The 2018 CES has shown us its usual dazzling array of weird and wonderful TVs, both real and ‘out there’. Samsung had its 146-inch Micro-LED model, with its self-emissive LED pixels and unique modular design. Samsung also showed off an 8K QLED screen that’s actually coming to market that uses 10,000-plus local dimming zones and a self-learning upscaling system. LG Display let the media get its eyes on an 88-inch, 8K OLED TV, and a 65-inch OLED TV that mechanically rolls up like a retractable projection screen.
For me, though, the screen I found myself most unable to take my eyes off was the 85-inch, 8K, 10,000 nits of brightness screen on show in a ‘concept corner’ of Sony’s CES stand.
This is not, of course, a TV that’s going to be available to buy anytime soon (though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a much ‘milder’ version of it turned up in the latter stages of 2018). But it does shine a light - literally! - on what feels to me like the direction TV technology is headed in.
First, let’s consider that 10,000 nits of brightness. This is an important figure in AV terms because it represents the outer brightness limit of the industry’s definition of high dynamic range (HDR) video. The brightest commercially available HDR content around right now tops out at 4,000 nits, but there’s no reason it should stop there in the future. Certainly, it will go way higher if Dolby has anything to do with it!
Unfortunately, Sony hasn’t been able to confirm for me if any of the content being shown on its concept screen at CES was actually making full use of the panel’s claimed 10,000-nit capabilities. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that I was seeing both image highlights and general brightness levels that were stretching far, far beyond anything I’d seen on any screen before.
The incredible intensity of the sun racing across Gran Turismo Sport’s beautifully rendered skies; the headlights of cars driving through a city at night in a beautiful, seemingly specially shot video clip; sunlight blazing off the spectacular bodywork of a pair of sports cars racing through a desert. All these image clips looked so intense you almost had to squint at them - as you would in the real world.
The key word there, though, is actually ‘almost’. For contrary to what I know many people reading this might expect, even the brightest parts of the image on this claimed 10,000 nits screen didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. They didn’t hurt my eyes. They didn’t make me worry for the safety of children, or send me rushing off to smother myself in suntan lotion. Even though the area of Sony’s stand where the screen was appearing was blacked out (apart from the light being cast from both the 10,000-nit screen and five other more ‘normal’ screens sharing the space).
What the boldness of the highlights DID do, on the other hand, was make the pictures look more stunningly realistic and dynamic. More like real life. More direct. More intense.
Some of the demo content Sony is showing has extreme brightest peaks appearing within the context of generally much higher light levels than we’ve seen on an LCD TV before, so that they don’t stand out too brazenly. But actually, as noted earlier, even when the brightest images elements are ‘blaring’ out of a dark setting, they still just look compellingly realistic rather than something you should only watch with sunglasses on.
Going back to the point I made a moment ago about Sony’s 8K beast is capable of a much brighter ‘baseline’ brightness performance than any other TV I’ve seen before, this underlines the importance of brightness to delivering truly realistic images. Shots of villagers embroidering on a bright sunny day show looked incredibly life-like with 10,000 nits (or so) of light output to define them.
These shots showed, too, that it’s only when you’ve got this sort of real-life brightness at your disposal that colors truly start to look representative of reality rather than a construct limited by the screen technology of the day.
The yellow and orange sports cars also explode off the screen as if you were standing right next to them under the desert sun. The embroidery work of the villagers looks like a work of infinitely subtly toned art. Skin tones looked utterly natural in all filmed light conditions, while the effortlessness with which the screen can deliver subtle light elements in dark areas maintains the sense of tonal subtlety and naturalism in even the darkest corners.
The range and finesse of color the Sony 10,000-nit screen delivers aren’t just down to its brightness and seemingly outstanding color processing, though. It also owes a debt to the screen’s 8K resolution, which made the efforts of the actually excellent 4K Sony Z9D running the same material right next to it look almost out of focus by comparison.
As with the already almost unnervingly good 8K upscaling exhibited by Samsung’s 8K prototype LED TV (previewed here), the upscaling processing Sony is using in its own 8K demo screen, delivered by a working sample of the brand's in-development X1 Ultimate processor, really is sensational. It even manages to turn the video game graphics of Gran Turismo Sport into an epic visual feast full of so many extra pixels, so much extra color finesse, so much extra depth, and so much extra object-based clarity that it really does sometimes seem to look more like real video than game graphics. Especially as the effortless clarity doesn’t drop at all when cars are flashing across the screen, or the camera is panning dynamically around the track.
It isn’t just in the bright, colorful content that Sony’s CES-stealer makes its mark, though. Amazingly for the amount of brightness it was pumping out, it also enjoyed deep but also stunningly detailed black tones. In fact, dark parts of the picture probably looked as natural as I’ve ever seen them on an LCD TV. Or any TV, period. Perversely, it’s almost again as if you actually need all that brightness to make dark scenes look truly realistic.
For the sake of, well, humor, mostly, I might as well point out that I did find one problem with Sony's concept set. Namely the appearance of shadowy vertical banding down the screen in bright, mostly monotone areas such as uniform blue or grey skies. But this is essentially irrelevant in an article such as this.
I’ve kept saying how ‘realistic’ pictures look in this article, but in truth the pictures from Sony’s 8K, 10,000-nit screen actually look more beautiful than reality. And that’s an experience I simply can’t wait to be able to install in my living room. Assuming Sony or anyone else can find a way of delivering so much brightness without running foul of the consumer world’s increasingly prohibitive power consumption rules. This was, after all, the first CES in history to suffer a massive, Convention Center-wide power cut.
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