Every once in a while, a TV comes through here,
and before I even open the box, I know I'm standing in the presence of greatness.
This is one of those moments.
Welcome back, everyone, I'm Caleb Denison and today
we're going to unbox, set up, and get first impressions on the Sony Z9J.
This TV, let's just call it what it is, it's insane.
Everything about it is insane.
Its peak brightness is supposed to be insane.
The price is insane.
This is Sony's attempt at saying, you know what?
This is the best and LED TV can be.
Let's find out if that's true.
Before we get into it, though, let's have a little reality check here for a second.
The MSRP on this TV for the 75-inch is eight thousand dollars.
MSRP for the 85-inch is ten thousand dollars.
Now, as I record this, you can get them both for about a thousand dollars less.
Seven grand. Nine grand. Still ridiculously expensive.
And if you compare that to like the LG QNED99, it's twice the price.
Is it twice the TV?
I doubt it, but we're going to find out. Anyway,
what do you think about all of that?
Leave me a comment down below right now.
And while you're down there,
please click like and subscribe, because you know what we're trying to do?
We're trying to get to a million subs. And you know what?
We're making some good progress. I appreciate your help.
Now let's get into this thing.
OK, can we just take a second and recognize what's happening here?
I, this is the first time I've seen a TV wrapped in, well I'm going to call it
Mylar. I don't think it actually is Mylar, but it's like this foil plastic.
What is this? I don't know.
But it seems extra special. And I,
oh, that new TV smell.
There's, this TV is definitely different.
OK, so here's everything that comes in the box.
Not a ton of stuff,
considering how expensive the TV is, mostly it's decorative panels.
Uh, these are going to help cover up the cables.
Speaking of cable management, here it is, four zip ties.
That's pretty much what we get.
A couple of legs, three different leg positions
that we'll talk about it a little bit.
Batteries for the premium backlit remote from Sony.
Not surprised to see that, but happy to see it anyway.
Some screws for those legs.
And then, of course, a bunch of paper that we don't really need.
So we'll just put that over there.
So as I just mentioned,
there are three different options for where you mount the legs on this TV.
The first option is right here in the center.
This is if you don't have a particularly wide stand.
We've got a couple of little nubs there that are going to lock into keyholes.
Put that in place
and then you're just two screws away from having each leg secured.
Your second and third options are going to be on the far sides of the TV.
So we have three evenly spaced key holes here.
If we want to leave a little room for a sound bar,
we can position it in the lower two here.
That's going to give us a little bit of clearance,
not a ton, but a little bit of clearance to put, uh, probably is going to have to be
a Sony sound bar, something else very slim. Or you can do as we're going to do,
which is go with the super stealth mount and put that in the upper two key holes.
And now we just need to screw these in. And we're in business.
Alright, here we are back of the TV shot
and not without a great deal of effort, by the way, this TV is stinking heavy.
I can only imagine how heavy the eighty five inches anyway,
more than the normal amount of stuff to talk about back here.
Let's start with the HDMI inputs, which are labeled very interestingly,
HDMI one not labeled at all, except that it's HDMI one.
HDMI two and three labeled as 4K one hundred and twenty hertz.
OK, HDMI four labeled as 8K,
4K one hundred and twenty hertz, which is interesting to me.
I'm going to actually check with Sony to see if there's any difference
between these ports, difference in the capabilities.
You'd figure it's just HDMI two point one,
right? But not necessarily.
So I'll check on that and I'll report back on that in the full review.
The other thing you want to notice back here are the binding post,
speaker binding post, gold, five way.
You can use banana plugs or bare wire here if you want to.
This is to use the TV as your center channel speaker.
So you would run speaker cable from your AV receiver if you want to do that.
Not to be confused with the S Center Speaker inport.
That's actually for use with Sony’s HT-A four speaker Dolby Atmos surround system.
So unless you own that, don't worry about that port at all.
Last thing I wanted to mention, oddly
enough, they put the Google assistant microphone speaker switch back here.
Not very easy to access.
So make your decision about
whether you want your TV listening to you or not now,
because you're not going to want to change it later.
And while I'm back here, I should also mention
tiniest power button ever also awkwardly located.
Now I've got some cable management stuff to do and a bunch of plastic panels
to put on, and then we'll flip this thing around.
And here we are all set up.
And did I mention this TV is heavy?
Have two or three helpers around if you're going to do this
without the aid of a professional.
