It's also been heavily discounted since launch, to a degree that's quite uncharacteristic of Sony. Value for money: The A80L is the step-down OLED in Sony's 2023 TV range and is quite aggressively priced for a brand-new TV. This should be a strong consideration for anyone with this sort of budget who is determined not to combine their new TV with a dedicated sound system. While flagship sets with discrete speaker systems will sound even better, for a step-down model the A80L sounds very impressive. Put it in the Cinema sound mode and the spaciousness of the delivery is very impressive, yet this spaciousness combines with the sort of focus that can really only come from having the sound literally coming from the screen. That slight lack of bass depth aside, the A80L sounds really rather good by TV standards. Sound: Through our tests, we find that the A80L sounds a bit bass-light, but that does mean that it stays composed even through our Blade Runner 2049 stress test. Through our extensive suite of tests, our only complaint is that a bit of dark detail is missing when watching SDR content. On top of all of this, detail is also outstanding, with clothing textures, skin imperfections and complex patterns all rendered crisply but without artificial definition. There’s a rare purity to highlights, too, such as Love’s white jacket and the light panels above her head in the records room of the Wallace Corporation.Īll of these qualities combine to make an image that’s brilliantly solid and has a lovely three-dimensional feel. The TV’s ability to subtly recreate different shades doesn’t come at the expense of dynamism, and contrast extremes such as the intro text at the start of the film emerge brightly from the pure black background. The neon lights and holographic billboards of Blade Runner 2049’s downtown LA pop from the overall gloom of the city in brilliant fashion, but skin tones are handled with realism-boosting nuance and the seemingly hundreds of slightly different shades of grey that make up the bark of the tree at Sapper Morton’s farm are made clear to see. Picture quality: The seemingly effortless way it combines the spectacular with the subtle is quite extraordinary. The A80L uses the Google TV operating system, which packs in practically every app you could want, and the Cognitive Processor XR adds a new XR Clear Image feature, which is intended to be a more intelligent form of upscaling that understands content type and quality and applies processing accordingly so that images look closer to native 4K. The TV also lacks support for Dolby Vision gaming, despite Dolby Vision being present for movies and TV shows. ![]() ![]() One of these is also the eARC port, and if you use that to connect a soundbar or AVR you'll have just one left for a games console or gaming PC. It's a little thicker than rivals such as the LG C3, but partly that's down to its actuator-based sound system, which vibrates the whole screen in order to generate sound.Īround the back are four HDMI sockets, two of which are HDMI 2.1-spec and support 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM. It sounds good by TV standards, too, and the feature set will be strong enough for all but the most hardcore of gamers.ĭesign and features: The A80L looks very similar to the A80K it replaces, which is fine but the design is starting to look a little bland. it's not a QD-OLED or MLA model) so we broadly thought we knew what to expect, but it stunned us during our extensive test by offering a picture performance with a near-perfect balance of the spectacular and the subtle. It's based on 'traditional' OLED technology (i.e. The Sony A80L is the surprise of the year so far. ![]() If it's an OLED TV you're after, you'll find the perfect one below. The good news is that we've whittled down all of those reviews in order to recommend only the very best OLED TVs at a variety of sizes and prices. In short, there's lots of variation in the quality of different OLED TVs, as our extensive, independent testing proves. Then, of course, you've got different HDMI feature sets to consider, and sound quality varies wildly.Īnd on top of all that, there is now another OLED panel manufacturer in town – Samsung, which is producing QD-OLED panels for use by it and other TV brands. ![]() In fact, there are vast differences in the way different OLED TVs perform, partly because LG Display now produces a number of different panels (including super-bright new MLA OLEDs), but also because processing plays an enormous role in a TV's picture performance, from how it handles colours, contrast, sharpness, detail, motion and more. You may have heard that most OLED TVs use panels manufactured by LG, and that's true (it's LG Display rather than LG Electronics, for what it's worth), but that doesn't mean that all OLED TVs are equal.
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