The curved 65-inch Sony S90 4K Curved BRAVIA Ultra High Definition TV “is like watching the real world, but better”. Hugo Rifkind is agog.
Now this is a very big television. So big, in fact, that you sort of wonder if it’s giving you a suntan. We had it in our living room for a while, where it took up most of the space, and I think it might have frightened the kids a bit. Peppa Pig was a monster. Seriously. Much, much bigger than me.
The thing is, it’s probably our fault, for not having a big enough house. Horrifyingly, now I check, Sony actually does an even bigger one: a 75-inch, as opposed to the 65-inch it sent to me. Lying on its side, my friends, that’s more than six feet (1.8 metres) of television. We’re talking a duvet here. And yet, if you have the space, there is simply no better way to watch the tube. It’s amazing. I lack the words. But it is. It’s like watching the real world, but better.
Or will be once the rest of the world catches up. At the risk of getting technical, your normal High Definition (HD) television these days gives you two million pixels to look at. This, though, is Ultra High Definition (UHD) and gives you four times that. Already there’s quite a lot of TV you can watch at that resolution (Amazon and Netflix both stream a bit) but it is not yet the norm. Once it is, though… Blimey. Sony also gave me a bunch of special showcasing footage. Sport is crystal clear: like actually being there, but borrowing somebody else’s eye to follow the ball. Wildlife clips, meanwhile, are more immersive than you would believe. Imagine being on safari, but with dead-steady zooming eyes, and filmic lighting directed at every passing cheetah. I don’t meant to gush but it’s clearer than looking out of the window.
Also, curved. Not dramatically, not like a bath, but curved nonetheless. Which might sound gimmicky, but shouldn’t. For, unless you have a main saloon the size of Battersea Power Station, this is not a TV you’ll take in with a single glance. Rather, your eye flicks about, as with the cinema, or the world itself.
This is the future; a whole new way of watching. When the delivery man came to take ours away, I nearly refused to help him because he’d never have managed to deprive us of it on his own. Behind it sat our old one, a mere 30-inch, once so big that my wife shouted at me when I bought it because it wouldn’t fit in the car. Suddenly it looked like a Nintendo Game Boy. It’ll have to go.
Sony S90 4K Curved BRAVIA 65-inch Ultra High Definition TV, from £3,499, sony.co.uk.
Hugo Rifkind is a columnist for The Times.