Sony 77 Inch OLED 4K Ultra HD TV (K-77XR80), 2024 Model

I hooked up my new TV to my Apple TV 4K and sound system and I thought everything was fine. Then I started getting 1-2 second black outs every 10 minutes or so. I checked Sony support and there was no help there. I posted to the Sony Community and nobody there had any suggestions. But I did find another post about synchronizing video feeds so I set my Apple to 1080p Dolby Vision and got rid of the blackouts. But that didn’t feel right, so I bought a new high end HDMI 4K/8k cable, set my Apple back to 4K Dolby Vision and now everything is fine. Lesson learned, upgrade everything at the same time.

That said, this is a beautiful TV and I love it now that I’ve worked the kinks out of my setup. Big thumbs up.

OLED TV picture is amazing.
The TV interface and setup was relatively painless….

The reason for 4 stars rather than five is rather than asking you if you wanted certain apps, it preinstalled all sorts of useless crap and you had to go in a manually clean up the app list one bloatware app at a time.

Install NOTHING then prompt for what you want to have installed, would be way better.

The Bravia 8 was a replacement for a 16-year-old Sharp 52-inch, which abruptly perished on night. With that large leap in technology, the improvement in visuals was breathtaking. Sony’s build quality is impressive as well. This was a great purchase.

However… I do have a few general industry-wide caveats, which are the reason I can’t honestly give my Bravia 8 the full 5 stars it would otherwise easily qualify for.

* The Bravia 8 doesn’t get along with the rest of my system as well as the ancient Sharp it replaced. I’m sure this isn’t a Sony thing, nor a Bravia 8 thing. It’s the move toward ever-‘smarter’ components – each of which wants to run things it’s own way. Going through the inevitable ‘control my other devices’ setup only makes the conflicts worse – I wish there was a setting to tell all the devices to just mind their own business. I’d still be using four remotes, but at least I wouldn’t have my control inputs being constantly over-ridden.

* Along with the uppity built-in smarts, there’s a serious dearth of available technical over-rides and read-outs. For instance, I’ve got a PC hooked up, and it’s hit or miss whether the TV will recognize the correct resolution – and there’s no manual setting to brute-force the resolution. At the same time, while my cable (IPTV) box is delivering a superb image, there’s no way to confirm that it and the TV are in fact doing the promised 4K, or just getting by on really good 1080p – and, again, no easy way to enforce that outcome.

* The TV really wants individual HDMI devices to be plugged directly into it. And yet, after a full agonizing day, I was unable to get Audio Return Channel working – either via HDMI or optical connection – to provide full surround sound through my receiver. So I wasted another sweaty hour putting things back the way they were in the first place – everything plugged into the receiver, with a single HDMI connection to the TV. That setup is still quirky and mysterious (as much the fault of the receiver as the TV), but nonetheless, things feel a lot more rational this way.

* On the positive side, the TV has not been overbearing about Internet connectivity. I get an occasional warning popup to the effect that my Ethernet cable is disconnected, and so far that’s it. On the negative side, I did need to enable GoogleTV at least once for the purposes of configuration (see next point). But back on the positive side, GoogleTV is quite functional, and obviously benefits from Google’s extensive Android experience. If my TV simply *must* have an OS, I guess it’s just as well to have a good one.

* In order to properly set up the picture, I needed to run a professional calibration app in GoogleTV – this instantly enabled a full range of picture settings in the Bravia on-screen menus. Having worked in computers and consumer electronics for decades, I do not enjoy being ‘protected’ from using my lifetime of know-how. The full settings could be disabled by default, yet made safely accessible behind a simple warning message.

* Accessing the full settings is important, because even in Professional mode I found the image drastically over-saturated. Once I’d turned the saturation down (and boosted the gamma very slightly to compensate for the fact that I run at low brightness), the image became astonishingly life-like. Watching talk-shows and the like, I often feel that the presenters are in the room with me.

Bottom line: Bravia 8 – full marks, it’s a terrific TV. The OLED blacks are miraculous, the color gamut is gorgeous, and even older DVD-quality content looks better than ever before. Consumer industry: continuing failing grade, you need to wise up a bit!

🤙🏼

Jamás había tenido una pantalla oled, es vdad lo que dicen, es la mejor forma de ver películas, la imagen que subí no le hace justicia, llevo una semana con ella y no he dejado de ver pelis o jugar PS5, la cuídare como se debe, vale cads peso gastado 🙌🏻

I’m not that impressed with picture quality or the interface within the programing of the TV. I’m disappointed with visuals. Also packaging could be better. Luckily the screen wasn’t damaged. Look at pics. I’ve owned Samsung for many years and I wish now I had purchased another tv from samsung.