But honestly, if you're going to mount this thing, call in a pro. Like this
TV is just too heavy
and too expensive not to get it done right. From the side of the TV
It's about what I expect fairly thick.
It has a very advanced backlights system. It needs room to breathe.
So that's to be expected, not super thin. From the front
it's a rather big black slab.
You have relatively thin bezels around the edge.
You also have the black matrix that goes around.
So it's not edge to edge screen like you might get with some of Samsung's
more advanced TVs.
But I think what really matters is
what's inside the picture that we're going to get from this TV.
And we don't get to see that unless we get to setting it up.
So let's get to it.
OK, setup time, and if you follow this channel, you know I'm
a fan of Google TV because it's so easy to use
and because setup is extremely easy. I'm going to use my phone for this
so that I don't have to do any typing on the television.
You're not going to see it
but I mean, there's not much to see
because through the Google Home app it's going to find the TV.
I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to give it certain permissions.
One of the most notable things
here, though, is that I can choose to allow it to recognize different voices.
So not only is it going to allow me to use voice control,
but if there's multiple people in the home, it'll recognize the voice
of the person and customize the content that it suggests for that person.
It’ll also customize the layout if you want to.
I love that. There's so much versatility here.
Anyway, after some basic
permissions are granted, the TV is going to proceed forward.
There are some more acceptances that you have to make here.
You can choose whether or not you're going to hand over personal information.
Again, that's going to change whether or not you get personalized ads.
Buyer beware. Just keep in mind that that's what you're going to do
if you don't accept it. It's not going to be very personalized
and I get it. One critical piece of this is the audio calibration.
It’ll first ask if it's going to be on a table top stand or mounted on the wall.
And then you want to position your remote where you normally sit. Press go.
It's going to play some sounds
and that's it. It should have optimized audio for your room.
From there, it's going to update.
This will take a little while, but not all that long.
And then you are up and running.
Your TV is fully set up,
you have accessed your Google TV profile if you set it up before. All of your apps
are there and you're going to be logged in automatically.
It's so fast, so simple. And I love it.
Now it's time to start messing with the picture settings
and I don't expect to have to do a lot of work here because Sony's out of box
picture presets are generally fantastic.
Also, I should note, I'm not getting bowled over with brightness
right now, which I think is great, because that indicates to me that this TV
is not going to be bright for brightness sake.
It's going to be selective about the brightness.
Out of the box the picture mode is standard.
This may work well for a lot of folks, but as you know I'm going to choose custom.
I will go ahead and go through here,
cinema, considerably darker, game mode, graphics
photo, and we'll land on custom.
Let's move down here.
The ambient light sensor is on by default,
and I notice that that's going to handle auto luminance level, the tone curve
and the white balance.
This is going to basically try and make
the TV look as best as it can, depending on your room environment.
Because I want complete control
I'm turning it off right now. But we'll test
that and we'll talk about it in the full review. As we move down
we can adjust the brightness if we want to.
Uh, there's gamma controls right here, which I love seeing.
That's just enough to be dangerous.
Uh, but really what we need to do is get into some of the
dimming settings and motion settings.
Auto local dimming is currently set to medium.
I'm going to leave this at the default
and see what happens when we change it later.
Peak luminance is turned off right now.
Now, as we know, this can have a dramatic difference on the picture quality.
So, again, we're going to play around with that
uh once we get into the full review. Down to clarity.
Uh, reality creation. Normally I blow right past this or just turn it off.
But the thing is, Sony's new XR A.I.
Cognitive Processor is so good
that this reality creation is actually really stellar.
I'm going to leave it on auto right now.
It's not so much edge enhancement as it is contrast enhancement.
And so we're going to play around with this
but I think the auto setting is actually going to serve us really well for that.
Uh, we'll leave some of this other noise reduction stuff off.
Smooth gradation is currently at low.
We'll leave it there again, because I think that Sony's custom
settings are generally what most people would want,
uh, even if they are wanting the most pure reproduction of the creator's intent.
Where are that changes, though, is motion flow.
Now, again, I think most
folks are going to be fine with custom where it's at its absolute minimum.
I am going to turn this off.
I know that's super polarizing, but I want to see how the TV does
without any motion smoothing. CineMotion, I'll go ahead and leave at high
for now, I want to see how it handles interlaced to progressive content,
also, 24p content.
