Passive viewing
4K also helps 3D. This is the first Sony TV we’ve seen to embrace Passive, rather than Active Shutter, 3D. Sony quietly sneaked a few Passive HD TVs out into the Chinese market at the beginning of the year, following a panel acquisition deal with LG Display, but it has been keeping mum about its broader plans.
Scart on board – how quaint
In the context of 4K, Passive becomes extremely interesting. In fact, the quality of 3D delivered by this monster sets new standards. Because it uses inexpensive polarising glasses it has none of the flickering problems associated with expensive shuttering spectacles, while the extra resolution means stereoscopic images play out at Full HD resolution. The result is the best 3D you’ll see outside of a commercial theatre – indeed, it may be better because of the improved brightness.
4K ready HDMI
Where I feel Sony has dropped the ball is not with picture processing or design, it’s with the user interface of the KD-84X9005 itself. The TV has exactly the same GUI found elsewhere in the brand’s range – and, frankly, it doesn’t look that great scaled to this resolution. Text is jaggy and the whole thing has a bleary appearance which rather undermines the raison d'être of the set. I don’t begrudge Sony the wallet-numbing price point, but I do feel shortchanged that it hasn’t invested in an ultra-HD UI to really show what this screen is capable of.
Coming to a living room near you, if you're prepared to pay... or wait say, five years or so
Verdict
As a statement piece, the Sony KD-84X9005 is something else. It’s beautiful to behold and able to drop jaws to floors when graced with the right source material – and that includes vanilla 2K content. The football fraternity and Hollywood creatives should lap this thing up. Early adopters too – it's out this December – this is the best you can get until LG's similarly priced 84LM960V goes on sale and, as such, it seems unfair not to give this Sony a recommended award for its sheer technical prowess. For the rest of us, it’s probably best regarded as an elaborate signpost to where TV makers want to go over the next five years. I don’t know about you, but I’m well up for the journey. ®
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Sony KD-84X9005 84in ultra-HD TV review
COMMENTS
Re: Will it ever be cheap?
Ignoring any subscription, 25,000 royal portraits is something like 950 average price tickets to the RSC in stratford, or 1250 ringside seats at Giffords Circus, 431 of the poshest seats at the Edinburgh Tattoo, 500 return flights to Budapest. or 135 nights in the Lukimbi Safari Lodge in the Krueger national park. Or 4 Triumph Bonneville Steve McQueen Special edition. There are many more interesting things to spend your money on than 'casualty' or 'the X factor'.
Adding more pixels won't make 'Dallas' into 'Henry V'. Especially as the chance of anyone offering those pixels is slim.
Won't be many of these in Tesco.
Re: Nice to see
Human eye acuity is a maximum of 1mm at a typical viewing distance of 3m. So you'd need to be sitting within 2m of this set to be able to distinguish individual pixels (if you had perfect, or perfectly corrected, vision).
I don't think revolution means what you think it means.
Sky can't even offer us true HD now, it's only 1080i (not sure about Virgin), But I'm not sure how they are going to offer us 4K content within the next ten years without some serious spending on infrastructure, which they don't do anymore.
TV sure does look nice tho', I reckon they'll make great pretend windows when we're living on Mars.
Re: No need for the average consumer
>Same idiots that insist on valves sounding "better", I warrant.
Only those 'valve fans' are a self-selecting group, the test audience for 48fps cinema (self-correction, I had said 60fps in my previous post... but 48fps is more sensible as it is easier to downsample to 24fps) were film reviewers. Most of their feedback was negative, but it might not have been a fair test because a, the post-production and colour grading was not finished, and b, Jackson notes that it takes a while to for a viewer to 'settle in' to 48fps and the test footage was only ten minutes long.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/hobbit-48-fps-reaction/
Valves aren't inherently 'fuzzy', they can sound very clean and 'fast'. They do prefer to be left on, though. 30 seconds warm up before an evening's listening is acceptable for some, but I for one would probably go for the convenience of a solid-state solution if given a choice.
Similarly, vinyl: I have some albums on both vinyl and CD.. the low end on the vinyl can sound much more 'tangible'. However, music is commercially available at 24bit 96kHz+ (compared to CD's 16bit 44.1 kHz) and the equipment to play it back is not that much compared to a lot of hi-fi kit. A fair few sound cards, DACs and AV receivers already can.
