Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful picture quality, buggy firmware
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2021
2023-01-23 Update:
I bought this TV in October 13, 2020, 2 years and 3 months later the TV failed. Electronic failures happen, but after investigation Ive found out that the issue with my TV (and for that matter a lot of Sony TV models) is pretty common. The TV will not turn on and flashes a red light 4 times which commonly indicates a T-Conn or motherboard failure. I did talk to Sony warranty rep and he stated the TV was out of warranty by 3 months and therefore Sony could not help. The rep also confirmed that the most likely culprit was the motherboard, he also mentioned it could be the backlight but since OLEDs don't have back lights, I don't believe that is the case. I offered to pay for the repairs and was told the closest authorized Sony repair place is in Houston, 2 1/2 hours away (I live in Austin the 11th largest city in the US). If you plan on getting a Sony TV I highly advise getting a warranty, if these board issues are as common as I've read, there is no sense in paying so much for an expensive paperweight.
Original Review:
This is my second Sony TV, I had previously purchased the Sony 900E and I loved the picture quality on it. The blacks looked good and I was convinced for the price, the 900E was a better deal than any OLED at that time. Fast forward two years later I purchased the A8H, side by side it was obvious the OLED video quality and blacks were far superior to my 900E. In fact the A8H is pretty much superior in every aspect to my 900E, thinner bezel, better blacks, better color, much faster processor, better HDR, and more advanced menu and settings.
I waited 6 months to write this review, I didn’t want the review to be based solely on my initial experiences. Here are the goods and bads.
If you primarily watch movies, this is the TV to get, Sony does an amazing job with video processing and you will find it hard to beat the picture quality even against other OLEDs. If you primarily game, the LG CX or C1 may be a better choice. I own both, the Xbox SX and the Ps5, and although I initially blew off the 120 4K support, I feel that is something all next gen TVs should have. My reason for going with Sony over LG was due to warranty issues with past LG TVs I owned. The experience with LG was horrible both times and although I’ve never had to use Sony for warranty, I didn’t want to give business to LG anymore. If you are a big gamer LG may be the way to go or you can go for the A9. If the lack of 4K 120 support in games is not a deal breaker than the A8H is a fantastic TV and much more affordable than the A9. The Android TV OS is responsive, easy to use and comes with a huge application library via the play store.
The main problem I have with this TV is the firmware. Modern TVs have bugs, my friends LG OLED has plenty, the problem is that Sony bugs seem to impact functionality to greater degree. I had similar issues with the 900E and I can say that after over 2 years of owning it, they’ve managed to fix all the issues. The same can’t be said for the A8H right now. My biggest problem is with how some background services seem to fail, this typically leads to audio no longer working (through a receiver or even the TV speakers) and bundled apps such as YouTube and Netflix locking up. The fix is easy and requires you to restart the TV (you can do this with the remote fortunately). Sony did release a patch that made this issue occur less often, however the issue still happens once in a while. It’ll probably be another 6 months to a year before the A8H is completely stable but this is something you can expect from Sony TVs, the issues do get fixed but you deal with irritating bugs for a while. One other complaint is the TV allows a wired connection (great for streaming 4K content, especially if you run something like Plex for Blu-ray quality 4K streams) unfortunately you can only do 100Mbps, which is absurd since the WiFi connectivity in most cases can easily surpass a 100Mbps wired connection. Sony should have thrown in a gigabit wired connection, as it is, using wired is useless unless you have very spotty wireless access or overloaded WiFi.
