Charlie Brown on Amazon 5 years ago
12/01/2017, 13:09 PM
As Good As They Can be Made – With a Few Drawbacks
At least for my eyes and the way I enjoy TV, there is nothing like a Sony: colors are vibrant and sharp yet natural enough so they don’t feel forced into you and sending TV programming to the realm of the UHD imagination, were things look amazing but definitively not real. In most of the other non-OLED UHD TVs, image often looks like everything is wearing an extra cover of make-up, which can be good in certain cases (animation, visually extreme Sci-Fi) but it looks completely and hopelessly artificial most of the time. UHD programing looks absolutely impressive in this TV; in terms of image quality, this is the best TV you can get at this size, period. However, here is where this entire marvelous world ends, some of the flaws of this TV are too great and too obvious to ignore. Granted, image rendering and image quality should be the most important feature on a TV and that’s why I give it 4 stars despite what I’m going to describe
The first obvious flaw is the remote control. Seriously Sony? The control UI is just above garbage level, with tinny buttons that look and feel the same all over the remote and a very awkward wheel-type selector in the middle. Want to pause a program? Use the same type of tinny button you use to Play, Fwd, Back, mute, sound, input, etc., it is impossible to operate this remote without having to look at it carefully which quite honestly is very silly to say the least. Add to that the remote is not lighted and that its shape is a perfect rectangle (hard to know what’s front and what’s’ back) and you cannot operate this remote in the dark which will be most of the time, at least for me. It also look and feels really cheap, not worthy of the status of this TV, I have seen much better remotes on TVs half its price. The remote range is also very narrow and it takes ages to react during the first minute the TV is turned on. The only thing that works pretty good I would say is the voice recognition but its use is limited to a few apps, and it cannot be used to control the TV settings or move around the TV UI (Really Sony?)
Then, the poor UI designing ability of Sony moves into the TV. The Android TV interface looks awkward and counter-intuitive to operate, the learning curve is steep, having to go back and forth many times and spend an awful amount of time learning to use it. It is also very slow to respond. The way to manage apps is cumbersome, and its “Discover” menu option seems like a very good idea but again its use is limited to a few apps and there are some parts of that section that cannot be changed or customized. So if you don’t particularly like that section too bad, you have to live with it, you cannot even hide it
Finally, I spent months trying to fix an issue with the Wi-Fi not working even if the status said connected, having to reconfigure the network several times, etc., very frustrating. Sony support was simply useless, I ended up stumbling into a solution on a messaging board and it was something that didn’t work for everybody, I was lucky it worked for me. So take a notch down for Sony’s technical support, or better said lack of it
Oh, one very positive thing is the sound, if you connect the TV to a Dolby Digital capable sound bar or receiver you will get pure Dolby Digital sound straight out of the TV which is something not all TVs support, on this respect Sony has been always very careful with the sound capabilities of its TVs, very smart as sound is a complement to the image
Overall and amazing, visually stunning TV with a sub-par UI and Remote Control. The remote can be fixed with a universal one but you will have to live with the deprived interface. But image will always look gorgeous, that’s a fact