What's with the recent trend of putting matte coatings on the most "premium" devices?
This TV does it, the Steam Deck's done it, and it almost always looks terrible (the nano-etching on recent MBPs is _fine_; but still makes the text noticeably fuzzier).
The market for top-end TVs is the people who _really_ care about image quality, why would you jeopardize that with a coating that makes it _worse_?
I'm fine with this being an option for those who want it, but associating "top-end" with matte is bizarre to me. I regularly regret buying the OG 512 GB Steam Deck because the matte coating on it is just so bad.
Two reasons: Wider viewing angles and light reflection rejection.
Not every TV is used by two people in a room devoid of lighting. Friends will come over, other things will be watched. Some people are very bothered when the ceiling lighting or sunlight from the window "alters" the image.
Enthusiasts are an interesting bunch. Some features loved by others are grave flaws for others. One can't make everyone happy, so matte screens are an acceptable compromise for it, AFAIK.
My old Bravia is matte-ish without "Viewing angle extending layer", which reduces contrast apparently. I'm happy with what I have. It shows moving images, syncs with sound, and is big enough.
> Not every TV is used by two people in a room devoid of lighting. Friends will come over, other things will be watched. Some people are very bothered when the ceiling lighting or sunlight from the window "alters" the image.
> Enthusiasts are an interesting bunch. Some features loved by others are grave flaws for others. One can't make everyone happy, so matte screens are an acceptable compromise for it, AFAIK.
You know what, fair enough. I don't mind these; but I do _hate_ the blurriness that the matte coatings introduce.
Now, I wouldn't call my wife a TV tech enthusiast, but I do know that she's bothered by the reflections occasionally when I don't mind, and I know with her eyesight she straight up physically cannot notice the extra blurriness that the coatings bring.
I explicitly bought a high-end matte TV (Samsungs S95D) because of the coating - I like having light in my living room which means a lot of reflections from windows and other lights.
Matte coating pretty much solved all my issues with glare and reflections and I don't have to sit in darkness while watching things anymore, it's great. The tradeoffs are negligible and appear in situations where other TVs would be unwatchable. It's been a bigger QoL upgrade than actually switching to OLED.
On my PC, the site displays a weird "Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason" banner on the top... not sure if it's my ad blocker that messes up some CSS styles that makes this appear, but the message is weird in any case.
EDIT: no, it's not the ad blocker. The <noscript> tag is empty, and that string floats in the source near the <title> tag.
As some commenters pointed out, this is basically slowly adding a real RGB led panel behind the LCD, or an OLED with extra steps. I could not see prices but I would expect this to be significantly cheaper, or maybe the refresh rate is much better than OLED.
In every store demo people go to the TV with the most vibrant colors even if they're unrealistic. You can't even tell which is the color you're expected to see sometimes.
I have the movie "Once Upon a Time in America" in 2 different editions and the colors were remastered, they look very different between the 2 copies, yellowish vs. reddish. If the source material is already like this, having super color fidelity in the panel is a paper checkmark but not super useful in practice. Maybe the 2000nits brightness in case I mount the TV in direct sunlight.
This will attract a few people who are very focused on these details, and a lot of people who are very focused on the spec sheet.
I have a 2024 Bravia (K-77XR80) because I wanted an OLED TV with Android TV, to avoid yet another vendor spying on me (Google already does). I also hoped that a "premium" brand like Sony would offer a better UX than other brands.
Well, I was wrong. Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
The UI is laggy. It's as if Sony used a chipset that couldn't handle Android TV driving a 4k display or something. And to make things worse, the UI had to be filled with all kinds of animated transitions, which of course make lagging even more noticeable. If there was one thing to learn from Apple in the past 20 years, it's that a consistent UI framerate must be prioritized over everything (except maybe realtime audio). Dropped frames = cheap, trash UX.
