And I'm back!
Guess I just miss you guys too much.
In this video, I'm going to review this Sony AF8 OLED TV, also known as the BRAVIA A8F
in the USA.
Hello everyone, Vincent Teoh from HDTVTest here...
I'm a TV reviewer and professional calibrator.
Allow me to introduce this TV beside me... it's the 55-inch Sony AF8, which is a 2018
OLED television from the Japanese brand.
On paper, its specifications are almost identical to last year's critically-acclaimed Sony A1
or A1E, featuring an ultra-high-definition OLED panel, the company's currently most advanced
X1 Extreme picture processor at the time I filmed this video in May 2018, HDR support
for HDR10, HLG or Hybrid Log-Gamma, and - following a firmware update hopefully in the near future -
Dolby Vision formats, Acoustic Surface sound technology where the entire screen acts as
the speaker, as well as Android Smart TV platform.
The main difference between the Sony BRAVIA AF8 and BRAVIA A1 is the styling: whereas the A1 or A1E
had a leanback design with a kick stand, the AF8 or A8F sits vertically on a table-top
stand with the lowest profile we've ever seen... if this was a car, it wouldn't be able to
clear any of the speed bumps dotted around Manchester.
The low-profile stand doesn't take up much space at all, so you can put the TV on a narrower
AV rack, in which case you can safely ignore the pair of rubber spacers behind the television
which is meant to add stability but is really not needed.
Should you choose to not wall-mount the Sony BRAVIA AF8, the screen will almost be touching the
surface on which you'll place the television, meaning that there won't be enough clearance
for a soundbar.
However, Sony believes that the onboard Acoustic Surface Speaker technology should be good enough to obviate
the need for an external soundbar, and to a certain extent we agree, but I'll talk more about
the sound quality later on in this video.
The OLED panel is wafer-thin, and there's an inconspicuous Sony logo at the bottom left
corner of the screen.
Our review unit still has a very slight lean back when inspected from the side, but it's
not noticeable from the front.
The connections are found on the left rear of the display.
As is the case with all Sony X1 Extreme TVs so far, there are four HDMI inputs, but only
HDMI input 2 and 3 are the full-bandwidth HDMI 2.0b ports that support 4K HDR video at higher
frame rates, chroma or bit-depth, and you'll need to manually enable HDMI signal "Enhanced
format" in the user menu to unlock this.
For cable management, Sony has provided cable ties behind the television, aandd...
not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 plastic covers to let you achieve the cable-free look you've
always been dreaming of.
Before moving on to talk about picture quality, I'd like to thank UK electrical retailer Crampton
and Moore for sponsoring this video.
If you're thinking about buying a new television, even if it's not this Sony AF8, please support
this channel by buying from Crampton & Moore.
I work very closely with them for the annual HDTVTest TV Shootout, and from time to time
they also loan me TVs 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.
If you've watched my review and comparison videos of the Sony A1 OLED, you'll probably
know what to expect from the BRAVIA AF8, but here's a quick recap, before I proceed to
explain some interesting findings on our review sample.
OLED is self-emissive...
every one of its 8.3 million pixels can be turned on and off independently
of each other, allowing for true blacks, vibrant colours and wide viewing angles... there's
virtually no loss of contrast and saturation when watched off-axis.
We rate Sony's X1 Extreme chipset as the best in-TV video processor on the market today,
based on a number of factors.
Scaling quality of standard-definition content is better than that delivered by any other
TV brand, however slight the advantage may be: this SMPTE RP-133 test pattern in 576i
looked crisp and detailed without excessive ringing or fizziness.
With high-definition material though, because the source resolution is higher, most high-end
4K TVs will upscale in a competent enough manner such that there shouldn't be significant
differences between various TV brands from typical viewing distances.
Sony's near-black handling is generally the cleanest among consumer OLED televisions, exhibiting
less noise and posterisation in darker areas than its rivals.
Another strength of Sony TVs is their [Smooth Gradation] Super Bit-mapping technology which
can smooth out in-source posterisation even further.
Now, LG and Samsung have introduced similar decontouring filter on their 2018 televisions, but
they are both tied to noise reduction control which can erase some fine detail...
