Sony Australia who was knocked off the top perch in the TV market by Samsung and LG has thrown down the gauntlet to the two Korean giants with a sub $6,000 55″4K 3840 x 2160 TV.
The Japanese Company who is the first Company to launch a sub 60″ 4K TV has also launched a $8,999, 65″4K TV, both models will come with integrated Wi-Fi, allowing users to get access to new content services along with catch up TV from the ABC with their iView service, SBS, PLUS7 and Ten.
The two new TV’s go on sale in July in Australia.
Movies on demand will be available from Video Unlimited, Quickflix, Yupp.TV, Crackle, Mubi, and Garage Entertainment.
Radio and music content will also be available via the new TV’s with the introduction of content from Pandora, Moshcam, vTuner and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
Sony Australia claims that approximately 70 per cent of new BRAVIA TV’s connect their TVs to the internet and on-demand video viewing and that “numbers are growing substantially month by month”.
Sony who pioneered the development of 4K TV was the first Company to launch an 84″ Ultra High Definition TV in Australia.
Management are not saying how many of the new 4K TV’s they expect to sell as they move to concentrate on the premium end of the TV market where OLED and 4K TV technology is set to dominate running into the peak end of year period when most TV’s are sold.
Known as the X-Series, the new range delivers four times the resolution of Full HD due to unique Sony technology that the Company claims delivers superior picture quality and sound.
Due to the lack of 4K content Sony has built in an X-Reality PRO upscaler that delivers all content to near-4K quality regardless of the content source.
Hass Mahdi, Marketing Manager, Home Entertainment at Sony Australia. ” Sony’s new 4K Ultra HD TVs will make everything you watch look and sound better, regardless of content source broadcast TV, DVD, Blu-ray, or internet, everything looks better with 4K technology”.
Both models will also come bundled with eight Sony Pictures feature films that have been ‘Mastered in 4K’. They are:
Angels & Demons, Battle: Los Angeles, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid (2010), The Amazing Spider-Man, Spiderman, the Other Guys and Total Recall (2012).
The new Sony content was specifically mastered in 4K so that owners of the new TV can take advantage of the new 4K upscaling technology. The collection was created by matching the algorithms used to down-convert 4K movie masters to HD and then up-convert them back to 4K with the Sony 4K X-Reality PRO engine.