Also, apparently all OLED TVs must periodically do these "pixel refresh" cycles, to lengthen the lifespan of the panel. Fair. But in Sony TVs this is scheduled a few hours after the TV was turned off, and the schedule cannot be configured. The operation itself is invisible, but when the TV comes alive to do this panel maintenance it produces AN AUDIBLE RELAY CLICK like a fucking CRT TV from the 90s. You watch some TV before going to bed, then in a few hours wake up to the sound of a solenoid switch. Then after about 5-10 minutes, the relay clicks again to power off the device, so if you didn't wake up to the first click, now there's a second chance! Yay! And I can confirm this relay sound isn't unique to this particular Bravia model, because I have a smaller one in the bedroom, and it's the same. (See also on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/vx2efk/sony_a80j_i_...)
> apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
35 mm film projectors usually interrupt the light 3 times per frame, and switch frames during an interruption. By your description, on an OLED the pixels just change to the new frame, with no transition. You might prefer an OLED with black frame insertion? (Although, I have an LCD with that and it gives me headaches)
> By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
Normally you’d shoot at 180 degree shutter angle (exposure time is half the frame time). This produces a “cinematic” blur that doesn’t look choppy, especially when projected at the same rate. So if you’re shooting 24 fps video, try shooting at 1/48 (this is comparatively very slow compared to most still photography, which is why you start to need ND filters on cine cameras, especially if you also want to shoot wide open).
Stutter is particularly noticeable for fast panning landscapes where there’s uniform motion across the entire frame. Very obvious if there are “gaps” in the blur because your brain will want to interpolate. If there are static/foreground objects, you probably won’t notice.
Well when I got my first job at uni I bought a bravia tv just before Android TVs came out (around 2014 here), so it had whatever it was the OS before it and it was cheaper than the regular price.
Since Android TV and Google TV became the de facto OS for most of "premium brands", they stopped updating my TV around 2019 or so, and apps a bit after that. The youtube app became even more sluggish and slow, all other third party apps were gone. A couple years ago my sister messed with my TV so I did a factory reset and with that the youtube app went away too. Now it has only screen mirroring.
Which turned out to be absolutely great - I got to have a "premium brand" TV that I can keep it connected to the internet and use screen mirroring and send commands to it via its IP but it won't show any ad whatsoever because its OS is long outdated. And after 12 years everything but the "smart" part of it is working great as new. Of course it's not OLED whatsoever but I can't really care less - viewing experience is still great.
> Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
My guess would be that it's not so much a difference between projectors and OLEDs as it is a difference between old movies and new movies.
Personally I think that slow pixels is the wrong way to "fix" poor motion blur in movies.
It still blows my mind that no OLED TV has yet added simple temporal blending between frames, the kind of which MPV has had for decades. They could even take it a step further and emulate the colour-dependent blending of LCD screens. But no instead it's the same terrible motion interpolation algorithms of 15+ years ago, or nothing.
Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Vision persistence with high intensity light is an interesting phenomenon. This is why people still love CRTs, too. OLEDs do not create that much of a light by themselves, so no persistence of vision is present.
Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much? BTW, I'd rather have a proper relay in my devices rather than a high-power MOSFET which can short and has a shorter lifespan.
Your comment reminds me a couple of blog posts. One person wrote a 2500 word essay on something they hated so much. Then the thing got tuned or serviced or something, then they wrote 3000 word essay on how they love it. The kicker? The feature they hated most in the first was the feature they loved the most in the second one.
>Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Is it running Android TV?
>Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much?
I would have expected a device that people put in their bedrooms to be silent. Or at least have an option in the settings to produce loud clicks at a different hour instead of 3am?
Yes, it's running Android TV. It also had some major updates along the way, and is still getting updates.
Personally I don't have such an expectation from my devices. Configurability would be nice, I agree, but no, I don't expect everything to be "solid state" in 2026.
What's with the recent trend of putting matte coatings on the most "premium" devices?
This TV does it, the Steam Deck's done it, and it almost always looks terrible (the nano-etching on recent MBPs is _fine_; but still makes the text noticeably fuzzier).
The market for top-end TVs is the people who _really_ care about image quality, why would you jeopardize that with a coating that makes it _worse_?
I'm fine with this being an option for those who want it, but associating "top-end" with matte is bizarre to me. I regularly regret buying the OG 512 GB Steam Deck because the matte coating on it is just so bad.
