Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What if I had an unlimited budget…? – Sony A95K”.
There is a gaping hole in my family room wall and a matching tv size budget burning, a hole in my wallet. Why haven’t? I spent the budget to fill the hole well because i’ve fallen into the same trap. I’M always warning you guys about in my search for the perfect tv we already reviewed two of the hottest sets on the market, samsung’s s95b qd oled and lg’s g2w oled, but i couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger because i knew there was something better around The corner, fortunately, the corner – is this one: this is it for a whopping thousand dollars more. The a95k from sony features the best of all worlds, at least on paper: a qd oled panel, sony’s, outstanding image, processing, dolby vision and a special cooling layer to push it beyond the performance of its south korean competitors. Will this be the one that ends up in my family room? I really hope so because it’s getting harder and harder to convince my sponsors to keep buying me new tvs sponsors like grid studio using the art of knolling grid, studio’s art frames, show off the art hidden inside technology, learn how you could win your own frame at The end of this video between our last two contenders, the lg g2 and samsung s95b, i’m leaning toward the s95b – and it’s all about samsung’s qd oled panel technology.
It is super bright color, accurate out of the box, has top-notch viewing angles and we suspect that it won’t suffer from permanent image retention or burn in to nearly the same degree as earlier oleds. Yes, the lack of polarization does mean that in a brightly lit room, it doesn’t look as inky black as lg’s w oled, but when you’ve got two scenes side by side that aren’t super dark, it just plain wins, or at least it did. Let’S take a look at our newcomer for 4 grand for a 65 inch. This better blow me away, there’s a good chance.
It will it’s. You know we’re still using cutie oled panels and just like with the samsung, but it’s got an extra twist like lg’s g2. It’S got that big thermal layer on the back, so it should dissipate heat a bit better, but they’re not using it. The way you might think lg seems to be using the thermal dissipation layer to boost brightness without cooking their oleds sony seems to be more focused on reducing image retention because it’s not any brighter than the vanilla, samsung version.
Yeah there’s more though compared to samsung. It has dolby vision to go along with its dolby atmos and its bravia, which means this or something else from sony’s lineup is the only way you’ll get dolby vision in your ps5. On my ps5 or ps5, your ps5 can’t say i’m a fan of this kind of ecosystem, walled, gardening, and also i don’t have a playstation 5. yeah.
Well anyway, it has hdr 10 and hlg, but not hdr, 10 plus. Why can’t they just have all of them? Yeah, i mean, i guess it’s a lot of work, but that’s another swing and a miss to me. I thought you said i was going to like this thing. You are, you are double vision’s, pretty good. The good news is, i’m expecting those supported hdr modes. To look really good on here and we measured around 960 nits in hdr with full field white hitting about 210 nits, but the big thing is almost 320 nits in sdr really yeah, which is really good for an oled wow.
Okay. This already looks great with the studio lights. In my eyes i know, and as long as the g2 isn’t that right there yeah it still looks black.
It still looks black like it’s. You know it’s a pretty minor difference. It’S a funny thing because the issue with the black bars on an ips is that they glow yeah. So in the night they bother you because they’re glowing they’re distracting from the immersion in the content, but on these tvs they only look gray. They don’t actually emit light.
They just have kind of a gray look compared to the inky, blacks of a wo lead, yeah and the fire looks so good, like even his pant leg there. It looks like his legs are actually on fire like they are they filmed it on fire, probably with like a fire resistant, pants or whatever, but but without over juicing anything yeah? No, it doesn’t look cartoonish. All the grass looks as green as it should, and it’s like the yellow patches there like it, looks like you’re staring at an actual field. I hate the term. It looks like i’m looking through a window but like that’s as close as it’s gon na get. I think we haven’t talked about reflections.
That was a big advantage on the samsung compared to the lg, and it’s pretty solid here when it’s full black. I can see myself yeah, but otherwise, like even here, it’s kind of dark and i can kind of see us a little bit, but it’s not that distracting and we are lit by studio lighting right now. This is totally unfair yeah.
This is an unfair situation and when we look at the numbers that makes sense, sony boasts nearly 90 coverage of the bt 2020 color space and straight out of the box. We got a delta e average of 1.85 in sdr. Technically, that is a slight loss to the s95b, but that’s only after using samsung’s onboard calibration and a difference of 0.16 is an insignificant price to pay for our 75 nits of extra brightness.
As for hdr, we measured both imax, enhanced and cinema modes and, ladies and gentlemen, we figured out where most of that thousand extra dollars is going sony’s processing, not ltcstore.com, where they could have picked up a sweet man, hoodie or a swag, even after using samsung’s calibration App the a95k crushes the s95b in hdr, without luminance errors, we are getting a delta e average of 3.6 with a max of 6.5 like it’s, not even close. The sony also handles reds, significantly better skin tones. Look so natural, like that, looks like a fire lit face.
It doesn’t look like a yellow light on a face, and, while some of the other colors are slightly more accurate on the samsung that lower maximum deviation is more important here, it wasn’t easy getting to this state, though, while we didn’t dig into the 10-point, white balance And color adjustment on the bravia we did have to tinker with some of the other settings and it comes with some trade-offs to get the most color accurate image in both sdr and hdr. You can’t use the same settings in both modes. We found that the best results in hdr were with gradation, preferred hdr tone, mapping advanced contrast, enhancer set to medium and live color set to high. Conversely, sdr wants ace and live color off. If you keep the sdr settings, you end up with less accuracy and more luminance errors in hdr when you keep the hdr settings, color accuracy plummets in hdr – and i just wish we didn’t have to make this trade-off, though realistically an average delta ef4 is still really Good for the average viewer, so what i would probably do is leave it dialed in for hdr and then take that hit in sdr. Of course, we need more than just great color performance. What about the features? It runs it up to 4k 120hz refresh rate.
