I have a 2024 Bravia (K-77XR80) because I wanted an OLED TV with Android TV, to avoid yet another vendor spying on me (Google already does). I also hoped that a "premium" brand like Sony would offer a better UX than other brands.
Well, I was wrong. Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
The UI is laggy. It's as if Sony used a chipset that couldn't handle Android TV driving a 4k display or something. And to make things worse, the UI had to be filled with all kinds of animated transitions, which of course make lagging even more noticeable. If there was one thing to learn from Apple in the past 20 years, it's that a consistent UI framerate must be prioritized over everything (except maybe realtime audio). Dropped frames = cheap, trash UX.
Also, apparently all OLED TVs must periodically do these "pixel refresh" cycles, to lengthen the lifespan of the panel. Fair. But in Sony TVs this is scheduled a few hours after the TV was turned off, and the schedule cannot be configured. The operation itself is invisible, but when the TV comes alive to do this panel maintenance it produces AN AUDIBLE RELAY CLICK like a fucking CRT TV from the 90s. You watch some TV before going to bed, then in a few hours wake up to the sound of a solenoid switch. Then after about 5-10 minutes, the relay clicks again to power off the device, so if you didn't wake up to the first click, now there's a second chance! Yay! And I can confirm this relay sound isn't unique to this particular Bravia model, because I have a smaller one in the bedroom, and it's the same. (See also on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/vx2efk/sony_a80j_i_...)
Well when I got my first job at uni I bought a bravia tv just before Android TVs came out (around 2014 here), so it had whatever it was the OS before it and it was cheaper than the regular price.
Since Android TV and Google TV became the de facto OS for most of "premium brands", they stopped updating my TV around 2019 or so, and apps a bit after that. The youtube app became even more sluggish and slow, all other third party apps were gone. A couple years ago my sister messed with my TV so I did a factory reset and with that the youtube app went away too. Now it has only screen mirroring.
Which turned out to be absolutely great - I got to have a "premium brand" TV that I can keep it connected to the internet and use screen mirroring and send commands to it via its IP but it won't show any ad whatsoever because its OS is long outdated. And after 12 years everything but the "smart" part of it is working great as new. Of course it's not OLED whatsoever but I can't really care less - viewing experience is still great.
> apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
35 mm film projectors usually interrupt the light 3 times per frame, and switch frames while the light is interrupted. Some projectors only interrupt the light twice per frame, but I think those were earlier projectors. By your description, on an OLED the pixels just change to the new frame, with no transition. You might prefer an OLED with black frame insertion? (Although, I have an LCD with that and it gives me headaches)
> By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!
Normally you’d shoot at 180 degree shutter angle (exposure time is half the frame time). This produces a “cinematic” blur that doesn’t look choppy, especially when projected at the same rate. So if you’re shooting 24 fps video, try shooting at 1/48. This is slow compared to most handheld still photography, which is why you start to need ND filters on cine cameras, especially if you also want to shoot wide open.
Stutter is particularly noticeable for fast panning landscapes where there’s uniform motion across the entire frame. Very obvious if there are “gaps” in the blur because your brain will want to interpolate. If there are static/foreground objects, you probably won’t notice.
It still blows my mind that no OLED TV has yet added simple temporal blending between frames, the kind of which MPV has had for decades. They could even take it a step further and emulate the colour-dependent blending of LCD screens. But no instead it's the same terrible motion interpolation algorithms of 15+ years ago, or nothing.
> If there was one thing to learn from Apple in the past 20 years, it's that a consistent UI framerate must be prioritized over everything (except maybe realtime audio).
Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Vision persistence with high intensity light is an interesting phenomenon. This is why people still love CRTs, too. OLEDs do not create that much of a light by themselves, so no persistence of vision is present.
Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much? BTW, I'd rather have a proper relay in my devices rather than a high-power MOSFET which can short and has a shorter lifespan.
Your comment reminds me a couple of blog posts. One person wrote a 2500 word essay on something they hated so much. Then the thing got tuned or serviced or something, then they wrote 3000 word essay on how they love it. The kicker? The feature they hated most in the first was the feature they loved the most in the second one.
>Interesting issue on the UI lag. My 2022 4K Sony has no lag whatsoever.
Is it running Android TV?
