Audio Video News

"Whether the same can be said for the LG and, in particular, the new Sony, is hard to say."
No it's not hard to say!! You review TVs all the time, how many TVs have you reviewed that did not improve significantly with proper calibration?
I encourage anyone curious about Sony's new TV series to read the AVSForum article- much more comprehensive and useful.

I've already seen the X85D on sale at Frye's for $7999.Iv'e read some reviews on that TV and they were VERY mediocre to poor considering the size and price. The only good thing about it was that it was the largest and best 4K TV you could get at that price. But,you could definitely get a smaller, "better", less expensive, 4K TV from the same company. Now the top of the line goes from 65-75, then 100 inches in size. With the 65 outclassing the 85 for the same price!

Yikes! I will never buy another Sony TV or anything.

The Customer service was poor to scam level. My HD XBR failed and apparently Sony Customer service is now in Boca Raton Florida.. so they owe the consumer nothing due to that states laws. Just a scamming crabby company now.. and the fact that Sony is attempting to enter the High End stereo game with a $10,000 pair of loudspeakers is laughable..

There’s no simple answer to your question about how many sets we've seen that haven't been significantly improved by calibration. The entire calibration process, starting with setting the basic controls and continuing on to a full color calibration, often yields a pronounced improvement. But more than half of this improvement typically comes from proper setting of the basic user controls (Brightness, Contrast, Backlight, etc.). In the comparison we saw neither the basic controls nor the color controls were altered beyond placing each set to its Standard Picture Mode. Sony simply chose to do the latter, and this appears fair on the surface. But there’s no guarantee that this will show off each set at its best. Each manufacturer will have its own ideas about what a correct picture should look like in its default settings, and the latter are rarely technically correct.

In addition, proper calibration of a 4K in HDR has introduced a steep learning curve that we’re all—reviewers, calibrators, and industry pros alike—doing our best to climb. I’ve only done one HDR calibration so far—on the same Samsung model used in the face-off. While that set certainly doesn’t look bad in its Standard HDR mode sans calibration, it isn’t even close to offering its best performance in that configuration.

In fact, one other attendee at the Sony event, who has also calibrated a 65KS9800, agreed with me. For these reasons I declined to be specific about the differences noted between the three sets in my initial posting. Without a proper setup I consider such differences interesting but ultimately as irrelevant as attempting to show the performance of a display via screen shots. But none of this takes away from how impressed we all were with the new Sony Z9D.

The color grading demo discussed in the AVS piece showed how much the color and HDR of a scene can be changed in post-production. It also showed how closely the Z9D can come to duplicating the performance of Sony’s pro reference monitor. But the former was expected, and we were seated too far from the latter, with its very small screen, to draw any definitive conclusions—though as far as I could see it was a very close match. The take-away here was no surprise: the color balance and the degree of HDR applied are very much under the control of the colorist, hopefully working together with the cinematographer and/or the director assuming they’re available. In the case of a classic film like Lawrence of Arabia (please Sony, release this jewel in your library crown in UHD with HDR— soon), others must make these decisions while being careful to retain the overall atmospherics of the film.

The event’s comparison of a live studio set with its reproduction on the new Z9D was also interesting, but why the latter was compared side-by-side to an X850 displaying the same scene in SDR at 1080p (upconverted by the set to 4K) puzzled me. The X850 isn’t Sony’s best current 4K set. A comparison of how the new Z9D and Sony’s currently available flagship, the XBR-75X940D reproduced the live scene would have been more interesting, though likely less dramatic. I will say, however that the Z9D, apart from a slightly cool color temperature, came rewardingly close to the live setup.

Warrior24_7: Your impressions of the X85D aren’t relevant with respect to the new Z9Ds. The latter are very different and incorporate significant new technology.

I still think you certainly CAN say "a tight calibration can improve [both TVs] significantly"- especially given the technological advantages they both have over the Samsung, but for some reason, you sound as if you have a strong preference for the Samsung that you do not want to concede that it may not be the best. Samsung may have won the popularity contest in forums and such, but I for one have always considered Sony to be the king of picture quality and I'm yet to find anything made by Samsung that approaches Sony's best- and that's before this break through series.

Hopefully next year at CES they'll have an 85" model with DV and HDMI 2.1