So the last time I bought a TV was probably 10 years ago and I didn’t really pay much more attention than that it said “4K” and wasn’t too expensive. It’s a Samsung something, I don’t really know. It’s 55”.
I decided to finally upgrade and went down the research rabbit hole this time and landed on the Bravia 8 ii, in theory, before ever actually seeing anything in person. I was mainly just looking for good picture quality for watching movies in a dark room, maybe some video games as well. Leading competition was LG G5, but I was also considering if Mini LED would be good enough considering it would still probably be a big upgrade compared to what I already had, and if I was just getting too worked up about specs and reviews.
I went to Best Buy today to check them out in person and the first thing that immediately stood out to me was that OLED was clearly way better looking than Mini LED, ok immediately crossed that off the list and went to comparing OLEDs.
I ended up getting someone who actually just worked for LG masquerading as a sales rep, who went straight to their models. They looked very good, the C5 honestly seemed almost indistinguishable from the higher tier G5 and the pricing was attractive. When I went to look at the Sony models though there was just something about them that seemed more natural or warm maybe compared to the LGs, like the LGs were a bit brighter maybe but also just more clinical or something. When I told the guy I was interested in the Bravia he said he was “surprised” and went on a long rant about how QD-OLED is actually not actually worse compared to WOLED, and how Sony just buys panels and uses software (Google) from other manufacturers and doesn’t even make their own and listing off a bunch of ratings lists and stuff with LG at the top.
Anyways I stuck to my gut base on what looked best to me and got the Bravia 8 ii 65”. I just set it up and the first thing that popped up in the app was a recommendation for Inception on Prime and I was like ok sure. I just accepted the default Prime auto calibration or whatever and my god it looks fucking incredible. I’m exited to try out some of the Sony Core stuff that is supposed to be really high quality and I feel like I should now get an actual Blue-ray player and movies, considering a PS5 for this purpose as well as games (also haven’t bought a console in like 10 years)