>Also, why an audible click is so bothering? I can't fathom that part, sorry. Nitpicking much?
I would have expected a device that people put in their bedrooms to be silent. Or at least have an option in the settings to produce loud clicks at a different hour instead of 3am?
Yes, it's running Android TV. It also had some major updates along the way, and is still getting updates.
Personally I don't have such an expectation from my devices. Configurability would be nice, I agree, but no, I don't expect everything to be "solid state" in 2026.
> Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.
My guess would be that it's not so much a difference between projectors and OLEDs as it is a difference between old movies and new movies.
Personally I think that slow pixels is the wrong way to "fix" poor motion blur in movies.
Not really, it’s very common in the UK to not having curtains or closed curtains even if you live on the street level. You can walk in a town and literally watch TV through the windows.
In a tall apartment / skyscraper I bet not more than 10% ever have or close their curtain. Also they paid those prices to look at that view so they want to do that. (A flat there is £1-5M)
It was so fucking funny. I wonder what the engineer thought, who had to issue the SQL query which added Bono to literally everyone's collection. Like, I'm not surprised that management was so out of touch, but I'd expect the engineers to have a bit of common sense...
"We wanted to deliver a pint of milk to people's front porches, but in a few cases it ended up in their fridge, on their cereal. People were like, 'I'm dairy-free.'" -Bono
Literally imagining the milk man bursting in to dump a gallon of milk on some poor sod's cereal this morning.
Not only that, but the milk man also acts like he did them a huge favor. And hides his huge fortune in a tax haven, while relentlessly campaigning for the government to increase the tax burden on those who actually pay taxes.
>Despite being well known for his extensive charity work, Bono has previously faced backlash over his tax dealings, with critics claiming that he could have helped to eliminate poverty if U2’s tax base remained based in Ireland.
>Instead, it previously transpired that U2 often put their money through the Netherlands, where tax rates have reportedly resulted in increased profits for the Irish rock icons.
>Two years ago, Bono dismissed the criticism as “just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed. And that’s just one of our companies, by the way. There’s loads of companies”.
I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done, because so much of what makes it a bad idea is a consequence of the rest of the system.
Imagine if everything else surrounding the Apple ecosystem worked better. Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself. Imagine if people who do use Apple Music never had an album play without being actively interacted with. Imagine if the album cover wasn't low-key softcore gay porn. Imagine if you could "uninstall" an album you own, like how you can uninstall an app you own and never ever see it again unless you actively go out of your way to search for it on the App Store.
Would it still have been a violation of consent? Sure, yeah it would. But almost everything people complain about is related to how it starts to play when they don't want to (an issue with iOS/macOS and Apple Music that would be annoying regardless), or how the album cover sometimes unintentionally pops up on your screen (such as when you hit the play/pause button on Mac when macOS doesn't think that there's any active paused media, so macOS opens Apple Music), or how there is no way for them to get rid of the album once they own it. These things are pretty large problems regardless of Songs of Innocence.
I can sort of understand an engineer thinking that surely there can't be any major downsides to just giving away a digital good. And if the rest of iOS, macOS's, Apple Music and the album itself didn't have all these issues, it wouldn't have been much of an issue. Again, it would've been a consent violation, but developers at tech companies aren't exactly known for valuing consent anyway and everyone would've certainly forgot it by now.
> Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself.
Nice dream. My wireless headphones act like in the manual when paired with my phone, but the buttons on them always start apple music when paired with my laptop instead of muting or controlling noise canceling.
>> I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done
I don't even think it was a terrible idea. It was just one of those things lots of people irrationally hooked on to. "We're giving you all a free record". Enough people made it 'bad' because people like to make a fuss. The only real issue with it was the inability to remove it which they later rectified.
Eh no, sorry. The practical result is that a ton of people who have absolutely no interest in U2 has Songs of Innocence start playing when they don't want it. It plays when people turn on their cars. It plays when people connect to Bluetooth speakers. It plays when people want to resume Spotify playback but Spotify got killed in the background. It plays when people want to resume the YouTube video they were watching but macOS lost track of what's paused. It's a truly terrible idea in practice.
Apple didn't really rectify the inability to remove it. They released a removal tool, but that tool is long defunct. The only way to remove it these days is to contact Apple Support, from what I can tell on the web.
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