Sony’s next-gen Sony A95K 4K TV has taken home the big prize at this year’s EISA Home Theatre & Display awards.
The flagship for the Sony 2022 TV range picked up the award for ‘Best Premium OLED TV’, beating off strong competition from Samsung's S95B QD-OLED TV which was named runner-up.
Sony became the first TV manufacturer to show off a QD-OLED (Quantum Dot OLED) TV, when the A95K was first unveiled back in March.
As it names suggests, QD-OLED combines the best aspects of OLED and Quantum Dot display tech, with the aim of offering the deep black levels, high contrast and wide viewing angles of OLED alongside the color accuracy and pixel illumination that quantum dot filters can provide.
In our hands-on review at the time, we were blown away by the TV’s extreme color depth, with the A95K delivering a higher level of brightness and greater palette volume than what we’ve come to expect from standard OLED panels.
A traditional precursor to the annual IFA consumer tech expo in Berlin, the EISA awards are voted on by an association of 60 technology magazines, websites and social media commentators from 29 countries.
This year’s awards also saw LG's C2 OLED TV recognized as ‘Best Gaming TV’, while there was a strong showing from Philips, who picked up prizes for 'Best Buy OLED TV' for the 55OLED807, best 'Home Theatre TV' for the 65OLED937 and ‘Best Family TV’ for the 55PUS8807.
A full list of the 2022/23 EISA Home Theatre & Display winners can be found here.
Analysis: Latest awards win is another indicator that QD-OLED is the future of TV
Coming hot on the heels of the Sony A95K’s triumph at the Value Electronics ‘TV Shootout’ last month, this weekend’s big awards win at EISA went some way to vindicating Sony’s plans to go big on QD-OLED.
It also points further to where the future of flagship TVs looks to be heading, with the incredible contrast and significantly improved color saturation that the hybrid display tech offers only likely to improve further as it matures.
Prices are unsurprisingly high for early adopters to QD-OLED, with the 65” version of the Sony A95K coming in at an eye-watering $4,000 / £3,499. Nevertheless, Samsung’s similarly specified, yet significantly cheaper S95B shows that that barrier to adoption may soon start to come down.
With new QD-OLED TVs expected to be shown off by Sony and Samsung at IFA later this year, and growing rumors of other manufacturers set to get onboard with the display tech, we can’t wait to see what gets unveiled in Berlin.
