Months following Sony Malaysia’s unveiling of its 84-inch 4K LED LCD TV on September last year, we went to Sony Store at The Curve yesterday for the Malaysian launch of its smaller sibs: the 65-inch and 55-inch KD-X9004A.
4K what?
Ultra HD, or 4K as it’s better known as, is the marketing term to describe the insane amount of pixels you’ll be getting in these two TVs. It has double the amount of vertical and horizontal pixels from a 1080p display (1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600) to be at 3840 x 2160 or a total of 8,294,400 pixels. Photos taken with an 8-megapixel camera will display it on these TVs pixel for pixel, or at a 100% crop, for you photographers out there.
It’s worth noting that TV resolutions are traditionally measured by its vertical resolution (1080p has a vertical resolution of 1080 pixels) but 4K TVs are measured by its horizontal resolution instead. This means that a 4K TV is a 2160p TV. Even its horizontal pixels are not quite 4K (only 3.84K), but that’s another discussion for another day.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole further by calculating its pixel density, lets. The 65-inch model has around 68 PPI while the 55-inch model, 80 PPI. For comparison, a 65 and 55-inch 1080p TVs have only 34 and 40 PPIs respectively. By the way, even the Sony’s 84-inch 4K TV has a higher pixel density (52 PPI) than the 55-inch 1080p TV (40 PPI).
Don’t be put off by the numbers though; televisions are not meant to be viewed up close like mobile devices. For demonstration purposes, Sony Malaysia displayed a scanned image of a newspaper, on the 65-inch 4K KD-X9004A TV and on another 55-inch 1080p. Remember that at the same resolution, the smaller the TV, the higher the PPI, and yet the 28 PPI difference is staggering. The text on the 55-inch 1080p TV is almost illegible. The two images are taken just 10 centimeters from the screen.
Photo above is of the 65-inch 4K TV, photo below is of a 55-inch 1080p TV.
Features
The 84-inch launched last year was sold in beginning of January 2013 for a jaw-dropping RM99,000. Samsung showed off its 85-inch TV back in April that is said to be available this quarter. Sony on the other hand, is already shipping the larger TV and the current two 4K models carry the same features.
Adopting its previous experience with BRAVIA TVs, Sony’s TRILUMINOS Display technology widens the color palette bringing richer colors to mimic images in real life. Since 4K content are still very rare these days, the 4K X-Reality PRO Picture Engine automatically upscales lower-res videos from any source. We saw a 1080p YouTube video played back on the 65-inch TV at around 8 feet and it looks just as crisp as you would viewing 1080p videos from an external monitor 2 feet away.
As with any high-end TV, you can expect a host of connectivity features here. Supporting both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct, you could pair a compatible NFC-enabled Android smartphone, like an Xperia Z, with the TV to perform screen mirroring via Miracast. Pairing the device is as simple as setting the menu on the TV and tapping a compatible phone to the back remote, which has NFC embedded as well. Android 4.2 officially supports Miracast, however we weren’t able to get it to work with the HTC One when we tried yesterday. There is always MHL to fallback to, connecting the phone directly to the TV’s HDMI-in port.
Instead for down-firing speakers many TVs incorporate today to artificially increase the weight of the sound, Sony is adopting a forward-facing array of 2.2 channel speakers: two tweeters, two Magnetic Fluid Speakers, and two sub woofers.
The Magnetic Fluid Speakers uses the technology first developed by NASA in the 1960s, where the fluid replaces dampers found in conventional speakers. This design allows the TV to retain its thin design while still being able to spit out a full-range audio that is crisp and has less distortion. In our brief time with the TV, it has easily the best in-built speakers found in any TV to-date.
On the software side, the X Series TVs has Cinema Mode and Compressed Audio to deliver audio and visual presets that is very close to what the movie directors have intended, creating a cinema-like viewing experience.
If you happen to be a gamer, this 4K TV also has one more trick up its sleeve. Passive 3D TV projects two offset images on the screen at the same time while each lens on the 3D glasses filters in only one of the image to each eye, creating a sense of depth. With Sony’s SimulView Mode, it projects both players’ perspective to the TV at the same time, where special 3D glasses are required to only allow one of the offset image viewable by each player.
4K content
A full-length movie in 4K is said to be around 1 TB in size, and understandably there is still no commercial way of getting 4K content ‘broadcasted’. With the impending HEVC (High Efficiency Video Encoding) compression, or H.265, 4K videos could potentially be streamed with as little as 20-30 Mbps of bandwidth. Currently 1080p videos require around 10Mbps to stream.
As such, Sony is remastering several 4K titles into Blu-ray discs which will be complimentary for folks who purchase the TV. These movies include:
* Angles & Demons
* Battle: Los Angeles
* Ghostbusters
* Glory
* Godzilla
* Moneyball
* Spider-Man (2002)
* Taxi Driver
* The Amazing Spider-Man
* The Karate Kid (2010)
* The Other Guys
* Total Recall (2012)
Pricing and availability
Sony Malaysia said that the X Series 4K LED TVs are now available in all Sony Stores nationwide. The 65-inch model will set you back RM23,999 while the 55-inch model is going for RM16,999. More information on the lineup here: KD-84X9000, KD-65X9004A, KD-55X9004A.
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