Review on 📺 Reviewing the Sony XBR55A8F 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart BRAVIA OLED TV (2018 Model) - A Comprehensive Analysis by Sean Patel

For a $2.5k Smart TV I expect (finally!) a powerful processor and good GPU support. Unfortunately, this model is another disappointment. They advertise their X1 Extreme processor as cutting edge technology that you might think works great with UHD HDR content. I will not. My kid's 5 year old desktop (i5 + Nvidia base card) performs better than this "highly" expensive hardware released in 2018. Here are just a few: 1. Android TV's out-of-the-box layout sucks. In vanilla OS you can customize the home screen, not here. And the default home screen is optimized for watching broadcast/cable TV, not what we expect from a smart device.2. The Plex player on this TV dies at 20Mbps video bandwidth (not sure if it's CPU or GPU but who cares?).3. The built-in video player (built into Android TV) freezes on UHD content at 30Mbps.4. Surprisingly, KODI gives the best throughput of almost 40 Mbps. However, it cannot handle all HEVC profiles efficiently. A typical BD or RIP remix usually takes 50-60Mbps V-BPS, so forget about playing it on this TV.4. The WiFi module can work at 5GHz, but cannot deliver more than 30Mbps even if the access point is at a distance of 7 meters! However, the wireless connection is useless for anything other than watching YT or Twitch. After two months of trying to get the most out of this TV, I gave up and bought an Nvidia Shield. This thing solves all problems! And my Sony SmartTV became "Sony JustMonitor". However, with support for UHD and HDR. While the "smart part" of this product is abysmal, the "TV part" is not. And that's why I gave 3 starts instead of 1 (and didn't send the TV back, fwiw): 1. The OLED matrix is really cool. Artifacts not noticed.2. Contrast is good even in non-HDR mode, in HDR it gets amazing. I've compared to models from other brands, they're not even close.3. 5 cents back to the smart feature: The remote control plays very well via HDMI (HDMI-CEC feature). The compatible device on its end (Nvidia in my case) handles all commands from the TV remote well with almost negligible response delay. Because the remote was designed for smart features (which this TV can't offer), it has enough features to control any truly smart device. The HDMI ARC connection works very well. It can even set Atmos, but only if encoded via E-AC-3. You can't stream TrueHD, but this is a known ARC limitation. In short, don't buy this TV if you want smart features. Only buy it if your eye can _actually_ tell the difference between FHD and UHD, HDR and LED, and OLED and QLED. In all other cases it will be a huge overpayment.