Two reasons: Wider viewing angles and light reflection rejection.
Not every TV is used by two people in a room devoid of lighting. Friends will come over, other things will be watched. Some people are very bothered when the ceiling lighting or sunlight from the window "alters" the image.
Enthusiasts are an interesting bunch. Some features loved by others are grave flaws for others. One can't make everyone happy, so matte screens are an acceptable compromise for it, AFAIK.
My old Bravia is matte-ish without "Viewing angle extending layer", which reduces contrast apparently. I'm happy with what I have. It shows moving images, syncs with sound, and is big enough.
> Not every TV is used by two people in a room devoid of lighting. Friends will come over, other things will be watched. Some people are very bothered when the ceiling lighting or sunlight from the window "alters" the image.
> Enthusiasts are an interesting bunch. Some features loved by others are grave flaws for others. One can't make everyone happy, so matte screens are an acceptable compromise for it, AFAIK.
You know what, fair enough. I don't mind these; but I do _hate_ the blurriness that the matte coatings introduce.
Now, I wouldn't call my wife a TV tech enthusiast, but I do know that she's bothered by the reflections occasionally when I don't mind, and I know with her eyesight she straight up physically cannot notice the extra blurriness that the coatings bring.
And then my wife can't tell the difference between 576p and 2160p, so I guess everyone is different.
Once the screen is 10ft away I doubt any human alive could perceive a sharpness difference from a nano texture.
I just don’t want to be reminded how I look like while using these devices, it’s really distracting to me.
If I wanted to know what I look like, I use a mirror.
I explicitly bought a high-end matte TV (Samsungs S95D) because of the coating - I like having light in my living room which means a lot of reflections from windows and other lights.
Matte coating pretty much solved all my issues with glare and reflections and I don't have to sit in darkness while watching things anymore, it's great. The tradeoffs are negligible and appear in situations where other TVs would be unwatchable. It's been a bigger QoL upgrade than actually switching to OLED.
Is it fully matte, like on a desktop monitor, or is it some "reflection reduction" semi-gloss/semi-matter whatever magical coating?
Yeah we have one of these in our kitchen diner and it's excellent.
Are these "pure" Sony or from new JV with TCL?
On my PC, the site displays a weird "Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason" banner on the top... not sure if it's my ad blocker that messes up some CSS styles that makes this appear, but the message is weird in any case.
EDIT: no, it's not the ad blocker. The <noscript> tag is empty, and that string floats in the source near the <title> tag.
I got a lot of ads related messages and I can tell you, this site works much better by actually disabling javascript!
As some commenters pointed out, this is basically slowly adding a real RGB led panel behind the LCD, or an OLED with extra steps. I could not see prices but I would expect this to be significantly cheaper, or maybe the refresh rate is much better than OLED.
The advantage is, it's cheaper, can provide better color accuracy, and won't burn in as bad as OLED since LEDs have much longer lifespan w.r.t. OLEDs.
I still can't accept to use OLEDs in TVs and computer screens. Both has much higher duty cycles w.r.t. phones and tablets, and I hate burn-in.
In every store demo people go to the TV with the most vibrant colors even if they're unrealistic. You can't even tell which is the color you're expected to see sometimes.
I have the movie "Once Upon a Time in America" in 2 different editions and the colors were remastered, they look very different between the 2 copies, yellowish vs. reddish. If the source material is already like this, having super color fidelity in the panel is a paper checkmark but not super useful in practice. Maybe the 2000nits brightness in case I mount the TV in direct sunlight.
This will attract a few people who are very focused on these details, and a lot of people who are very focused on the spec sheet.
I have a 2024 Bravia (K-77XR80) because I wanted an OLED TV with Android TV, to avoid yet another vendor spying on me (Google already does). I also hoped that a "premium" brand like Sony would offer a better UX than other brands.
Well, I was wrong. Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
The UI is laggy. It's as if Sony used a chipset that couldn't handle Android TV driving a 4k display or something. And to make things worse, the UI had to be filled with all kinds of animated transitions, which of course make lagging even more noticeable. If there was one thing to learn from Apple in the past 20 years, it's that a consistent UI framerate must be prioritized over everything (except maybe realtime audio). Dropped frames = cheap, trash UX.
