Vinny, can you help me set up this Sony OLED for comparison against the LG OLED?
Are you taking the piss?
I thought we did it last year.
Vinny, every year TV manufacturers come up with new TVs.
It's just like you buying a new pair of glasses every year.
Say, I haven't seen you wearing a new pair for some time now... is everything ok?
Is the calibration business still going well?
Yeah...
I'm saving up for a Daytona.
Didn't realise you're into cars... anyway, are you going to help me set up this Sony
OLED or what?
As a hooker might say after she's taken your money, "let's get this over and done with."
Hello everyone, Vinny Teoh from HDTVTest here...
I'm a TV reviewer and professional calibrator.
In this video, it's LG vs Sony OLED round 2, 2018 version.
On my right is the LG C8 which features the South Korean manufacturer's new Alpha 9 picture
processor, and this is the Sony AF8... also known as the A8F in the USA, whose main difference
from last year's BRAVIA A1 or A1E OLED is the design.
Now ideally I would have loved to compare the same screen size, but as luck would have
it, my LG C8 review sample is 77 inches, whereas the Sony AF8 is 55 inches, which makes assessment
of upscaling quality more difficult.
But I think what most video enthusiasts will be interested in is whether LG's new Alpha
9 processor can match or even surpass Sony's X1 Extreme chipset in terms of picture quality,
but going straight into the comparison, I'd like to thank UK electrical retailer Crampton and Moore for sponsoring
this video.
If you're thinking about buying a new TV, even if it's not the LG C8 or the Sony AF8, please
support this channel by supporting them.
I work very closely with the team at Crampton and Moore for the annual HDTVTest TV Shootout,
and from time to time they also loan me televisions to review, TVs that maybe some manufacturers
are not willing to send to me for testing.
I find the staff's knowledge of the products they sell to be excellent... they'll give
you unbiased, independent advice for your purchase.
So if you call Crampton and Moore on 01302 365 760 and ask for Richard, mention HDTVTest,
and he'll take care of you with great price and service.
Thanks again for your support.
After scrutinising numerous heavily compressed video clips, the Sony AF8 consistently had
the slight upper hand when it comes to near-black gradation and noise suppression.
In this episode of Father Brown from ITV, the dark walls on the AF8 exhibited less posterisation
and macroblocking than on the C8 even with [Smooth Gradation] turned off.
In another footage captured untranscoded from satellite broadcast...
I'd like to thank Mr David Laine who sells high-quality audio cables at flashbacksales.co.uk
for his help with these video clips... the black jacket had a smoother transition from
one dark tone to another on the Sony.
And finally, in this 2013 film Snowpiercer, again the jacket looked more pixellated on
the LG.
New for 2018, LG has added a decontouring filter which is meant to smooth out such posterisation,
and it does work to a certain extent, but the result is still not as clean as on the Sony.
Also, because LG has put the decontouring filter under the [MPEG Noise Reduction] control
which also applies some spatial noise reduction, it affects more fine detail than the Sony, detail that
videophiles would want to keep.
Even on higher-quality sources, the near-black gradation on the Sony AF8 is superior compared
with the LG C8.
In this scene quite early on from the 4K Blu-ray of The Revenant...
I've purposely slowed it down a bit so you can see the difference... the LG C8 exhibited
more posterisation and tonal jumps than the Sony AF8 as the camera fades to black.
To assess motion performance, let's start by looking at the smoothness of 24 frames per
second playback which is important for a cinematic experience when watching movies.
In this slow panning shot from the Blu-ray of Wall-E as the spaceship travels from the
left to the right of the screen, to my eyes the LG C8 looked a bit more juddery than the
Sony AF8, but it may be because it's more obvious on a 77-inch screen size.
I stress that the slight judder on the LG 77C8 is NOT telecinic judder, it's just the
stutter inherent in 24p material.
To clarify, [TruMotion] is off on the LG, [Motionflow] is off on the Sony, so we're testing native
24p playback.
Should you choose to enable motion-compensated frame interpolation or MCFI, in general Sony's
[Motionflow] will introduce less interpolation artefacts than LG's [TruMotion].
Here, I've set both TVs to their least aggressive MCFI preset respectively:
[TruMotion] "Clear" on the LG;
[Motionflow] "Standard" on the Sony.
This is our own custom-authored test pattern...