Uh, high seems like an
interesting choice to be the default, but you really only have high, low, and off
so we'll leave it there. Under video signal
I'd leave the stuff at auto. There's no reason to change this.
It should automatically detect the signal and make the appropriate settings.
One exception may be when we get the game consoles running.
So we might end up returning to this
but for now, leaving everything on the default of auto is just fine.
And then under advanced color adjustment, I would not recommend that most folks
get into this section.
This is really meant for collaborators who want to make fine
adjustments and you really need to have measurement equipment
to do anything meaningful here, so just leave this section alone.
So what's the takeaway here?
Well, other than motion and maybe the clarity setting
where we got into the reality creation, there's not much that you need to do.
The custom setting is outstanding, as is the cinema setting.
Uh, I think if you want a slightly brighter picture for your SDR stuff
that you could make an adjustment to the overall brightness.
But generally speaking, with Sony,
you're going to get a great result with the out of box picture presets.
So those settings we just made were great for the home screen,
but they don't apply to apps. So we open an app. This is Netflix.
And as we can see, it's in standard mode.
So we're going to go ahead and replicate everything that we just did.
I'm going to move into the custom mode. Now because it is Netflix
there will be Netflix Calibrated Mode. If you're not familiar with that,
that means that it's going to optimize the picture quality for what
the creator intended. I'm not a huge fan of this.
I don't think it's necessary,
but if you like the idea of seeing everything on Netflix
the way it was intended, you can always turn that on.
We do see that the ambient light sensor is turned off.
So that's a good start.
Let's keep going down to clarity.
We see that reality creation is set to manual,
I'm going to move that to auto. Move down to motion,
it is on custom,
so we'll turn that off once again, and then leave
CineMotion at high and all the other stuff is at their default.
Now, let's pull up something in Dolby vision.
So I've queued up and paused
a show in Dolby Vision, we’ll go in and we can see right now we're at Dolby
Vision Bright, which honestly, I think is what most folks are going to want.
I'm going to change this
to Dolby Vision Dark because honestly, this TV is bright enough without it.
Again, Netflix Calibrated Mode is available, Ambient Light Sensor is off.
Let's keep going down to clarity.
Reality creation is currently off by default.
I think that's a Dolby thing.
I'm going to go ahead and set it to auto.
See what happens
when we play around with that. Smooth gradation still at low, motion
if I'm not mistaken, yeah, custom.
So we'll turn that off.
CineMotion is set to high and everything else needs to stay at default.
That is Dolby vision.
Now, let's pull up something in HDR 10.
OK, here we are on YouTube.
We've pulled up an HDR video clip, gonna hit settings and hey,
look, we're in custom. That's encouraging.
HDR mode is in custom.
Uh, we'll just double check everything here.
Motion is set to off.
All right. So it copied over some of the stuff that I did in
uh, either Dolby Vision or SDR.
Either way, I'm happy that HDR is set up, at least for the apps.
Now, let's pull up our Blu-ray player and see if anything copied over to HDMI.
Well, here we are with our Blu-ray player
and sorry to say, nope, didn't copy over to HDMI.
So it looks like we'll need to make settings for the HDMI inputs as well.
And you know the drill. I'm not going to drag you through this.
This is HDR. It's currently set to standard.
I'm going to move it to custom and make all the same settings that I did before.
The point here is that you're going to need to go ahead
and make adjustments for your HDMI inputs, although I believe once you make
the adjustments for one HDMI input, they can be copied over to all the others.
OK, so first impressions.
Well, first of all, we definitely won the panel lottery jackpot.
This may be the cleanest screen I've ever reviewed outside of an OLED TV.
Uh, I'm really looking forward to putting
some grayscale slides and seeing if there's any dirty screen effect at all.
Second of all, the brightness is definitely there.
Can't wait to measure it and see just how much brightness we're getting,
but the HDR punch is absolutely there for sure.
Overall, entirely favorable.
I think this TV is going to come out amazing.
The question isn't going to be, is this TV amazing?
I think the question is, is this TV amazing enough to justify its price?
That's going to be a tough question to answer,
but I look forward to doing so in our full review, which will be coming very soon.
Thanks, as always, for watching, everyone.
How do you feel about the fact that all the best TVs
are 8K TVs now, with the exception of a few 4K OLEDs? Leave me
a comment about that down below. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
And here's two other videos that I think you'll like.