Първоначално публикувано от jrref
This is an excellent post because I asked the same question because I wanted to "learn" something from the judging as well. I really wanted to know what the "professional" judges saw at a high level similar to what you would see in an objective review like the ones Vincent does for example. In past shootouts, we told how the sets faired in each category so we got a sense of what the pros and cons were by everyone for each set. Since we are not going to get this information, I'll give you my opinion, and I believe, "overall" the folks that were there like D-Nice, Ken, Al and others, will "generally" agree, so not as to create another debate but rather to clear up some things for the folks here.
1) The OLEDs and the LCDs are now in a category by themselves. Although there was no doubt that the Z9 and maybe the Q9 were the brightest sets there, it's really hard to "get over" the off axis viewing characteristics that you get with LCD compared to OLED.
2) The LG and the A1, although they have subtle differences, they are extremely close and I believe from what I saw and heard, even the judges were having a hard time because, although we don't have the numbers, they did say that the dark room was so close that it was almost a tie and I could see them going back and forth, scratching their heads over the two sets. After the first day, D-Nice, Al and I had an opportunity to make a couple of temporary adjustments to the LG and the A1 and we were able to get them to look almost the same to the reference monitor which proves that with calibration and adjustments, you Can get these sets to look the same.
3) The streaming category was and excellent addition because it showed a comparison that the judges didn't pick up. We played Meridian from Netflix. Why, i guess because it's a "reference" stream at 60 Hz. The E7 has DV so it played the DV encoded stream while the A1 does not so it played the HDR10 stream. I really expected the LG DV stream to be far better than the HDR10 but it wasn't. The DV stream was clearly darker and it didn't look balanced to me. The A1 playing the HDR10 with it's dynamic HDR processing clearly, in my opinion, produced a more balanced picture that looked brighter to me. Also during the shootout, Joel measured a streaming test window and even though the LG had about 100 nits more peak brightness, in streaming mode, the A1 measured slightly brighter than the LG with the streaming test pattern and the judges picked this up when asked. So i would have believed that the A1 should have won the Streaming category award.
4) It was clear that the Z9 was the brightest LCD in the room when viewing from the "sweet spot" and if the Z9 and the Q9 were put in their bright mode settings, And the judging could get over the over axis issues, the Z9 would have taken this category. The Q9 looked good with bright content but its dark viewing was not very good. You could easily see "flash lighting" and other local dimming anomalies when playing credits, and looking at low light content. The Vizio actually looked better with this content! The Westinghouse had no local dimming so that was a non-starter.
5) HDR was interesting. Why because of the A1 and the LGs different tone mapping. The LG had dynamic contrast on Low which turned on it's dynamic HDR while the A1 has it on all the time. The LG looked clearly brighter but on the first day we got to measure spots on the screen with Joel's meter, i forget the model but it's the hand held one that you can take a spot reading off of the screen. For example, the opening scene in Earth II where you see the earth and the sun, etc.. The LG looked brighter and overall more saturated but some very bright spots, like the Sun looked a little washed out compared to the A1 and the reference monitors. When we measured the Sun, the reference measured say 290 nits, for example, the Z9 250 nits, the A1 230 nits but the LG measured close to 390 nits! Again these numbers were my recollection but the point is that although the LG was brighter, it was less accurate to the reference monitor due to it's dynamic HDR processing. If we turned off that processing, then the LG looked and measured very close, in that scene, to the A1.
6) On the first day Joel showed us content where you could see the LG and the A1 and the Z9 having problems reproducing certain colors compared to the reference monitor like teal, and magenta and cyan range of colors which are a challenge for these sets.
7) Finally, although Joel tried to show the challenges for the sets in upscaling, etc, i'm not sure the judges caught on to this because for upscaling, clearly the test patterns showed that the Sony's did a much better job than the LG and the others upscaling from 1080i to 1080P. Very clear, no debate. Now Ken will say, "i don't watch test patterns" and he's right but the test showed that the upscaler Is better in the Sonys and if you watch cable, the PQ will be upscaled better on the Sony's. We were able to clearly show that Sony's gradient processing is better and even D-Nice pointed out that even with the A1's gradient control off, it smoothed the gradients better than the LG. As far as motion, they showed the girl swinging in the hammock but the OLEDs had the motion processing turned off. I think an improvement would be to show some poorly mastered content like Gypsy episode 2 and then turn on motion handling on both sets to see how they did. We all know that the motion handling on the LG needs work.
All this said, the logistics of a shootout of this type are very complex. The calibrations, and all of the technical inner workings should not be trivialized. We have some of the best people in the industry doing this and it's very easy to unfairly critique the event. One thing is very clear to some of the experts that i spoke to in the room, the fact that these Retail sets are so close to a reference monitor is incredible. We have reached a new point in Retail TV evolution that may require some "re-thinking" of how to execute a "Shootout" in the future. At the very least the event will evolve and should get better and better. Regardless of the results, as far as the OLEDs are concerned, they are so equivalent that we are really "splitting" hairs when comparing the sets and you can't go wrong with either set. As far as the LCD's i which we could have taken and looked at color volume and done some bright mode comparisons but i have to say that the Z9 did an exceptional job with all of the content give that it's an LCD as compared to the OLEDs.
I hope this helps a little and Please, let's not start yet another debate since this is the way i personally saw the event, and i believe that D-Nice, who a lot of you are familiar with, would generally agree and i'm sure he will add some other good insight to help as well. :)