I'm not sure if you'll be able to see the difference because this clip is filmed through
my camera and then compressed by Youtube, but from where I was sitting, there's less tearing
and sparklies on the Sony.
So far, the Sony AF8 seems to be winning, but the next few sections will go mostly to
the LG C8, mainly due to less aggressive ABL or Automatic Brightness Limiter.
Let me explain what ABL is if you don't know.
Automatic Brightness Limiter is a protective circutry that's implemented mainly on emissive
displays such as plasmas and OLEDs to better manage power consumption and prevent components
from overheating.
On such displays, if there's no ABL, then when a bigger portion of the screen gets brighter,
the power consumption would go up unchecked and generate excessive heat, because more
pixels need to be driven harder.
What ABL does is to dim the screen if the bright elements take up a larger portion of
the screen, so for example when measuring peak white, you may get 300 nits on a 10%
window, but only 150 nits if the white fills up the entire screen.
When we say that an ABL algorithm is less aggressive or more relaxed, what we mean
is that a larger portion of the screen can get brighter before ABL kicks in.
Now, as you can see from this test pattern... again we authored this ourselves, really I
should be in the business of producing test patterns and discs, I'll sell millions and
never have to appear on Youtube and get people giving me s******* (cut off)
Anyway, as you can see from this test pattern, ABL kicks in on the Sony AF8 earlier.
The difference in ABL algorithms has a major impact in HDR presentation.
Basically, because of less aggressive ABL, the LG C8 generally looked brighter than the
Sony in non-dark scenes, which is not helped by the fact that our Sony KD-55AF8 review
sample only reached 600 nits of peak brightness on a 10% window after calibration to D65 white
point.
I'm showing you this flame-thrower guitar sequence from Max Max: Fury Road which is
mastered to 4000 nits... the LG C8 looked brighter and more impactful than the Sony AF8.
Note that sometimes the situation can reverse depending on the particular scene, because
LG's tone-mapping algorithm favours retaining specular highlight detail, whereas Sony's
prefer to maintain the APL or Average Picture Level at the expense of sacrificing some specular
highlight detail.
For example, in this scene from the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray of Pan, the LG C8 lowered the overall
brightness to retain the detail in the sun, whereas on the Sony AF8, the sun was slightly blown out,
but the benefit is that the picture looked brighter.
I think I've explained this before: that when a manufacturer tries to tone-map high-nit HDR
content to a display with lower peak brightness, they can choose to retain overall brightness
or retain specular highlight detail.
There's no ratified standard, there's no right or wrong here, it's just that LG chooses to preserve
bright specular highlights, whereas Sony prefers to maintain overall brightness.
Moving on, this is a paused frame from The Martian which I wanted to use to demonstrate
the respective banding removal technology on each TV, but the Sony AF8 looked a bit
too dark, because its auto-protective dimming has kicked in to minimise the risk of
screenburn, whereas I could disable the auto-dimming of the LG C8 from the service menu.
Anyway, if you can see past the brightness difference, there's already less posterisation
in the sky on the Sony BRAVIA AF8 OLED, but engaging [Smooth Gradation] really smoothed it out without
affecting fine detail.
On the LG C8 OLED, engaging [MPEG Noise Reduction] improved matters too, but it's still not as
clean as the Sony AF8.
Also, some fine detail on Matt Damon's face is erased...
I guess there must be some women of the #metoo movement who'd like that (to erase Matt Damon's face) too.
For gaming responsiveness, it's an easy win for the LG C8: input lag measured 21ms in
[Game Mode].
On the Sony AF8, 4K lag is not too far away at 31ms, but if you're playing 1080p games
such as from the Nintendo Switch, then the input lag goes up by an additional frame at
47ms, which will feel more sluggish than the 21ms on the LG.
Putting on some HDR games such as Assassin's Creed: Origins on the Xbox One X, we see a
similar behaviour to HDR movies playing out.
Generally speaking, the LG C8 will look brighter thanks to less aggressive ABL, but in scenes
where there's a particularly bright object such as the sun, the TV will perform dynamic
tone-mapping to preserve specular highlights, causing the picture to paradoxically look
darker than the Sony.
If you've found this video useful, please like and share it, and subscribe to the HDTVTest
Youtube channel for more videos like this.
Thank you for watching, and I'll see you next year for LG vs Sony OLED version 3.0... that's
if I'm still doing Youtube videos.
Peace!