Sony Spent 20 Years Making This TV

[exhales] [L] 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 [clears throat] 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 mastering 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 [typing sounds] unacceptable for flagship picture quality. [laughs] 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 Quality of Five. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 one centimeter 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 color, which, with a colored backlight, right, is gonna 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 yourself 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 nits peak that we're not confirming, and even dim scenes. And from talking to Sony, all 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, [laughs] 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 'cause it was a jaw-dropping demo. [laughs] Like, it would be test pattern, and it would have an RGB backlight, and then they would change it up a little bit or they'd put real content on it, and [snaps fingers] 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 gonna 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 looks very, very hard to compete with. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not 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.