Sony A95K

Sony's QD-OLED is a new era for OLED TV technology - and it's simply stunning

While Samsung used its Quantum Dot OLED (QD-OLED) debutantes as a stick to aggressively beat regular OLED TVs with, Sony has used its A95Ks to offer a new level of refinement and picture quality aimed squarely at the discerning home cinephile. So is the A95K the best QD-OLED TV to buy right now?

QD-OLED differs from regular OLED in that it uses a blue phosphor element to produce each individual pixel's light, which is then passed through green and red Quantum Dot layers to create a pure RGB picture. This enables more brightness, and not having to use a white element to boost the image's brightness, like traditional OLED displays, should unlock a wider, richer colour palette.

So does the A95K live up to the QD-OLED picture quality hype? The short answer is yes, to the extent that it arguably delivers the best all-round picture quality we've seen from a TV to date. Though the longer answer involves a couple of qualifications.

Brightness is slightly up over the best regular OLED TVs, peaking at 1020 nits. This is enough to matter - especially given that the A95K's intense peaks are able to exist just a pixel away from a shot's deepest, darkest black colours, without either the bright or dark pixels compromising each other.