SONY KD-55X900F 4K LED TV
OLED TVs can thrill, but the technology remains pricey, and in real-world viewing conditions, a good backlit LED-LCD can be the better option. Sony’s X90F might be just the thing...
In real-world viewing conditions, a good backlit LED-LCD may be the best option. This 55-incher from Sony’s X90F might be just the thing.
It seemed to surprise even Sony’s own local employees when we mentioned it to them, but the company was recently described to us as the world’s most efficient company when it comes to TVs (see panel overleaf).
Back in 2014 when Sony abandoned its PC business, many predicted its TVs would be next, given a decade of losses totalling over $7bn to that point. But then-CEO (now-President) Kazuo Hirai was smarter than your average axe-wielder, and was not about to see Sony exit a market which many considered fundamental to its public image. Instead he isolated the company’s TV business, hoping the independence would speed up strategy decisions. He did the same with its camera and audio divisions a year later. Now look at the results. Sony has a wildly successful photographic business — witness the EISA Awards elsewhere in this issue, and Sony’s seven awards from TIPA this year. And its TVs are also winning accolades — the A1 OLED was our Sound+Image 2018 TV of the Year, even if, as IHS Research’s Paul Gray says in an interview excerpt overleaf, it was a love-it-or-hate-it design with a desirability level which even Sony itself perhaps failed to recognise at first.
That OLED model has had only mild tweakery this year to re-emerge as the A8F — no longer leaning back on a giant picture frame but standing vertically to attention and thereby appealing to more real-world positioning in homes. The 55-inch model has an RRP of $3999. But OLED doesn’t have all the fun. Sony’s Z9D LED TV also won many fans — so for our first Sony 2018 TV review we requested the latest LED rangetopper, the X90F, also known as the X9000F Series.
Equipment
The 55-inch X90F is only $2799, so nearly a third cheaper than the equivalent A8F OLED. There is a 65-inch at $4099 (the 65-inch OLED is $5999), and a 75-inch to come (no 75-inch OLED is expected).
It is an attractive television, narrowing to a mere 8mm-thin panel at the top, but with a back that rises nearly its full height, making total depth a still slim 5cm. The bezel around the picture is about 8mm as well, and double that at the bottom.
In common with other Sony TVs in recent years, it is well packaged, easy to extract and to add its legs (which double as useful cable collectors). The 65-inch will need two-person assembly but we got the 55-inch review unit sorted easily without assistance. We were also impressed by the many strips of plastic protective covering Sony has added — not only around the aluminium frame edges but onto areas of screen you’re likely to touch when lifting the TV into place. Once in place, strip off all the plastic and your Sony TV should have made it through unscathed and fingerprint-free.
The stand leaves the bottom of the TV about 63mm from the bench surface if you’re tablemounting the 55-incher. The remote receiver is right at the bottom so there’s room only for a very low soundbar if that’s your choice of sound enhancement; the built-in speakers are as good as most — that is to say fairly thin-sounding, certainly not a match for the company’s OLED Acoustic Surface performance on the A1 and A8F. (Good active stereo speakers either side would be a fine solution that will outperform most soundbars.)
The inputs are divided into side-facing and downward-facing rear ones — on the left side are one HDMI, two USB and minijack composite AV inputs with a minijack headphone output (this could be used for a subwoofer, the manual notes), plus on the bottom three more HDMI inputs, one more USB, antenna in, an Ethernet connection, and an optical digital audio output.
All the HDMI inputs are 4K-enabled with HDCP2.2 support, and if you’re using a sound system that takes audio via HDMI ARC, plug it into HDMI 3. As is usual, it’s Fiddle City plugging up rear HDMI cables in particular once the TV is in position, so get everything plugged up before sliding the TV into place.
Performance
This is an Android TV with its own level of smarts beyond that, so the set-up wizard walks you through tuning and set-up, though be ready for a long delay while all the latest iterations of software are downloaded en masse in a process which took, in our non-NBN home, the best part of an hour. Once done, you suffer the very slow start-up of Android TV only once (the rapid start option is selected by default, not the case on some rivals), and the Android TV Home page was populated with the usual options in addition to Sony’s own shelf of recommended apps.
We were offered something called Samba Interactive TV, which sounded like fun until we read up on it — “Samba has integrated TV data from multiple sources — from smart TVs to set-top boxes to TV apps — to help advertisers and broadcasters understand the TV viewership habits of the modern consumer” says its website proudly. We prefer to watch than be watched, so we disabled it, and stopped ‘Samba Services Manager’ clearing data under Settings/App.
As with most modern TVs, there are multiple layers of adjustment options for pictures and sound, so it’s just as well that the Sony’s default picture was pretty good out of the box. Optimising them is an especially tricky moveable feast if you keep the Light Sensor option enabled, since this will vary the luminance (and who knows what else) according to the room conditions. It does so very effectively, and for most users we’d say leave it on, tweak to your preference during the day, and tweak again at night, then again in daylight. If you’re working to greater precision, set something up in the Custom setting. If you don’t like the warming yellow effect that the Custom defaults deliver, start on the colour menu by changing the Colour temperature to neutral. We then reduced contrast to 90 to prevent crushing up the top, turned off the Light Sensor, took a few notches off the colour, and that left us us with realistic colours and fine contrast which worked equally well across daytime TV or UHD Blu-rays, for which HDR and 24Hz trigger the Sony into compatible modes. As is often the way, it’s impossible to make picture adjustments when streaming or playing from USB. (You cannot, incidentally, record to USB with this TV in the manner of a PVR.)
