Are my expectations too high?

[miniman]

Spurred on by The Grand Tour being available in 4k, I bought a Sony KD43XD8088BU to replace my long serving Toshiba panel which the kids had dinged in a couple of places. I've just emailed ao.com to ask if they will take it back. Grievances:

• Remote control is slow, buttons are hard to press and is exceptionally sensitive to needing to be pointed directly at the TV
• Commands are laggy - e.g. volume sometimes has no effect, then suddenly fires a gazillion commands
• Amazon Prime app randomly chose to stop seeing (working in other apps) internet connection - factory reset needed
• Amazon Prime app only plays audio on 4k regularly
• 4k playback is juddery (50mb ineternet)
• Picture seems a bit, well, meh. Not expecting the fake punch of retail display mode and maybe I'm seeing what it's actually meant to look like but from anything other than sitting perfectly in line with it appears washed out
• IR Blaster doesn't work with Sky box properly (known issue, no fix)
• Menus are slow and dimwitted

Gah. I was so close to buying a Samsung.

[gizlaroc]

All LCDs have a terrible viewing angle, unless you go for an IPS panel, but then they have really, really poor black levels.

I love Sony sets for picture processing but they are awkard to set up properly as you have settings all over the place in the menu system.

Try the following.

Find the eco setting and turn the light sensor to on.

Then chose the scene select as cinema.
Now go to picture and chose user.
Backlight 10 (only with light sensor on! if not, then around 4)
Brightness 49.
Colour 47
Contrast - play about with it but on Sony LCDs you can get to around 95 before clipping)
Motionflow Off (but try clear)
Sharpness - play with it but do it with the menus up so you can see when it is adding noise.

Then on the next page (if the menu is the same on that set as the XD90)
Turn everything off.
Gamma 2.4 (maybe gamma -2 on that set)
Colour Temp Warm 2.
You can try the edge enhancer, dyanmic contrast etc. on Low and see what it does.


But having all ECO stuff to off and light sensor to on is important, Sony's have a really good light sensor, it will crank it up but not too much when needed and drop the backlight to 4 when it is the evening, which is where you want it to be.


But the viewing angle thing is no better on the Samsungs, all VA panels have really poor viewing angles.

[miniman]

Appreciate the detailed reply thank you. I will give it a try. At first glance there's no back light setting but it must be in there somewhere!

[VEX]

Have you done any of the updates to it yet?

They take an age but we always do them and have not seen any of the issues you are describing on the Sony'a we have set up form clients.

V.

[MrOrange]

Also, I find the Sony App for Prime is crap (actually most of the apps are rubbish now) so I bought a Fire TV and that's ace! Rips through 4k no worries and no delays on my TV.

(And do the settings thing above, too)

[davek_964]

MrOrange said:

Also, I find the Sony App for Prime is crap (actually most of the apps are rubbish now) so I bought a Fire TV and that's ace! Rips through 4k no worries and no delays on my TV.

(And do the settings thing above, too)

The one catch is that Fire TV doesn't do HDR or DV - I prefer the Fire apps for Prime / Netflix to my TV Apps but if I want HDR or DV I have to use the TV Apps.

[Ransoman]

Definately do an update if you haven't already.

I have found with every brand new LCD tv I have bought that the screen needs 20 hours or so before the picture "Settles" and starts to look good. I can't explain it and others probably think I am mad.

The Poor viewing angle thing hasn't been an issue with LCD Tv's for a few years now. I haven't seen a tv that distorts the picture or colour at an angle since around 2010.

[gizlaroc]

Ransoman said:

The Poor viewing angle thing hasn't been an issue with LCD Tv's for a few years now. I haven't seen a tv that distorts the picture or colour at an angle since around 2010.

Any VA panel will colour shift and raise black levels once you sit off centre, just the nature of their design, you can hide this a little with zoned backlighting, but the colour shift will still be there.

An IPS panel won't do it until you get seriously off centre, but then the black levels are no where near as good.

The Samsung KS8000 I had was terrible, worse than my Sony W905 that I was thinking about replacing it with.

I think a few years back you noticed it even more because they really struggled to do black full stop, so if your start point is only just acceptable it doesn't take much of a degradation to put it passed the point of acceptable.