SONY Master A9F
OLED television
The whole picture and nothing but the picture! Sony’s lean-back A9F leaves nothing on display except a monolithic slab of OLED loveliness.
Short of the very latest announcements from CES (where an A9G was unveiled), this OLED television represents the toppermost of the poppermost for Sony’s ranges. Part of the company’s ‘Master’ series, the A9F combines OLED panel quality with impressive processing power, the Android TV interface, and the downright magical Acoustic Surface audio technology. There’s a 65-inch version currently at $6298, while we spent time with the 55-incher, which is listed at $4298.
Equipment
Sony has had a spectacular renaissance in its TV division in recent years, entirely reorganised, working closely with third-party manufacturers to Sony’s specifications and designs. This rise culminated in the A1 OLED released in 2017, which surpassed other OLEDs in just the way mentioned above — panel quality plus external design plus Android interface plus high quality processing and Acoustic Surface (see panel). The A1 design was minimalist in presenting only a big rectangle of OLED picture to the viewer — no side speakers, no gap at all between the screen and the tabletop — and with the slight oddity of leaning back on its picture-frame-like pop-stand in the manner of Sony’s earlier Monolithic models from around 2010. Back then Sony referred to this design concept as adhering to the Japanese idea of ‘tatazumai’ — when an object stands out in a space, yet blends into that space. “When the television is switched off, its gorgeous single surface becomes something to decorate the living room,” said Sony at the time.
But that lean-back characteristic didn’t suit everyone then, and it didn’t with the A1 either, so last year Sony delivered the same OLED panel in a more conventional standmount design with the A8F — the picture was great, but after the A1 (which we loved, and made our Television of the Year for 2017) we found the A8F “rather dull after the A1” we said, though it still delivered a fine picture.
And it turns out Sony was saving the A1 template for this Master A9F. It leans (but perhaps not as much, from memory) and the stand remains one of the easiest tabletop TV mounting solutions we’ve seen — unlock the rear stand, pull it out, screw in the bottom support and it’s done. The Acoustic Surface (see panel) gets an additional actuator pair for even better sound, better than any other TV’s internal sound system short of those that have integrated soundbars, although we’d still suggest connecting a larger external system to deliver the sonic impact a TV like this deserves.
Other gains for the A8F over the A1 model include the latest Oreo version of Android TV,
and notably it gets a more powerful processor in the X1 Ultimate rather than the X1 Extreme. (We guess Sony will have a hard time naming the next processor generation beyond ‘Ultimate’, so our money’s on an X2…) Processing is important not only to deliver a seamless Android experience, but for the array of intensive image processing available — the A9F’s upscaling uses the tens of thousands of pre-stored reference results in what Sony calls its Dual Database system; the other part of the ‘Dual’ is used to reduce on-screen noise. The processing can also enhance sharpness and detail, add HDR-like brightness and detail to SDR material, and Super Bitmapping to smooth colour gradations.
Connections
You get four HDMI inputs, one on the side, three at the rear, all fully UHD compatible, with HDMI 3 offering the Audio Return Channel to compatible attached sound systems. While there’s no component video input there’s one for composite video on minijack (no cable adaptor supplied), and we were pleased to find both optical digital audio out and an analogue headphone minijack output. There are three USB inputs, one of them SuperSpeed USB 3.0, plus Ehernet and antenna inputs, and an interesting extra in centre-channel inputs, so you can use the Sony’s audio system to deliver the centre channel of a surround system.
There’s a full-size remote control, while of course with Android on board you can use Google Voice Assistant to interact and command, and even Alexa users can join in, as the TV is also Alexa compliant.
Set-up & performance
The A9F is heavy for a 55-incher, mainly because of that picture-frame stand which is physically big, though it closes flat if you’re wall-mounting) and it does provide an easy lift point, while little rubber bumpers prevent corner crushing; it’s a carefully considered and effective system to simplify set up. You simply unlock the stand, pull it back, and hold the TV up while you slot in the smaller base, which is secured by three screws. We had it out of the box and in position in less than 10 minutes.
We used all three audio outputs — firstly the Sony’s own Acoustic Surface (see panel), later the headphone output and the optical into our larger audio system. Depending on the surround abilities of your external system you may need to switch the optical output to delivering PCM only, which was nowhere to be found under the Sony menus (opening when you press ‘Action Menu’), but was under Android’s more extensive settings, which have moved under this latest Android Oreo TV screen (see overleaf) from their former position hidden off the bottom of the Home screen to a new spot as a settings icon now top right. Software update is also there, so we allowed Sony a remarkably brief (compared with some previous Sonys) update. The Oreo Android interface was otherwise familiar enough, indeed not quite the major refresh we might have desired, and worse in some ways — we couldn’t find a way to pin HDMI inputs to the Home screen, for example. But it’s still a fine interface, and here snappy to use. Also we were pleased to find no offer to activate the pernicious Samba Interactive technology that we’ve had to disable on previous Sony models, a system that came in with Android 7.0 to “help advertisers and broadcasters understand the TV viewership habits of the modern consumer” — i.e. it reports home on what you do. We’re glad to see it gone!