There is local dimming on the X90F series, but we gather the Direct LED Drive here is to a lower resolution (larger LED blocks) than the Z9D. There is, however, a new innovation in Sony’s motion processing, which we already consider a highlight of Sony’s TVs. In the TV menu this is still called Motionflow, but a new process called X-Motion Clarity is applied, we are told, and this changes the usual full black frames inserted to ‘reset’ the brain between frames, with the black instead applied only to different blocks of the image frame in sequence, rather than to the entire frame at once. Since black insterstitials reduce overall luminance (Sony’s Motionflow ‘Clear’ setting does so particularly), we assume the variations must add up to a full frame eventually to avoid inadvertent regional dimming. So it’s a clever solution for resetting while limiting the loss of luminance.
Since there’s no way to turn this X-Motion Clarity on or off, its effect is impossible to judge in isolation. What we can say is that Sony’s smoothing was highly effective with judder-prone scenes.
If you have a UHD Blu-ray player you can enjoy the Sony’s HDR performance — it is compatible with both HDR10 and Dolby Vision version, and the broadcast HLG standard too, should you live long enough to experience it here in Australia. Indeed just as every input must be auto upscaled to its UHD panel resolution of 3920 × 2160, everything also gets automatic HDR upconversion; it’s part of all picture settings except True Cinema mode (triggered by a UHD Blu-ray signal). This can make the whites brighter, but not HDR’s biggest trick of delivering much more detail in the blacks, which of course depends on the information being there in the source content. And for that, UHD Blu-ray is the source of choice, and the X90F an effective display. We cannot claim it captured us into long nights of movie watching as have some OLEDs, and its deeper blacks soon shift to grey once you are much off the sweet spot, which for a two-metre viewing distance is about the width of the TV itself. But viewed centrally, the blacks seemed subjectively full in real content situations, while its higher (unstated) nit levels not only hit LED highs, they meant that in a bright room we could enjoy the TV fully without pumping everything up, as you might an OLED in the same conditions.
Smarts
As with other Android TVs, there is strong support both in apps that Sony puts on its ‘shelf’ of the Android home screen in advance, and others you can
download from the Google store. So while there’s the built-in Video app able to play files from USB, say, you can download VLC to add additional video codecs, or Archos, which has the clever trick of downloading subtitles files from the internet.
Apps can bring streaming services for both movies and music — there are dedicated Netflix and Google Play buttons on the remote, but the Android home screen can be set up to quickly access all the five Australian catch-up services along with all the YouTube, Red Bull and other
Paul Gray: Talking to equity analysts, the first thing they say about Sony is that it is now the most eicient TV maker in the world, bar none. Sony has 1300 people in TV — that’s it, globally, and for what they have done this year, on their report card it’s a strong A.
Sound+Image: An‘A1’perhaps?
Paul Gray: A1, yes! They did a very nice job of product creation on that OLED. It wasn’t a ‘me-too’ product, and maybe it’s a slightly ‘love it or hate it’ product on the styling, but that’s how it should be. It was a high impact product in every sense of the word — they did something that was distinct, dierent, unique indeed with the emissive audio.
At the same time Sony were also somewhat unaware of what they’d released — when the A1 was first released it was positioned below the Z9D [ZD9 in some markets] rather than above it, and consumers went ‘no no no no’... So if I was a teacher I’d put a red line under that — they missed the point. But all in all they did an excellent job, they recognised that quickly, they adjusted the pricing. Mind you the Z9D is a fantastic product. If you watch movies in a dark room, buy the A1; if you’re in a room like this [with ambient light], the Z9D might be better for you, a bit of punch. Sound+Image: Yetthisfromacompany thatisnotreallyaTVmanufacturer. video services you might want, as well as Spotify, Google Play and other audio services.
And since there is Chromecast inside, you can cast video or audio to the Sony TV from any Cast-enabled product or from the Chrome browser on any computer sharing its network. You can address its Google Voice Assistant using the voice button on the remote control, and this was more intelligent than last year, when it seemed very Google-centric in what it allowed, usually shoving you straight to YouTube. Now when we said “Play Glen Campbell” it played Glen Campbell on Spotify
Paul Gray: Yes, but then Apple doesn’t make phones either. So Sony have demonstrated that like Apple you don’t need a factory to do this, you need to have a very well-controlled manufacturing process and very very capable manufacturing partners with which you’re closely involved at every stage.
And does owning a factory give you anything? I mean Sony are still very involved — they have the factory at Bangi in Malaysia, so they are in touch with manufacturing and they understand it, but they’ve gone past that. I think as a thoroughly committed turnaround that they’ve done a fab job on it. You have to have the right competencies and the right partners — there’s no reason other people can’t do it, but I think other people haven’t been as disciplined or as desperate. Sony had an empty belly and it was that hunger and rigid discipline that paid o. Interview:JezFord.IHS:ihsmarkit.com (to which it was linked through our Google Home account), or we could say “Play Glen Campbell on Netflix” and it would open Netflix at the excellent Glen Campbell documentary.
One irritation was that Android’s Home was annoyingly sluggish in starting up when the Home button was pressed, as was the list of inputs when we pressed that key. Often we’d have pressed it again before anything happened, inadvertently cancelling the previous command. We tried to improve this, going into Settings/Apps (an alarming list of the many processes going on in the background), and both stopping and clearing the data of Sony Select and Sony Shelf. This removes the Sony row of apps from the Home page, but certainly did fix the sluggishness (although we should insert the usual disclaimer about messing with underlying software here, and besides, it reloaded itself later). Conclusion The X90F is no Z9D successor — Sony’s newlyannounced ‘Master’ Z9F fills that gap. But as a high-performance back-lit LED the 55-inch X90F ticks all the boxes, with industry-leading motion processing and good out-of-the-box defaults being particular strengths for both casual and critical users. Jez Ford