We will talk about gaming shortly, integrates with every relevant voice assistant through the mic in the remote and has sony’s cool behind the screen speakers. These can either be used as better than average integrated sound, or this is really cool as a stealthy center channel. In a surround config like the one we set up in this sponsored video on the a9ht speakers, it’s even got a freaking webcam. This wow that’s kind of weird. Looking. This definitely merits a closer look. Those flashes are so crisp yeah and fast. Normally, i don’t care about pixel response time, while i’m consuming passive entertainment, sure right like when i’m gaming, when i’m controlling the action i do but wow it’s on and off, yeah yeah and so there’s this difference between the display not being fast and there being kind Of an after effect to a bright flash like that and your eyes being what causes the the after effect of seeing something bright yeah, but this is just boop and then it’s gone, that’s cool! Do you like the remote you’ve, only used it for like 20 seconds? I haven’t had any complaints right because it just feels correct.
Look at that it has buttons. You need like a dedicated input button. Oh dedicated bravia, core button. I certainly plan to use that. I don’t think it has like disney plus.
No it does. It does netflix, but why would i want those? If i have braviacore i could watch such wonderful movies as spiderman and other more different, spiderman [ Laughter ]. It just makes the atmosphere so much more immersive, the glitter on the light fury and it’s glitter.
It’S not just a white spot, you know what i mean, yeah yeah, look at it look at them, yeah yeah sparkle, that’s over and you can only do that with individually lit pixels. Just now you said we got 100 megabit in one of the other files, but is the tv actually limited to 100 megabits? I tried speed test and i got 100 megabit up and down yeah put gigabit controllers on these things. You guys they cost nothing, and here this feels like sun behind clouds. Yes, it looks like an overcast gray sky yeah.
I just love this scene in hdr man. The thing is, hdr is not about a brighter image or even making out more details in the dark parts of the scene, it’s about light and materials and them behaving on screen in a way. That’S like what we’d expect in the real world. It’S about immersion. It’S about having a high dynamic range, yes, thank you! It is kind of right in the name. Finally, it’s time to talk gaming, we gamed on all three displays with an rtx 3080ti and a core i9 12 900k we’re gon na have our tvs and our test bench parts listed below by the way, if you want to check them out, surprise surprise, because they’re All oled they’re, all freaking great actually panel latency testing was done using a new tool from our friend andrew over at tech team gb speaking of tests.
We just went around trying to find out who’s the fastest typer at lmg, and you can only check that video out on floatplane so go get subscribed andrew developed the os, rtt or open source response time tool. It’S a device that is similar to nvidia’s ldap. But it’s open source, obviously, and it runs its own unreal engine 4 program. In the background to simulate flashes and light changes. We got pretty similar results from each display with the lg and the sony hitting about 8.4 milliseconds going from zero to 153. So black is zero and 153 is gray, and the samsung marginally beat them at 7.9 milliseconds in the same test, putting all three of them in the upper echelon of living room gaming displays now, while the g2 is the only one with proper nvidia g-sync compatibility.
All three displays have variable refresh rate and automatic low latency mode. So i’m not expecting that to be a big differentiating factor now to dive deeper into qdo, led versus w oled and whether or not it has the same lightning, fast pixel response time. We’Ve ordered a new sensor for our oscilloscope, so make sure to get subscribed for all the labs content that we have in store, but to the eye. All three of them are definitely fine, which leads us to the conclusion.
Despite the higher price tag, i think i’m gon na go with the sony bravia a95k. It might not get quite as bright as the samsung and hdr, but it’s sturdier. Our s95b has actually started to warp just from unboxing and re-boxing it a few times and we’re not the only ones seeing the problem. It’S more color accurate in hdr brighter in sdr and dolby vision is just too good to pass up, even if we think sony’s being kind of butt heads about dolby vision.
The thing, though, is that my budget isn’t exactly limited. I actually bought two of the three tvs rather than wait for review units so that i could get an answer quicker and get my family room built out. So it’s important to give a more grounded perspective for almost anyone else. Saving a thousand dollars is a no-brainer for the still very outstanding picture that you’re gon na get from either the lg g2 or samsung s95b.
Really, i think the main takeaway here is that if you’ve got the budget for a flagship tv, it is pretty tough to pick the wrong one for a change. And, if you don’t mind waiting a year or two, there are going to be some amazing home. Viewing experiences available at just wild prices as the competition heats up here, just like my segways heating up to our sponsor grid studio grid, studio’s art frames, show off the art hidden inside technology, using the art of knowling. Every part of your favorite phone or console gets carefully extracted laid out and labeled in clear view.
They’Ve got over 30 different frames available from the game boy color to the iphone 10 and grid studio wants to give you the chance to win your very own frame to enter. All you have to do is click the link in the description and, let us know what you think is the best designed tech product for a chance to be one of 10 lucky winners enter to win or buy your own grid studio frame using the links down Below, thanks for watching, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to check out the other two videos dedicated to the s95b and the lg g2. Both of them are really nice. Even if i did choose this one. Instead, .