Sony Unveils Cutting-Edge TV Tech Beyond OLED

 Almost exactly six years ago, I was lucky enough to witness what remains to this day arguably the greatest ‘TV’ demo I’ve ever seen. Sony had come out of nowhere at the 2018 CES to reveal an 8K LCD TV capable of pumping out an astonishing 10,000 nits of brightness while still producing HDR pictures that looked natural and realistic, with controlled colours and excellent black levels. So dazzled was I by this experience that I wrote an article for Forbes about it, which you can read here.

Since then Sony has continued to show more interest in brightness as a key component of modern TV performance than many of its peers. It always tends to favor aggressive light output with its LCD TVs, and was quick to adopt new Quantum Dot OLED technology, with its relative brightness advantage over standard WRGB OLED. If a new prototype Sony LED display I was lucky enough to be shown alongside a handful of other journalists in Tokyo recently is anything to go by, though, Sony’s fondness for brightness could be about to go to a whole new level.

The main point behind Sony’s demonstration of this new display technology appeared to be to show that the brand is now able to achieve extremely high levels of brightness (and contrast) from relatively easy to make displays without pushing electricity bills through the roof or running foul of today’s stringent power consumption regulations.

Sony’s experience with all types of TV technology (until Samsung introduced a couple of big-screen WRGB OLED TVs towards the end of 2023, Sony had been the only brand offering a range of TVs that used the whole gamut of WRGB OLED, QD OLED, Mini LED, and regular LED technologies) has led it to believe that the only way to achieve the sort of high brightness and contrast it wants at reasonable cost and low power consumption goal is to use Mini LED technology controlled by an advanced local dimming engine driven by an ultra-powerful AI-enhanced processor.

In more specific technical terms, getting the best out of a Mini LED screen for a potentially ‘real world’ display requires a processor that can separate incoming image data into LCD and backlight data as intelligently as possible in real time; a panel driver that can convert backlight data to analog levels; and an LED structure that can convert electrical signals into light as efficiently as possible. It’s in this trio of areas where Sony claims its new panel prototype goes beyond anything we’ve seen before

On the LED structure front, the new panel (we were shown various demonstrations using a 65-inch screen) combines a large number of dimming zones with a highly focused optical sheet to control precisely where the high brightness available to it is distributed. Sony didn’t state the exact peak brightness level the prototype panel targets, but it did say it was ‘in the same range’ as Sony’s new HX3110 professional mastering monitor. Which, if you’ve read my earlier article on that, is capable of reaching 4000 nits.

Sony has actually delivered 4000 nit consumer displays before, in the shape of its first 8K Z9G/ZG9 range. But those sets were famously expensive, and definitely would not comply with today’s power regulations!

The LED driver in Sony’s latest prototype screen technology is based around a new proprietary chip developed completely in-house by the Japanese giant that’s far smaller than its predecessor (Sony claims it’s the smallest such driver in the TV world, in fact), and so makes it possible for a TV to include a higher mini LED count.

This diminutive new chip also, crucially, is claimed to deliver the same level of performance power as its much bigger predecessor at a fraction of the production cost, enabling the resulting screen to deliver an increased LED count, more dimming zones and more peak brightness without ramping up power consumption or prices. In fact, Sony claims that because the screen’s light can now be controlled on a more localised basis, the prototype display actually reduces power consumption compared with Sony’s previous consumer mini LED TVs.

Sony’s new driver optimises the efficiency of the LED driving system too, requiring less current to ‘fire’ each LED and sustaining that lower current for longer each cycle. The drivers work on a frame by frame level to further enhance the display’s efficiency, and each driver is capable of handling six zones of four LEDs each, applying different amounts of current to each zone.

Clearly, getting all the new, improved drivers in Sony’s new prototype display to deliver the optimal results for constantly changing video images on a frame by frame basis in real time requires some serious ‘brain power’. Which is where a new generation of the Sony Cognitive XR processor we’ve seen on Sony TVs for a couple of years now comes in. Sony claims this has what it takes - essentially a 22-bit level of control - to optimise the prototype display’s backlight level across all gradations, from the image’s darkest to brightest points, for every LED zone and every frame to a degree we haven’t seen before.

So much for the theory. What you really want to know is how well all of this new tech translates into performance with an actual running 65-inch version of the Sony’s prototype screen tech. And the short answer, is very, very well indeed.

Up against the best

Sony was running its new prototype display alongside the 65X95L mini LED TV from its 2023 TV range. And despite the 65X95L having received rave reviews from pretty much all quarters for its combination of fine light control, rich colors and high brightness, the new prototype summarily crushed it across every key picture performance metric.

For starters, the new prototype produced levels of brightness with every bit of demo content we were shown that went far beyond the X95L. This was true, too, with both peak HDR highlights and full screen bright HDR images. While I wasn’t able to measure the prototype’s light output during the demonstration, I do know that the 65X95L is capable of producing nearly 1600 nits on a 10% white HDR window - and the range of extra punch the prototype screen produced made the X95L feel actually dull by comparison.

