On top of all of this, detail is also outstanding, with clothing textures, skin imperfections and complex patterns all rendered crisply but without artificial definition. There’s a rare purity to highlights, too, such as Love’s white jacket and the light panels above her head in the records room of the Wallace Corporation.Īll of these qualities combine to make an image that is brilliantly solid and has a lovely three-dimensional feel. The TV’s ability to recreate subtly different shades doesn’t come at the expense of dynamism, and contrast extremes such as the intro text at the start of the film emerge brightly from the pure black background. The neon lights and holographic billboards of Blade Runner 2049’s downtown LA pop from the overall gloom of the city in brilliant fashion, but skin tones are handled with realism-boosting nuance and the seemingly hundreds of slightly different shades of grey that make up the bark of the tree at Sapper Morton’s farm are made clear to see.

The seemingly effortless way that the A80L combines the spectacular with the subtle is quite extraordinary. The TV also lacks support for Dolby Vision gaming, despite Dolby Vision being present for movies and TV shows. One of these is also the eARC port, so if you use that to connect a soundbar or AVR you will have just one left for a games console or gaming PC. It's a little thicker than rivals such as the LG C3, but partly that's down to its actuator-based sound system, which vibrates the whole screen in order to generate sound.Īround the back are four HDMI sockets, two of which are HDMI 2.1-specified and support 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM. The A80L looks very similar to the A80K it replaces – which is fine, but the design is starting to look a little bland.

It sounds good by TV standards, too, and the feature set will be strong enough for all but the most hardcore of gamers. it's not a QD-OLED or MLA model) so we broadly thought we knew what to expect, but it stunned us during our extensive test by offering a picture performance with a near-perfect balance of the spectacular and the subtle. It's based on 'traditional' OLED technology (i.e. The Sony A80L is the TV surprise of the year.

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