What might surprise some people is that the OLED also offers brighter highlights when watching content than the X900E is capable of. The LCD offers superior performance with test patterns for HDR brightness, but watching a still frame on real world content, those highlights are always brighter on the OLED. If the X900E were to ramp up the backlight to make the portion of the image brighter, it would wash out the surrounding shadows and ruin the contrast ratios. While we love objective data in our reviews of displays and feel it is important, right now objective data for HDR does not always correspond to the real world performance for certain aspects of performance.
On an Amazon demo reel, there is a wonderful image showing some LED Christmas lights against the darkness of night. With the OLED, these blue lights are both brighter than the LCD and offer a more pure shade of blue. The LCD is a bit washed out for the brightest blue highlights as well and the red taillights on a car are not as bright and pure. Dark areas of the screen on the LCD are not as dark, so you’re losing both shadows and highlights on the LCD when compared to the OLED. The LCD still looks very good, as the X900E is a very nice TV, but the OLED just improves upon it in all aspects.
Doing the objective measurements on the A1E for HDR, they certainly fall short when compared to SDR. We see around 700-730 nits of brightness with a 10% white window, which is good but short of the 1000 nits we can hope to see with OLED in the future. The major issue we see with the color measurements on the A1E is that we start to run out of luminance when compared to white. This is the known issue with current consumer OLEDs, which use a White OLED pixel and RGB filters on top of it. With the white subpixel available for each pixel, it lets you have brighter whites since you can use all four subpixels. When you’re trying to do a primary or secondary color instead of white, you can’t use that white subpixel and so the luminance level falls behind. Below you can see the saturations and color checker error charts, both with luminance included and without.
So the real issue isn’t that the colors are not accurate with tint or saturation, but that they are not bright enough. Now LCD displays, like the X900E we are comparing the A1E to, can get brighter and perform better on these HDR saturation sweeps and color checker.
However, as we’ve seen in our real world evaluation, they can’t hit those targets with real content as well as the Sony can. The ideal solution here is that we need new objective test patterns that use motion and background content to better simulate the real world, but right now we have to just rely on our subjective viewing. Doing that, the Sony A1E OLED offers a superior image despite lower objective scores.
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