TESTTHE BEAUTIFUL 4K ANDROID TV

A stunning 4K TV with great sound, but it has a huge price tag.

byNg Chong Seng Jan 2016

A stunning 4K TV with great sound, but it has a huge price tag.

TESTTHE BEAUTIFUL 4K ANDROID TV

Sony Bravia X9300C (65-inch)

While LG and Samsung have chosen to use WebOS and Tizen respectively to build their smart TV platform on, Sony has opted for Android TV. Let’s be clear here though: this is Android TV the smart TV platform, and not Android the mobile OS. We’ve seen some makers forcibly cramming the latter onto their TVs, and the results were always plagued by ugly UIs and confusing controls.Not so on this 65-inch, LED edge-lit X9300C.

The UI looks great because it’s optimized for a giant screen and carefully considered to show off the strengths of the platform. For example, it’s easy to project content from your Android or iOS device thanks to Google Cast support; and via the microphone on the ‘one-flick’ touchpad remote, you can do voice searching. And of course, it ties in nicely with Google Play to open up a world of apps.While the panel is fairly thin, it takes on an overall wedge shape so as to give more capacity to the powerful front-firing speakers that flank the two sides. As such, the X9300C is also wider than most 65-inch 4K TVs.

A flagship 4K TV in Sony’s Bravia stable, the X9300C is expectedly stuffed with top-end components. Along with the usual analog connections, there are four HDMI ports (alas, only up to 4:2:0 chroma), three USB ports, plus wired and wireless network support.There are no less than 12 picture modes on the X9300C, but I tend to select Cinema Pro as I found it to look right for most content even without calibration.

While you can tweak the white balance to dial the colors in, the Bravia still lacks some advanced color management controls seen on Samsung’s flagships.Although having local dimming set at the highest gave the deepest blacks, it also resulted in more instances of backlight inconsistencies. As such, I left it at low. The panel does go mighty bright, on a par with the Samsung JS9000. Because brightness is important for rendering HDR, hopefully the X9300C will be one of the Bravia TVs to gain HDR support via firmware update down the road.

Even without HDR, 4K content looked stunning. While this isn’t a fancy quantum dot-based TV, the Triluminos display and 4K Processor X1 pairing ensured a wide color gamut. Motion flow kept the images smooth and sharp in fast-moving scenes. If you watch a lot of 24p content, you can turn it off to avoid the soap opera effect. Ultimately, you won’t go wrong with the X9300C. Great image quality and great sound coupled with the strengths of the Google and Android ecosystems make this a winner.