OLED Remastered

to the back of the OLED panel that vibrate the screen itself to produce sound. There’s also a separate woofer radiating from the back of the set. I heard no deep bass to speak of, but the overall sound was well-balanced and listenable, and better than what you get with most flat-panel TVS. Sony claims that the XBR- 65A8H supports Dolby Atmos, though none of the speakers contained within the set itself fire upward to create steered sound from overhead—the whole point of Atmos.

The XBR- 65A8H supports the HDR10, HLG, Dolby

Vision, and HDR10+ high dynamic range formats. Its HDMI inputs are version 2.0, with EARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel) being the only supported HDMI 2.1 feature. No future upgrade path to full HDMI 2.1 is planned, though all four of the set’s HDMI inputs do support the full 18 Gbps bandwidth required to pass today’s Ultra HD 4K HDR sources in 10-bit color. (Eight-bit color is standard for all SD and HD video sources.)

If an HDR source has been mastered with a higher peak white level than a given HDR display can handle (which is commonly the case), the signal must be “tone mapped” to prevent visible white clipping. Metadata encoded into all HDR sources tells a display how to do this. This source metadata is “static” for HDR10 material; that is, it provides a fixed correction from the beginning of a source to the end. But many modern Ultra HD sets use internal processing to analyze the program material and create their own dynamic metadata on the fly, generating corrections frame by frame. The Sony performs this through its most advanced processor, the X1 Ultimate, which also serves to upscale lower-resolution sources to 4K.

The 65A8H offers seven picture modes for either SDR or HDR10. Of these, I chose Custom. While there’s a Game mode, the set offers no specialized gaming features such as VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode).

There are three dedicated Dolby Vision Picture Modes: Dolby Vision Dark, Dolby Vision Bright, and Vivid. I preferred to use Dolby Vision Bright. There’s also a Netflix calibrated mode. No visible indication of this appears in the menus when watching a Netflix source, though it can be accessed from Sony's control app. Both 2-point and 10-point white balance calibration controls are provided in the Adv. color temperature menu, plus a full color management system.

Sony’s Motionflow motion smoothing feature offers both Auto and Custom active modes. Custom allows the user to manually adjust the balance between frame interpolation (the Smoothness control) and black frame insertion (the Clearness adjustment). While Motionflow works somewhat better than competing motion blur solutions, I chose to leave it off. Neither Auto nor the other settings I tried offered smoother motion without adding a filmas-video look (the infamous “soap-opera effect”), darkening the image, or both.

The Reality Creation feature found in the set’s Clarity menu is Sony’s sophisticated take on resolution enhancement and noise reduction. I never felt a need to use it with good-quality source material, though noise reduction did help somewhat when viewing one particularly poor-looking Youtube video.

Not only does the 65A8H not require separate calibrations for SDR and HDR, but you can’t even manually enter separate SDR/HDR color settings.

Once an SDR calibration is completed, the set’s processing automatically applies corrections, in the background, to the color settings as needed to produce a correct calibration for all flavors of HDR.

One reservation I had about the set’s ergonomics was the organization of its menus. It took some time to get used to them, including, for example, the 10 remote control button pushes needed to access the Brightness adjustment. More significant is the lack of an option to apply all picture

At a Glance

Unsurpassed contrast Superior color and resolution

Wide viewing angle Complicated menu system

No HDMI 2.1

$2,800

(877) 865-SONY sony.com

settings to all inputs. The set will transfer some of your settings to different inputs, as well as builtin apps such as Netflix, but not all of them. Being an obsessive type, I ultimately checked each input and app to ensure that the settings for it agreed with my preferences. On the upside, pro video calibrators will be happy to know that the calibration menu settings drop to the bottom of the screen where they don’t interfere with the readings when you make adjustments.

The 65A8H can pass Dolby Digital or DTS sound from connected sources or built-in apps to an A/V receiver or soundbar via its optical digital audio output, but sends DTS in multichannel format only if the source (usually a disc player) is set for LPCM and not bitstream audio output. If you want lossless audio from sources that offer it, you’ll need to use the set’s HDMI EARC connection.

HD/SDR PERFORMANCE

All of the disc-based material used in this review was played using an Oppo UDP-203 player. I saw no posterization (false contouring) from the Sony with any of the SDR or HDR material I watched. Neither did I see any obvious streaking, dirty screen effect, or other uniformity issues (though such issues can vary with the specific sample of any flat-panel TV). Off-center viewing produced no visible change in picture quality—a

major advantage OLEDS offer.

With the 65A8H properly adjusted, its screen would go totally black on scene changes (source material permitting) when viewed in a fully darkened room. The black bars on letterbox films also remained consistently inky and invisible.

I often begin my HD/SDR assessment of a TV with a pair of Blu-ray test discs created by Samsung and Pioneer, respectively, that were produced for

internal testing or demo use. The Pioneer disc (from 2006!) was designed to show off that company’s then state-of-the-art Kuro plasmas and contains a string of sequences ranging from dark and difficult, to bright and colorful. This disc looked at least as good on the Sony as I’ve ever seen it, and was in some ways better. The only place where the 65A8H faltered was a five-second shot of a shadowed steeple against a

darker background. This shot, which has tripped up other sets, is an extremely difficult test and might be affected by small errors either in a set’s reproduction of barely above black tones (an extremely tricky area to design around) or in its black level, or brightness, setting. I couldn’t see the steeple on the Sony, but this was the only shot on this disc or any other I viewed for this review where I had reservations about the set’s

otherwise outstanding rendition of near-black detail.

The Samsung disc also contains torture test sequences for black level and shadow detail, plus color, skin tone, and sharpness—the latter including a breathtaking close-up shot of a cat where I could have counted its whiskers if it sat still long enough! The Sony also performed flawlessly with this disc.

You wouldn’t guess that My