Sony's [Smooth Gradation] control is much more selective, but it can still get caught out
once in a blue moon, for example in this scene from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
where engaging [Smooth Gradation] would scrub away the borders of the white tiles on the
building however subtle.
Motion performance is top-notch, as long as you don't use the wrong settings.
Slow panning shots in 24 frames per second movies were presented smoothly without telecinic
judder, and should you choose to use frame interpolation, Sony's [Motionflow] algorithm
on the whole doesn't introduce as much soap opera effect or SOE, or interpolation artefacts as
motion-compensated frame interpolation from rival TV brands.
There's black frame insertion or BFI available on the Sony A8F too, which can be activated by
setting [Clearness] to "High" in the [Motionflow] "Custom" submenu, but we think most people probably
won't be able to tolerate the drop in brightness and the increase in flicker especially for 50Hz
content we get in the UK and Europe.
Ok, let's check out some test data specific to our review sample.
As you can see from this macro shot here, the subpixel structure is similar to what
we saw on LG's 55-inch C8 OLED TV, suggesting that the Sony AF8 is using the latest OLED
panel from LG Display, but I'll explain later on in this video why you shouldn't get too hung up about this.
SDR colour accuracy was superb after calibration, with none of the 140 colour patches measured
in this challenging Colour Checker SG chart exceeding the humanly perceptible threshold
of delta error (dE) 3, translating to supremely realistic colours particularly when it comes
to skin tones.
When cycling through full-field slides, bright uniformity was excellent with no dirty screen
effect, vignetting or colour tinting on our review sample.
Near-black uniformity was good too without any vignetting or reverse vignetting...
I think by now you should know that thin vertical streaks are unavoidable in very
dark scenes on WRGB OLEDs, but we weren't bothered by those on our Sony AF8 or A8F review unit
in real-life viewing.
Next, HDR.
Given the supposed newer OLED panel on the Sony A8F or AF8, we were really surprised
that its peak brightness only measured 600 nits on a 10% window after calibrating to
D65 white point which is the standard for the film and broadcast industry.
Furthermore, in the most accurate picture preset, the tone-curve on our review sample
actually undertracked the PQ EOTF ST.2084 standard, which means HDR content will look
darker than reference.
Through calibration, we got the Sony AF8's EOTF to track closer to the ST.2084 standard,
but the TV rolled off faster - right after 100 nits - than most other OLEDs on the market,
and when you combine this with the conservative ABL or Automatic Brightness Limiter circuitry, HDR didn't
look as impactful as on LG's 2017 and 2018 OLEDs, let alone high-peak-brightness LED
LCDs such as the Samsung Q9FN or Sony ZD9.
DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage measured 99% which is in line with what we'd expect from
a consumer OLED TV these days.
Sony's philosophy to tone-mapping is heavily in favour of maintaining overall brightness...
the company believes this approach will better protect artistic intent than sacrificing brightness
to preserve specular highlight detail which may be very rare throughout the entire film.
As a result, in movies that are mastered to 4000 nits, very bright highlights may be missing,
such as this sequence from Batman vs Superman where the lightning bolts and the creases
on Batfleck's white shirt look more blown out than let's say on the LG C8 or Samsung Q9FN.
There's a bug in the internal Amazon Prime Video app where the top and bottom letterbox
bars in non-16:9 HDR shows such as Goliath will look grey rather than inky black.
The shade of grey is very similar to the background menu of the Android TV interface.
Initially we thought it was just a fault on our review sample, but I reached out to other
top AV journalists in the UK...
I'd like to thank John Archer, Steve May and Ced Yuen for checking and confirming the same bug
on their Sony AF8 review samples too.
We have informed Sony about this Amazon Prime Video HDR bug. They are investigating and hopefully will issue
a fix in the near future.
In [Game mode], input lag on the Sony AF8 measured the same as the BRAVIA A1 OLED, which is
hardly surprising since they use the same X1 Extreme video processor.
