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Modern tech life teems with longstanding quandaries, questions that never seem to go away. Mac or Windows? Turn off the computer every night or let it sleep? Plasma or L.C.D.?
Fortunately, that last question will soon have an answer. There’s a new TV on the block, and its picture is so amazing, it makes plasma and L.C.D. look like cave drawings.
It’s called organic light emitting diode, or O.L.E.D. This technology has been happily lighting up the screens of certain cellphone and music-player models for a couple of years now, but Sony is the first company to offer it in a TV screen. It’s called the XEL-1, and it’s available only from SonyStyle stores. Its picture is so incredible, Sony should include a jaw cushion.
At a cooperative Best Buy store, I did a little test. I set the XEL-1 up next to state-of-the-art plasmas and L.C.D. sets — all hooked up to the same video signal for easy comparison — and recorded the reactions of shoppers and employees. Their adjectives for this picture included “astonishing,” “astounding,” “incredible” (twice) and “amazing” (five times).
They were right. The XEL-1’s picture is so colorful, vibrant, rich, lifelike and high in contrast, you catch your breath. It’s like looking out a window. With the glass missing.
Name a drawback of plasma or L.C.D. — motion blur, uneven lighting across the panel, blacks that aren’t quite black, whites that aren’t quite white, limited viewing angle, color that isn’t quite true, brightness that washes out in bright rooms, screen-door effect up close — and this TV overcomes it.
Plasma is supposed to offer darker blacks than L.C.D., but O.L.E.D. trumps both of them. Next to this TV, even the blacks on the critically adored Pioneer Kuro plasma screen look very dark gray. Blacks on Sony’s O.L.E.D. TV are jet black. Absolute black. Black-hole black — and kuro even means black in Japanese.
(If you’re a TV-technology geek and you’re getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu, congratulations. All of this does sound exactly like the descriptions of S.E.D. television prototypes demonstrated years ago by Toshiba and Canon. Unfortunately, that equally impressive picture technology never made it out of the lab.)
To make this thing even more drool-worthy, the XEL-1’s screen is only three millimeters thick — shirt-cardboard thick. If they could build a laptop with a screen this thin, it would make the MacBook Air look like a suitcase.
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