but what I am allowed to do is talk about the comparison.

0:43 And guys, I'm talking to the folks out there who own a display so to speak.

0:47 This is the real deal.

0:48 This is by far the closest that I have

0:51 ever seen a consumer TV to reference image quality.

0:55 But how?

0:56 Oh, I'm so glad you asked.

0:57 Like several of their competitors,

0:59 Sony has been working on RGB LED backlight technology.

1:03 That is, using colored backlight zones rather than white or blue in order

1:08 to harness the brightness of mini LED and dramatically boost color volume.

1:12 And that is what we're seeing today.

1:15 Except, wait a second.

1:17 Linus, every other time you've talked about this technology before,

1:19 it's carried downsides that you called

1:22 [typing sounds] unacceptable for flagship picture quality.

1:25 [laughs] You might have heard me describe it in the past as the future.

1:28 That's the nice way of saying there's work to be done.

1:31 But that's the thing, Sony did the work,

1:33 starting back in 2004 with the Quality of Five.

1:36 So the pedigree is there, and bringing it to today,

1:40 they stripped down the front panels of both their own new

1:45 TVs and ones from their competitors to prove that theirs is,

1:49 as the branding would indicate, true RGB,

1:51 with three independent diodes and precise color and brightness control.

1:56 All of which, looks like it's gonna make it pretty hard to compete with.

2:00 But let's back up for a second and talk about the basics of this technology.

2:03 Whether we're talking about mini LED or QLED or whatever kind of LED,

2:07 most TVs are just LCD with extra steps that might help

2:12 to optimize black levels by selectively dimming the backlight in zones,

2:16 or boost colors by adding a quantum dot film,

2:19 or enhance image quality with an anti-reflective film.

2:22 But all of them are going to be bound by the same fundamental limitations.

2:27 An LCD cannot block light perfectly,

2:30 and the very idea of achieving color by taking white light

2:35 and then blocking everything except the color

2:37 that you want is inherently inefficient.

2:40 So your color with LCD, it can never be pure,

2:44 and pushing brightness past a certain point is always

2:46 gonna take way more power and wash out that color.

2:49 That's where the idea of a colored backlight comes in.

2:52 You want green, let's say.

2:54 Well, instead of blasting white and then blocking all the red and blue,

2:58 you just open the pixel up wide and let the green shine through.

3:01 In theory, it's a really great idea, but in practice...

3:05 You know how with traditional white dimming zones,

3:07 you can get white halos around bright objects?

3:11 Well, with RGB dimming zones, you can get colored halos,

3:15 that personally I have found to be way more distracting than white halos.

3:20 So, I don't see any though.

3:22 How's Sony avoiding that?

3:24 Well, one way to do it is by increasing the number of dimming zones.

3:28 So how many do they have?

3:30 Well, Sony carefully avoided getting into the specifics,

3:34 but also pointed out that since the displays are torn down,

3:37 it's pretty easy to count them.

3:38 And compared to their competitors,

3:40 they're using slightly more dense arrangements of their RGB LED clusters,

3:45 about one centimeter in between, and this one is probably more important,

3:50 unlike a competitor whose TV I nearly installed in my home,

3:54 Sony's control zones are square,

3:56 so that's four LED clusters per, rather than being rectangular.

4:01 This is huge because it means they should be able to avoid, say,

4:06 accidentally throwing up a huge green backlight zone for, say,

4:10 a military uniform, and then having it destroy the nearby skin tones.

4:13 But as it turns out, that's only part of the story.

4:16 The other big part, is in here, the processing.

4:21 As you might know, different colors of LEDs have different

4:24 characteristics in terms of their power consumption and their light output.

4:28 This is one of the coolest demos they showed us.

4:31 They had a 4,000 nit sunrise just peeking over the horizon.

4:35 Strong hint, by the way,

4:35 about the peak brightness of the upcoming flagship TV in the spring.

4:38 And gave us a look at the thermal monitoring

4:40 that's happening behind the scenes that's dynamically tracking hotspots,

4:44 and then tuning in real time both the backlight intensity and color,

4:50 which, with a colored backlight,

4:52 right, is gonna change depending on the intensity,

4:54 as well as panel compensation in order to maintain accurate color if

4:59 they have to turn down one of the higher energy channels, for instance.

5:01 I just about crapped my pants when I realized exactly what I was being shown.

5:05 So basically, this compensation means that that downside

5:09 that I've talked about before is, it's gone.

5:12 It's still a local dimming zone technology, guys,

5:14 so I did find some off-axis bloom or some

5:18 halos around bright objects compared to a self-emissive display.

5:22 But guys, in the sweet spot,

5:23 which you can see a lot of it yourself through the camera,

5:26 it is damn near perfect.

5:28 Even in a freeze frame right next to the BVM series mastering monitor,

5:32 I was really struggling to find image quality differences in many scenes.

5:36 I'm talking bright scenes that take advantage

5:38 of that 4,000 nits peak that we're not confirming, and even dim scenes.

5:43 And from talking to Sony, all that is very much by design,

5:47 with these consumer TVs using the same

5:50 dimming algorithm as that professional display.

5:52 Another benefit of Sony's approach is

5:54 that by simply allowing the colored backlight through,

5:58 there's much less color shift when you're viewing it off-axis.

6:01 Now, I'd have to see it next

6:03 to an OLED before I could call this industry-leading,

6:06 but to say that it crushed the other

6:09 flagship RGB backlit LCDs that Sony had for competition,

6:12 [laughs] that would be an understatement.

6:14 When Sony's engineers tore apart their competitors' products,

6:17 they actually discovered that there were situations where

6:21 some RGB backlit models had RGB LEDs on them,

6:25 but they were falling back to a white-only mode that, sure,

6:29 improved color halos like the ones that I complained about,

6:32 but, um, gave up the benefits of RGB backlighting.

6:37 I wish I could show you that 'cause it was a jaw-dropping demo.

6:40 [laughs] Like, it would be test pattern, and it would have an RGB backlight,

6:44 and then they would change it up a little bit or they'd put real content on it,

6:47 and [snaps fingers] the whole backlight turns

6:49 white and starts behaving like a traditional backlight.

6:52 This seems to be down to processing,

6:54 since the physical hardware of the colored LEDs is obviously there.

6:58 But, that's just my best guess from hearing

7:01 other brands talk about the challenges that they face.

7:04 And it's worth noting that I and Sony don't know for sure

7:08 how this is gonna compare to upcoming models from those other brands.

7:12 They seem confident that one more year in the oven

7:15 won't be enough for others to close the gap, but, uh, only time will tell.

7:19 In fairness to them though,

7:20 no other company seems likely to roll the same 3 by 22-bit processing,

7:25 uh, and no one else is lens to living room,

7:28 as Sony puts it, with completely unfettered access to experts,

7:31 all the way from studio filmmakers, to colorists,

7:34 to their own imaging and professional display engineers.

7:37 Fair enough, Sony, since it seems to have resulted in a package that looks very,

7:42 very hard to compete with.

7:45 If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the last time we

7:47 compared a mastering monitor to a consumer display?

7:50 It might give you some appreciation

7:52 for this being close being a pretty big deal.