News Beat
the best OLED TV you’ve never heard of
For the last couple of years, top-end OLED TVs have had performance-enhancing layers built into their screens. Samsung and Sony use quantum dots to create brighter, more accurate colours while LG, Philips and Panasonic use a micro-lens array to do a similar thing. The A85N goes without such enhancements.
The difference is noticeable, but not that noticeable. The A85N’s screen, supplied by LG Display, is the same one used in the £1,600 LG C4 and when we reviewed that, our writer called it ‘stunning’.
It takes a little bit of tuning to get right. As with all new TVs, by default the motion smoothing is turned to maximum so that everything looks like a soap opera. I changed the setting to Clear, which uses the absolute minimum of smoothing for a very natural picture with no judder. No other OLED I’ve reviewed has a setting that’s quite so spot-on.
The A85N is one of the easiest-viewing tellies I’ve found. The peak highlights (think sunlight glinting off glass) don’t pop quite so much as on the Samsung S95D and the colours aren’t as jewel-like as the Sony A95L, but the A85N has a wider range of high dynamic range formats than either of them. It supports HDR 10+ Adaptive (which the Sony doesn’t) and Dolby Vision IQ (which the Samsung doesn’t), as well as IMAX enhanced and Filmmaker Mode.
Watching David Attenborough’s Nature, the colours were lifelike and extreme close-ups and epic landscapes were full of detail. Watching The Batman, there was some slight bloom around bright lights in dark scenes but there was decent detail in the shadows, with dark browns, dark blues and dark greys all distinguishable. Lesser TVs would crush them all together into a black sludge.
To test the different picture settings, I tried watching the same Batman scenes in Enhanced, Standard, Vivid, Cinema, Filmmaker and Sport modes. Enhanced was good for daytime viewing, but did introduce some colour banding. The banding was even worse on Standard. Cinema offered the most natural picture 99 per cent of the time.
One way in which the A85N lags behind its competitors is in upscaling SD (standard definition) content. All the other OLED manufacturers do a better job of making old films and programmes look brighter, sharper and better-defined using AI algorithms whose secrets are closely guarded.
But if the overall picture quality perhaps fell slightly short of jaw-dropping, it was consistently excellent and more relaxing to watch than some of the dazzlingly bright premium OLEDs.
