Sony XR48A90KU 48" 4K UHD OLED Google TV

Smart TV

The XR48A90KU is an example of a smart TV. On a practical level, this means once connected to the internet, you can access an enormous and ever evolving range of different applications to use on your TV.

The most useful of these are often the “catch up” applications which allow you to access the larger broadcaster’s recently aired programmes. Missed an episode of your favourite programme? Simply log in to the respective app and watch it at your leisure and convenience. Or have you ever got home to find you’ve missed the start of a BBC show you’ve been looking forward to watching? Simply press the green button to jump back straight back to the beginning!

A smart TV label allows you to stream from your favourite paid services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime as well as cast videos from a range of sources straight to the TV screen with simply the tap of a button on your personal device (phone, tablet, laptop, etc).

4K (Ultra HD)

The picture quality that is associated with a 4K television is also out of this world! With a resolution that is four times higher than full HD, you get four times as much picture detail (on media filmed in 4K). From being able to differentiate the hairs on a lion’s mane during an Attenborough marathon all the way to watching a panning cityscape shot and realising you can make out the detail of every building, 4K means delivery of a crystal clear picture every time.

HDR Support

This model of TV also has HDR (High Dynamic Range) support as standard. Though it is one of the most widely used buzzwords in the TV world, it is also possibly one of the least well understood (thanks in part to every manufacturer having different terminologies). Full HD TVs (with a resolution of 1080p) aren’t really worth putting HDR support on since the picture quality isn’t quite detailed enough for an enormous difference to be discerned by the human eye.

Once you have the detail of a 4K television however, HDR can transform a picture from looking great into looking absolutely breath taking. The two most noticeable effects of HDR support are better lighting (through bigger ranges of both brightness and contrast) and more realistic colours (through 10 bit colour depth instead of 8 bit). Using both of these features in tandem allows a TV to play HDR supported media that looks more like the viewing the real world than any TV technology has ever allowed.

The lengths that companies from all ends of the media spectrum have gone to in order to implement HDR standards and support should speak extremely highly about the end product quality. In short, HDR support means more detail in both bright and dark scenes, more realistic transitioning between the two when simultaneously on screen and fantastically vivid colours that pop, catch the eye and look incredibly realistic.

OLED

Most exciting of all is the nature of how the XR48A90KU generates the picture for you to view. Instead of a normal LED system, this model is an OLED. Instead of shining a few lights through multiple tiny, coloured filters that turn on and off (as in a standard LED set), OLED technology means that the individual pixels themselves emit coloured light and can turn on and off independently. Practically, this means no colour bleeding or blending, no halos around bright objects on a dark background, pixel perfect edges and most noticeably of all true black when viewing a night sky for example.