When fed a 4K signal, lag time was 31ms, but if you send the TV a 1080p video signal, such
as from the Nintendo Switch, latency will go up by one frame due to the upscaling involved,
resulting in an input lag of 47ms which is relatively sluggish by today's standards.
If you're one of those who enjoy the increased motion clarity that black frame insertion
brings, and can tolerate the flicker, we can confirm that BFI adds half a frame of lag
in both 1080p SDR and 4K HDR modes.
A couple more things before I wrap up this video.
The Acoustic Surface technology still delivers impressive audio clarity and localisation,
but we think its bass isn't as rich as last year's Sony A1 OLED, probably due to a change in
subwoofer configuration.
In case you aren't already aware, you can improve the bass by connecting your own powered
subwoofer to the [Audio Out] socket on the AF8 (or A1E for that matter).
We're slightly surprised Sony hasn't offered its own powered subwoofer as an optional accessory
for these Acoustic Surface OLEDs. It's an easy upsell, just like when you walk into
McDonald's, they always ask you if you want fries to go with your Big Mac.
The Bravia AF8 is an emissive display which uses organic material, and so there's a risk
of permanent burn-in if static content is displayed over prolonged periods.
Sony has implemented a number of anti-screenburn measures, such as pixel shifting, automatic
compensation cycle in standby, going into screensaver mode fairly quickly if there's
no activity on the Android TV interface, and screen dimming with static content.
But from our experiments, the screen dimming is quite aggressive with [Peak Luminance]
set to "High", and to a lesser extent, "Medium".
Here we're watching Sky Sports News, which understandably has some static elements such
as the bottom and side panels, but there's still movement in the active window.
Despite this, our Sony BRAVIA AF8 review unit - with [Peak Luminance] set to "High" - dimmed
the whole screen gradually. You can see that once we switched to another channel and
back, the picture brightened up to the original luminance level.
The dimming is not as obvious with [Peak Luminance] "Medium", and as far as we could tell, is
disabled with [Peak Luminance] "Low" or "Off".
Now you may ask, Vincent, why not just set [Peak Luminance] to "Low" or "Off" to get
rid of the dimming then?
Well, sometimes [Peak Luminance] "High" may be needed to obtain brighter light output
for daytime viewing, and [Peak Luminance] "High" is definitely necessary for HDR
to reach the maximum peak brightness this TV is capable of.
To clarify, we haven't seen the dimming take place when watching 4K Blu-rays throughout our
review period, but we don't know whether future HLG broadcasts of let's say football matches
can trigger the dimming. Perhaps Sony can look into refining the algorithm of its anti-screenburn
dimming to be less aggressive.
One final word about WRGB OLED subpixel configuration. Some people are concerned about whether the
Sony A1 or A1E is using last year's panel, the Sony AF8 or A8F is using this year's panel, and whether
an A1E OLED manufactured in 2018 will be using this year's panel.
As you can see from the macro shot of the subpixels, our Sony AF8 review sample uses
the latest OLED panel from LG Display, but peak brightness was only 600 nits anyway.
Bottom line is, there's no conclusive evidence of any performance differences between last
year's and this year's OLED panels, and all along, LG Electronics, Panasonic and Sony
have all stated that the OLED panel is the same between 2017 and 2018 models. They
may not even be aware that LG Display, from whom they purchased the panels, have modified
the subpixel structure.
In our opinion, there's no reason to obsess over whether an OLED TV has this year's or
last year's panel. Of more importance is the specific picture processing ingredients
implemented by any manufacturer.
And Sony's strengths are 1) motion handling; 2) clean-up and upscaling of bit-starved content,
and 3) colour accuracy after calibration, even though the Japanese company's OLEDs are
not as bright for HDR or as responsive for gaming as its rivals.
Between the Sony A1 or AF8, the A1 has slightly richer bass, but the AF8 takes up less space
either wall-mounted or not, so it's a toss-up...
we'd just buy whichever is cheaper.
The difference in peak brightness could just be down to panel variance or software... who's
to say that the A1 with the latest firmware won't have darker HDR too.
At a price that undercuts the LG C8 at launch (at least in the UK), the Sony AF8 is "Highly Recommended".
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