Just as importantly, the prototype delivered its spectacular new brightness while simultaneously hugely reducing the amount of backlight ‘blooming’ around stand-out bright objects. Sony was brave enough to use a test reel of aggressively mastered HDR content featuring numerous vividly bright and colourful highlights, such as fairground lights and neon signs, appearing right against inky black skies - and in every case, no matter how complicated the arrangement of such a contrast-rich image might be, the prototype screen was able to punch out the bright highlights with fearsome intensity at the same time the dark areas enjoyed fantastically deep, more or less OLED-like black levels. With scarcely any light ‘leakage’ escaping from around the bright objects into their dark surroundings.

I wouldn’t say blooming was entirely removed on our demonstration display, but it was the most suppressed by far I’ve seen with any mini LED screen to date. And Sony stressed during the demo that it was working to improve this aspect of the prototype’s performance even further - at which point, if Sony succeeds, blooming may well have become simply not an issue at all anymore. I wish I could show you photographic proof of this, but unfortunately Sony would let us take pictures during its demonstrations.

Unprecedented contrast

The prototype’s ability to put ultra bright highlights and inky black levels on the screen simultaneously in a way not seen in the consumer world obviously yields a huge sense of contrast. Which, Sony explained, was also a key motivation behind developing this prototype, since its new HX3110 mastering monitor has instantly created a sudden need for consumer displays to also start being capable of handling much higher contrast levels than they needed to before.

A spectacular knock on effect from the prototype’s enhanced brightness was a big increase in the image’s color volume. Its images looked substantially more vibrant than those of the X95L across the board, from the darkest tone all the way through to the brightest. And there was nothing forced or excessive looking about this leap in color intensity; on the contrary, the neon highlights looked more lifelike, more like you feel they’d look if you were looking at them in the real world.

Subtler parts of the image also still looked natural despite having more light behind them, partly because the Sony Triluminos color system deployed on the prototype has the gamut size to ‘keep up’ with all the extra brightness, and partly because the new finesse of the screen’s light controls allows the screen to deliver fantastic levels of tonal subtlety.

This subtelty together with cleaner object edging and the sheer range of light and color the prototype could show helped images look sharper and, especially, more three dimensional than those of the X95L, without any sense of the image being artificially sharpened or otherwise processed.

Even better than the real thing

It’s fair to say that the ‘as your eyes see the world’ aim that’s always been a key focus of Sony’s Cognitive XR processor is taken to a whole new level by the brand’s new prototype technology.

One of the most unexpected highlights of Sony’s prototype demonstration was the way it manages to reveal subtle brightness differences in the brightest parts of the picture as well as the more obvious high contrast areas. I was able to see subtleties of light in footage of bright skies and heavily lit interiors that I hadn’t been aware existed from viewing them on previous displays - an achievement that became particularly obvious on a version of the display I was shown that had the actual backlighting exposed, so you could focus on the extraordinary level of backlight control the prototype was able to deliver even in the most intense areas compared with previous Mini LED TVs.

The final part of Sony’s demo of its new prototype screen turned to power consumption, to prove that it was delivering the exciting picture enhancements we were seeing without requiring you to install a mini nuclear power station in your garden. In fact, running the same picture content simultaneously on one of the prototype screens, a 65X95L and one of Sony’s 2023 OLED TVs with power meters attached, revealed the prototype to be capable of consuming as much as 30% less power than the X95L, despite all the extra brightness and contrast the prototype delivers. Just because the prototype is that much more efficient at how it pushes power to each LED when ‘building’ each picture frame.

The OLED screen could still just about achieve a power advantage over the prototype with very dark footage, but whenever a bright shot filled the screen the OLED would suddenly leap to using as much as 20% more power than the new prototype Mini LED display.

It should be said that if Sony’s new display technology was ever actually to turn up in a consumer TV rather than just a prototype demo display, it would have to ship set to some sort of low-brightness ‘Eco’ picture preset that would substantially compromise the screen’s capabilities in order to comply with the latest TV power regulations. This would raise the prospect of some consumers potentially not knowing that they’d need to switch to a different picture preset to ‘unlock’ the full image potential their new TV is capable of.

There are, though, things Sony could do during, say, initial installation to help make people aware of this issue. And in any case, Sony’s demonstrations proved that even running in its most spectacular state, the new prototype can deliver its next-gen performance while actually running more efficiently than previous, much less dazzling screens have.

Sony has yet to reveal details of its 2024 TV range, and finished up by saying of the new prototype display only that we can expect to see more information about it released later in the year. From what I’ve seen already, though, coupled with the fact that I was invited all the way to Tokyo to see it, the prototype surely represents a key glimpse into Sony’s vision of the future of TV. And as someone who has personally always had a soft spot for brightness ever since HDR arrived on the scene, it’s fair to say I’m now very keen indeed to see where this vision leads.