Sony A1E 55" (XBR55A1E) vs TCL S517 65" (65S517)

The Sony A1E has exceptional picture quality because of its infinitely high native contrast ratio, decent luminosity, and near-perfect black uniformity.

The TV does a fantastic job when it comes to reproducing dark scenes, as the infinitely high native contrast ratio and the near-perfect black uniformity allow it to display thick, rich, and immersive dark scenes.

As for bright scenes, the luminosity of 389 nits allows this OLED TV to fight glare and reproduce crisp and vibrant colors in vivid scenes.

Out of the box, the Sony A1E has excellent color accuracy, so the majority of users will not require doing the color calibration procedure. The A1E has better color accuracy than its competitors, including the LG seven series OLED TVs.

This 4K120 TV works well with all of the current-generation 4K consoles, including the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, because of the A1E’s adequate input lag (30.7 ms) at 4K resolution. Additionally, the TV is a good choice for HDR gaming, since its input lag does not increase when processing high-bandwidth 4K HDR signal.

The Sony A1E looks good even from an angle since its colors only start to degrade when the angle between the viewer and the panel is greater than 29 degrees.

The Sony A1E sounds noticeably better than all of its competitors, including the LG Seven series OLED TVs.

The Sony A1E runs the Android TV which has the widest app selection among all the smart TV platforms currently available.

The Sony A1E is an excellent option for those who have a collection of old DVDs or Blu-rays, a cable or satellite box, or an Apple TV since the A1E can detect and eliminate judder from those sources and make 24p content playback nice and smooth.

The Sony A1E does an excellent job of managing reflections as its panel is coated with the anti-reflective material; therefore, the TV looks good even when situated right in front of a window.

The main interface of this TV is free of advertisements and sponsored content.

The Sony A1E can boost up the frame rate of low FPS content up to a stunning 120 Hz, making such content look more fluid and smooth. This feature is called motion interpolation, or in some sources, the 'soap opera' effect. Some people find the interpolated content very attractive.

The Sony A1E manages to balance all the features required for a good sports TV. It has well-handled motion blur, excellent color uniformity, and superb picture quality.

Motion blur handling is the most critical aspect of a good sports TV. The A1E has almost negligible motion blur because of its fast full pixel response time of 0.7 ms, which ensures that the pixels of this TV need only 1/1400th of a second to go from one color to another. Therefore, even fast objects don't leave noticeable trails on the screen.

As for the color uniformity, the A1E is currently the best TV money can buy. The overall color uniformity of a TV is essential for sports fans, as it allows a TV to reproduce realistic and good-looking football fields, hockey arenas, golf fields, and other large sports fields.

In terms of picture quality, the S517 is comparable to high-end TVs. It displays remarkably deep blacks due to its great contrast and reproduces details in color very well due to its good color gradient.

The 6000:1 native contrast ratio allows the TV to reproduce dark scenes particularly well. It is easily one of the best in this price range – it’s often compared to high-end counterparts.

The S517 has superb black uniformity and contrast that create pleasant, deep blacks. They are much better than those of the similarly-priced competitors. The maximum deviation sits at around 1.02% .

The TV is good at capturing small differences in color such as skin tones, green colors in nature, details in shadows, etc. This is because of the color gradient, which is on par with other options of the same price. There is almost no banding and the standard deviation of color doesn't go past 0,11%.

The S517 is a much better fit for HDR content and HDR gaming than its competitors due to the wide color gamut, decent color depth, and high contrast.

The TV can display a lot more colors than its similarly-priced counterparts. The coverage of the Digital Cinema P3 color space is very good - 90%.

The color depth is on par with competing options. The S517 has 10-bit color depth, which means that it can display approximately 1.07 billion colors in total. This is important for HDR content because HDR media takes advantage of 10-bit.

The S517 can display deep blacks in the HDR mode because of its high native contrast ratio of 6000:1, which is easily one of the best in the given price range.

The TV can also play all HDR content because it supports both standard formats of HDR - HDR10 and Dolby Vision. They enhance the viewing experience by editing the metadata, that is, the extra information that tells the TV how to display HDR. The formats differ in the way they deal with it, however - Dolby Vision edits the picture on a per scene basis, whereas HDR10 edits everything at the start of the video.

The TCL S517 is a decent option for pretty much everything, be it gaming, movies, sports, or HDR content. It has noteworthy picture quality, good all-around responsiveness, decent smart features, nice motion handling, and, most importantly, a great price.

The S517 does a reasonably good job with upscaling most content to 4K quality, be it 480p DVDs, HDTV or full HD Blu-rays.

The S517 offers the possibility to represent motion in videos smoother, also known as the "soap opera effect". This is done by making the TV take two frames and try to guess what would a frame in between of those look like, also known as motion interpolation. The frame rate can interpolate up to 60 frames per second.

All of the inputs are conveniently placed on the side of the S517, so you won't have to worry about leaving space between a wall and the TV.

The S517 offers a pleasant PC monitor experience not only due to the good responsiveness but also because of the video signal's compression.

The TV won't make text appear blurry while connected to a PC because the signal has no compression and transports color data and luminance fully. This is also known as chroma 4:4:4, and the “Computer” and “Game” modes display it properly at 60Hz.

The picture quality when you first open the TV up is quite decent. The only settings that could potentially require tweaking are grey inaccuracy and color inaccuracy. Either way, these are things that most people won't even notice.

The S517 is fit for all gamers because it offers a clear, lag-free experience. The TV is very responsive - it has struck a good balance between decent refresh rate, solid input lag, and good response time.

The TV is an ideal choice for console gaming in terms of its native refresh rate. It caps at 60Hz, which is perfect since most games won't benefit from anything higher than this.

The S517 is fast. An action shows on the screen in around 18 milliseconds, which can make the difference between managing to get a frag or waiting for a respawn. The time doesn't substantially increase when gaming in HDR or 4K either - it goes up to roughly 20.5 milliseconds. The only thing to remember is to keep "Game" mode enabled for the lowest possible input lag.

The TCL S517 also handles motion and fast-paced content quite well, it has a good response time. This makes sure you can keep up with fast-moving objects and a lot of action without it all appearing blurry. A full pixel color transition takes only 15.8 milliseconds.

The S517 comes with the Roku TV smart platform, which provides a comfortable interface and a big app selection.

The interface is quite basic and easy to overlook. It’s smooth and simple to swap to your favorite apps.

Roku TV offers a vast app store with all the most popular apps – Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant, HBO Go, Vudu and much more. Some apps are even absent from other TV manufacturers Smart TV platforms and unique to Roku.

The mobile remote app for both iOS or Android can fully and comfortably substitute the real remote – launch apps, input text in apps, control most TV settings, etc.

Also, colors can easily be adjusted close to perfection thanks to the app’s calibration menu.