Also, apparently all OLED TVs must periodically do these "pixel refresh" cycles, to lengthen the lifespan of the panel. Fair. But in Sony TVs this is scheduled a few hours after the TV was turned off, and the schedule cannot be configured. The operation itself is invisible, but when the TV comes alive to do this panel maintenance it produces AN AUDIBLE RELAY CLICK like a fucking CRT TV from the 90s. You watch some TV before going to bed, then in a few hours wake up to the sound of a solenoid switch. Then after about 5-10 minutes, the relay clicks again to power off the device, so if you didn't wake up to the first click, now there's a second chance! Yay! And I can confirm this relay sound isn't unique to this particular Bravia model, because I have a smaller one in the bedroom, and it's the same. (See also on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/vx2efk/sony_a80j_i_...)
Premium brand, my ass.
TL;DR: don't buy Sony TVs.
> apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
35 mm film projectors usually interrupt the light 3 times per frame, and switch frames during an interruption. By your description, on an OLED the pixels just change to the new frame, with no transition. You might prefer an OLED with black frame insertion? (Although, I have an LCD with that and it gives me headaches)
> By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
Normally you’d shoot at 180 degree shutter angle (exposure time is half the frame time). This produces a “cinematic” blur that doesn’t look choppy, especially when projected at the same rate. So if you’re shooting 24 fps video, try shooting at 1/48 (this is comparatively very slow compared to most still photography, which is why you start to need ND filters on cine cameras, especially if you also want to shoot wide open).
Stutter is particularly noticeable for fast panning landscapes where there’s uniform motion across the entire frame. Very obvious if there are “gaps” in the blur because your brain will want to interpolate. If there are static/foreground objects, you probably won’t notice.
Well when I got my first job at uni I bought a bravia tv just before Android TVs came out (around 2014 here), so it had whatever it was the OS before it and it was cheaper than the regular price.
Since Android TV and Google TV became the de facto OS for most of "premium brands", they stopped updating my TV around 2019 or so, and apps a bit after that. The youtube app became even more sluggish and slow, all other third party apps were gone. A couple years ago my sister messed with my TV so I did a factory reset and with that the youtube app went away too. Now it has only screen mirroring.
Which turned out to be absolutely great - I got to have a "premium brand" TV that I can keep it connected to the internet and use screen mirroring and send commands to it via its IP but it won't show any ad whatsoever because its OS is long outdated. And after 12 years everything but the "smart" part of it is working great as new. Of course it's not OLED whatsoever but I can't really care less - viewing experience is still great.
I bought a bravia tv around 2014 without any smart features and it stills works absolutely fine.
> Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
My guess would be that it's not so much a difference between projectors and OLEDs as it is a difference between old movies and new movies.
Personally I think that slow pixels is the wrong way to "fix" poor motion blur in movies.
It still blows my mind that no OLED TV has yet added simple temporal blending between frames, the kind of which MPV has had for decades. They could even take it a step further and emulate the colour-dependent blending of LCD screens. But no instead it's the same terrible motion interpolation algorithms of 15+ years ago, or nothing.
Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Vision persistence with high intensity light is an interesting phenomenon. This is why people still love CRTs, too. OLEDs do not create that much of a light by themselves, so no persistence of vision is present.
Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much? BTW, I'd rather have a proper relay in my devices rather than a high-power MOSFET which can short and has a shorter lifespan.
Your comment reminds me a couple of blog posts. One person wrote a 2500 word essay on something they hated so much. Then the thing got tuned or serviced or something, then they wrote 3000 word essay on how they love it. The kicker? The feature they hated most in the first was the feature they loved the most in the second one.
>Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Is it running Android TV?
>Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much?
I would have expected a device that people put in their bedrooms to be silent. Or at least have an option in the settings to produce loud clicks at a different hour instead of 3am?
Yes, it's running Android TV. It also had some major updates along the way, and is still getting updates.
Personally I don't have such an expectation from my devices. Configurability would be nice, I agree, but no, I don't expect everything to be "solid state" in 2026.