We had one immediate glitch — Wi-Fi simply wouldn’t connect, and even once the Ethernet network connection was fully operational, Netflix wouldn’t start until we’d uninstalled and reinstalled updates for that app. It was worth that effort, though, as this Sony is one of the company’s first to have a dedicated Netflix Calibrated Mode which, for Netflix Originals at least, claims to deliver the same picture quality on a TV as on a studio evaluation master. You may need to select this through the picture settings, though we found it had a deleterious effect on motion smoothing compared with our own tweaked picture settings (example: the very final pan shot of the Chef’s Table intro for season four), and as with many THX presets, it has a slight yellowing effect that took some getting used
to, and which worked best in less than high levels of ambient lighting.
However, this is one TV where the common recommendation of OLED for darker rooms, LED for brighter ones doesn’t apply — the Sony had more than enough illumination to hold its own under ambient lighting, even when displaying HDR material with rich and variated blacks. Indeed we have never seen a better demonstration of High Dynamic Range than watching the Prime Video series The Man In The High Castle on this TV. The series is not only brilliant in conception (as is the novel), the third season in particular is a poster-child for HDR, with shot after shot combining super-highlights with dark shadows — characters silhouetted against bright windows with detail clear within their haloed darkness; interior lights of the neutral zone bar almost wincingly bright against the myriad sepias. It was also a reminder of HDR’s potentially transformative effect on colours as well as just dynamic range: another Prime HDR delight was Z, which delivered less of the wild contrasts but was mesmerising in its colour gradations, the natural glow of skin tones in close-ups, the endless blues of the Westport sea and sky.
Also impressive, this impeccable colour performance required very little in the way of departure from the preset levels. We concurred with flatpanelsHD.com calibration suggestion of upping the gamma two notches and bringing the R and B down to -7 and -6 respectively. We kept the automatic gain adjustment off, preferring usually to switch between our own custom settings for day and night, but in this case we didn’t feel the need; the A9F impressed equally under all conditions. One set of broadcast TV shows which spanned both day and night viewing was SBS’s spectacular ‘Slow Summer’ season, these visual delights extending up to 15 hours. We watched both live and recorded, with the Sony delivering riveting vibrant images, colours and detail — the burnished-copper scale of a rock sitting trackside as the Indian Pacific raced by, the stamped iron pattern of the car-trailer, and notably supersmooth motion. The show’s high production values even extended to the full reproduction of somewhat ear-piercing brake shrieks on curves whenever the front camera was shown. Fortunately much of the ride is on pretty straight track!
The Kimberley Cruise show featured long shots of moving water, an excellent demonstration both of the Sony’s motion smoothing systems and its upscaling. Watching this on a four-year-old 1080p Samsung, the water patterns degenerated into blur and artifice as they sped towards the camera position. On the Sony they remained perfectly rendered and entirely free of either blur or judder, realistic and properly relaxing. And though we found 15 hours of slow-moving boat a bit much compared to the train shows, many of the extended drone shots of the Kimberley scenery were breathtakingly beautiful. ‘Those colours!’ rave our notes.
Of course the angle of view for OLED puts LED-LCD to shame; we could watch at even an extreme side angle from the kitchen sink, where an LED-LCD image would be at best highly deteriorated, at worst invisible.
With UHD HDR Blu-ray material the presentation was so enjoyable as to hamper our note-taking; we were drawn into movie after movie, despite these being our regular test scenes. The more film-type HDR didn’t deliver the extreme contrasts of The Man In The High Castle but there was instant immersion from the grainy Athens street-riot in the first of many Jason Bourne chase scenes and the hyper-reality 4K/60 ball-park scenes of Billy Linn’s Long Walk Home, no artefacts to distract from the film. It made random YouTube clips look good. It made Blu-ray nature documentaries breathtaking. Our only regret was that we didn’t have the 65-incher!
The A9F is not entirely without quirk. Press the Google Assist button on the remote by accident (it’s right next to the input selector, so we did this regularly) and you can’t cancel it — the quickest way is to say something which Google won’t action, like an expletive. (“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she then says, and disappears.)
Through the Android menus the TV can send audio to Bluetooth headphones for those moments of privacy. Inevitably we found the latency put things too far out of sync for our liking, and there’s no audio sync adjustment available that we could find, but different headphones may vary, and others may be less sensitive to sync issues anyway.
Conclusion
Picture quality here matches or exceeds the very best OLED TVs in the market. Plus you get the latest Android TV interface, which delivers better smarts than most rivals. Plus the built-in audio system means you don’t need a soundbar, and that means the whole screen can sit flush to the desktop, offering just one big rectangle of impeccably processed OLED image. The A9F is a stunner, and becomes our top no-holds-barred OLED TV recommendation. Jez Ford