Sony’s second-generation QD-OLED TV is very special indeed
4K TV | £3699 (65in)| whf.cm/SonyA95L
Very few TVs have been trailed as heavily as the Sony A95L. Revealed and demoed way back in March, then made available to us for an afternoon of testing at Sony’s UK HQ in August, it has taken until now for the A95L to make it into shops and into our test room.
It’s not as if Sony really needed to try that hard to build excitement, either: the A95L is the successor to the A95K, arguably the best TV of last year if you don’t take price into account. One of the two first QD-OLED TVs launched, it trumped its Samsung S95B rival by deploying its brightness-boosting, vibrancy-adding Quantum Dots in a more considered fashion – and by offering a far superior sound system to boot.
The promise of second-generation QD-OLED panels is an even brighter and more efficient performance; but we were just as excited to find out how the team at Sony could refine the performance further with an extra year of experience with the new panel technology.
As you might expect, the Sony A95L is a very expensive TV, coming in at £3699. Of course, what matters is how much it costs against current rivals – and it’s bad news here: the A95L is priced significantly higher than the LG G3 and Samsung S95C – and that’s before you take into account the significant discounts that are regularly being offered on those models, which have now been available for a few months.
Will the A95L come down in price? Almost certainly, but Sony doesn’t go nearly as aggressive on discounting as its South Korean rivals, so it seems unlikely that you’ll ever be able to buy the A95L for less than the equivalent G3 or S95C.
Given that the stand on the A95K was – though attractive – very heavy, it is perhaps not surprising that Sony has, for the A95L, opted for a simpler design consisting of two aluminium feet. These feet sit at the extremes of the bottom edge of the TV. Sony says this has been done so that they don’t create reflections on the screen, but it also gives the set an extremely wide footprint, which means you need an equally wide piece of furniture – at least 145cm in the case of the 65in model we are testing.
The 77in model includes the option of having the feet installed more centrally so that the TV can have a narrower footprint; we wish the 55in and 65in models did too (Sony says there is simply no room within the ch
