As some of you might know, the Sony MASTER BRAVIA OLED A9F TV series has been in Malaysia for quite some time since August 2018. It has two variants, the 55-inch KD-55A9F and the 65-inch KD-65A9F retailing at RM14,999 and RM21,999. We have already covered the official launch, but we have been recently been invited to have a closer look at its features and what it can do.
More than just a regular TV
Like smartphones, most modern TVs look more or less the same. The A9F TV series is just as huge upfront but that's not the point. The TV was equipped with an OLED screen panel and the bezels are quite thin all around to maximize your viewing experience as much as possible. On the back, the TV can be supported by either a huge stand or a wall-mounting mechanism which can be paired universally. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
A pretty big TV stand there, it hides all the necessary ports, actuators and subwoofers
It also helps the TV stand as straight as possible, with a slight tilt of 5-degrees
The hardware used for the Acoustic Surface Audio+
The picture was taken in Singapore back when the Sony A1 series showed up in Singapore
You might have noticed that it also doesn't come with any speakers which are normal, but not for the for A9F TV series, the speakers are sort of like hidden behind and on the OLED screen itself, this technology feature is known as the Acoustic Surface Audio+. We have mentioned this before a long time ago but basically how it works is that the sound will come directly from the OLED screen panel supported by three actuators behind it, this will cause some sound vibration and acoustics and backed up by two side-facing subwoofers for some extra bass effect.
Comparing this with other modern TVs around, the A9F TV series sounds quite good on its own without any speakers attached. That being said, I wonder if we could actually see this kind of technology on smartphones one day.
OLED display with flying colours
Continuing on with the design aspect, not many TVs are adopting OLED screens because the majority of them are either LED, LCD and some QLED ones. All these screens have good quality stuff, but OLED is just on another different level. Tech-savvy smartphone users know this, as smartphones with an OLED or AMOLED display shows the best colour concentration.
Anyway, the A9F TV series OLED display is truly beautiful in the sense that it balances all kinds of colours and shades well, yet able to show the clarity of it nicely. During the hands-on experience, the A9F was compared against other two TVs which has similar specs and it came out on top thanks to its Picture Processor X1 Ultimate, Pixel Contrast Booster, 4K High Dynamic Range and of course its trademark TRILUMINOS Display. According to Sony, the A9F TV series is able to show true black because of the 8 million self-illuminating pixels on the OLED screen, which means that if there's no colour on that particular area, then the pixel will just not appear at all.
Beautiful colour contrast, but this picture does no justice at all. You will have to experience it in person
Sony Malaysia continued to showcase the A9F TV series prowess in colour contrast, by showing off the HDR feature to show how accurate it is to spot "invisible" birds coming out of a hat video. Comparing this with the other TVs, they had to scale down their Vivid mode to spot it, while the A9F TV doesn't need to. In other words, with the A9F TV, you won't have to miss out important details without adjusting the settings. It's also worth mentioning that the TV can go up to 100Hz.
Extra features - Panel Refresh and Voice Assistant
So far the OLED display sounds pretty solid but what good of it if the colours are burnt into the screen? It's a pretty common issue for TVs for years, especially when the years pass by and you can actually see the colours imprinted on the screen when turned off. Well, Sony has figured this out too and to solve this weakness and they have pre-installed this feature called Panel Refresh which is a pretty cool concept, it literally can "self-repair" by removing the burnt in colours and restore it under an hour or so. The best part of this is that you can access this from the settings and just use it once a year for maintenance and won't affect the TV's lifespan (or so they say).
On top of that, if you use Google Assistant (or Google Home) a lot, you can also fully utilize to with a hands-free experience by commanding the TV or from your smartphone via Bluetooth. Besides Google Assistant, the A9F TV series works well with Amazon Alexa.
So those are some of the highlight features we got to check it out from our hands-on experience on the Sony MASTER BRAVIA OLED A9F TV series. If you want to know more about it, you can visit the official website right here and stay tuned for more hands-on articles at TechNave.com.
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