Sony unveils 4K Ultra HD TVs designed to deliver on filmmakers’ vision

Los Angeles (Variety.com): Sony teamed with Netflix to develop a new line of televisions the companies claim will reproduce video from the streaming-video service exactly how filmmakers intended.

For the new TVs, Sony and Netflix collaborated on a new display mode that the companies say make them the optimal way to view Netflix streaming content. The new Bravia Master series of 4K Ultra HD TVs have a “Netflix Calibrated Mode,” which Sony claims delivers picture quality equivalent to a master monitor in a movie production studio.

The Bravia Master A9F OLED display (available with 55- and 65-inch screens) and Z9F LED display (65- and 75-inch screens) models are slated to ship across North America in the fall of 2018, with pricing and retail availability yet to be announced.

“Unique among all our device partnerships, both Sony and Netflix share a deep immersion in the studio world,” Scott Mirer, VP of device partner ecosystem at Netflix, said at Sony’s launch event in New York. “Preserving creative intent is important not only to the storytellers, but also to viewers.”

The new Netflix Calibrated Mode is an option in Sony Electronics’ line of Bravia Master TVs only when users are in the Netflix app. Essentially, the feature instructs the TVs to not make any adjustments to the colour, motion or contrast to Netflix’s streaming video. Those kinds of automatic calibrations are “usually valuable when you’re coming from content that was mastered for an inferior format,” like DVDs, according to Mirer. But for Netflix-encoded video, that can distort the way it was originally crafted to look; for example, by making a scene appear brighter than intended.

Of course, that sounds a lot like what the TV industry’s high dynamic range (HDR) spec is designed for -- to present sharper contrasts and a very large, fine-grained colour palette, for the best fidelity possible to the original. But Mirer said Bravia Master’s Netflix Calibrated Mode is independent of HDR: The feature is designed the render the picture exactly as Netflix mastered (or remastered) the content and then encoded it.

“Designing televisions that better convey the creator’s intent -- that’s our passion,” said Mike Fasulo, president/COO of Sony Electronics North America.

According to Mirer, one-third of smart TVs that enable access to Netflix support HDR. Netflix currently provides 400 hours of HDR content and 2,000 hours of content in 4K format.