Sony X900E 55" (XBR55X900E) vs TCL S517 65" (65S517)

The Sony X900E is an excellent companion for watching sports because of its admirable image quality, decent motion representation, and good color uniformity.

Aided by a highly sensitive panel, the Sony X900E handles its motion blur well as the TV needs only around a 100th of a second for its pixels to switch their color entirely. As a result, moving objects leave just a tiny trail on the screen. The X900E’s pixel response time outperforms every competitor in its price range.

The TV can also display beautiful and uniform colors, which allows it to reproduce sports pitches correctly. In fact, the Sony X900E is among the best in its range concerning color uniformity.

The Sony X900E is an excellent option for those who need a TV for a bright room since its panel does an outstanding job of handling reflections thanks to the semi-gloss screen finish, which can diffuse around 98.8% of the incoming light.

The Sony X900E has everything needed for displaying high-quality HDR content. First, the X900E supports wide color gamut which is essential for a decent HDR experience as it allows the TV to reproduce deep and vibrant colors. Second, in HDR mode, the Sony X900E can sustain up to 525 nits of brightness, which enables it to fight glare and display vivid colors even in bright environments. In its range, the Sony X900E is the most luminous TV.

The Sony X900E is an excellent TV for those who use cable/satellite boxes, DVD/Blu-ray players, and Apple TV because it can detect and eliminate the ‘2:3’ judder effect. This effect is usually caused by 24p content being transmitted using the 60 Hz signal.

The main interface of the Sony X900E does not have advertising.

The Sony X900E runs the Android smart TV platform, which has the widest app selection among all current smart TV platforms. All of the applications are available via the Google Play Store.

This 4K120 TV is entirely compatible with all of the current generation gaming consoles, including the Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, and Wii U. Additionally, it’s highly unlikely that within the next couple of years any gaming console will break the 120 Hz barrier; so it is expected that this TV will remain compatible even with the next generation consoles.

The Sony X900E is also suitable for gaming because of the TV’s low input lag. While in ‘Game Mode’, the TV’s input lag remains at 34.2 ms allowing for relatively fast-paced gameplay.

The Sony X900E has the best picture quality in its range as the TV manages to balance high contrast ratio, marvelous SDR and HDR brightness, decent color uniformity, acceptable black uniformity, and good color accuracy.

The TV does an outstanding job with dark scenes as its contrast ratio of 5411:1 is perfectly balanced with its decent black uniformity, allowing the X900E to display deep and immersive dark scenes.

As for bright scenes, the TV’s peak luminosity is 509 nits, which is more than enough for making colorful scenes look really luminous, even if the TV is in a bright room.

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.