When comparing Toshiba Amazon Fire TV 2018 50" (50LF621U19 ) vs Sony A1E OLED 65" (XBR65A1E), the Slant community recommends Sony A1E OLED 65" (XBR65A1E) for most people. In the question“What are the best TVs?” Sony A1E OLED 65" (XBR65A1E) is ranked 10th while Toshiba Amazon Fire TV 2018 50" (50LF621U19 ) is ranked 79th. The most important reason people chose Sony A1E OLED 65" (XBR65A1E) is:
The Sony A1E is an 4K OLED TV with perfectly uniform blacks and infinite contrast ratio, achieved by its ability to manipulate pixels individually. This, along with its color uniformity and wide color gamut, gives it exceptional picture quality and makes it the perfect choice for movies. It also has no issues with brightness levels as the panel can reach up to ~650 nits of brightness when playing HDR content, and it handles reflections very well.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Decent performance in a dark room
When placed in a dark room, this TV offers fair picture quality thanks to its ability to reproduce decent blacks. The blacks look deep and inky because of the panel's high native contrast ration and high black uniformity.
The panel's native contrast ratio measures at 5000:1 which is a good result for a TV in this price bracket. This means that, within the same frame, the brightest highlights are 5000 times brighter than the dimmer blacks.
Pro Supports HDR
This TV can play HDR10 content.
Pro Perfect TV for movies and HDR content
The Sony A1E is an 4K OLED TV with perfectly uniform blacks and infinite contrast ratio, achieved by its ability to manipulate pixels individually. This, along with its color uniformity and wide color gamut, gives it exceptional picture quality and makes it the perfect choice for movies. It also has no issues with brightness levels as the panel can reach up to ~650 nits of brightness when playing HDR content, and it handles reflections very well.
Pro Virtually no reflections
The Sony A1E's panel has a glossy finish that handles reflections exceptionally well.
Pro Great performance in bright environments
The Sony A1E has a practical peak brightness of ~650nits for both SDR and HDR content — it can sustain this level of brightness when playing content. While the number here isn't very impressive compared to some other high-end TVs (e.g. the Sony X930E with ~1.4k nits of brightness), the panel of this TV offsets this by being an OLED. It can handle reflections very well and will not have any issues with fighting light in bright environments.
Pro Decent sound quality
The sound quality of the Sony A1E is suprisingly good for a TV (which isn't known for having good sound). The speakers can get really loud without much distortion happening, and its frequency response is perhaps one of the best measured in a TV's speakers. While an external audio set-up will definitely be better, the built-in speakers should suffice for most users that doesn't wish to spend additional money on an audio set-up.
Pro Great ecosystem of third-party apps
The Sony A1E runs on Android TV — normal Android apps from the Google Play Store (or other app stores) will work on it.
Pro Interface is ads-free
The user interface of modern smart TVs can include some advertisements similar to those on the internet or in a mobile app. The Sony A1E does not include any, and it also has a feature for limiting ads in third-party applications.
Pro Excellent for dark rooms
The Sony A1E performs exceptionally well in dark environments. Its ability to produce absolute and perfect blacks means the reproduction of dark highlights and scenes in movies will look great — this is further improved when there's no light around the TV as it allows the blacks to stand out more. This makes it great for watching all sorts of movies in a cinema-like setting, particularly movies with many black highlights/scenes where this is immediately noticeable even to undiscerning viewers (e.g. Interstellar).
Pro Extremely low motion blur
Because the Sony A1E has an OLED panel, it has near-perfect pixel response time; the motion blur is virtually non-existent at sub-1ms, which means this TV will have no issues with displaying extremely fast-moving objects — they will look smooth without any blur or lag.
Pro Decent for gaming
Input lag is one of the most important factors when considering a TV for gaming — it's representative of how fast the TV can display the image after receiving the input. The Sony A1E has ~30-40ms of input lag, which is decent enough for most gamers, but competitive gamers might find this lacking.
Pro Dark scenes are perfectly reproduced
The Sony A1E can handle dark scenes very well thanks to its OLED panel, which gives it infinite contrast ratios — it can reproduce dark scenes perfectly because of this.
Pro Wide viewing angle
The picture quality of the Sony A1E does not suffer from much deterioration when viewed from other angles. The brightness will decrease with deviations in viewing angles, but the black levels seem to be maintained perfectly.
Pro Excellent for watching sports
The Sony A1E's versatility is top-notch. The motion blur (sub-1ms) along with great overall color uniformity makes it an excellent choice for sports.
Pro Great color reproduction
The color gamut of a TV refers to the range of colors the display can reproduce — the wider the color gamut, the more colors it can display, and the better the overall picture quality will be. This is extremely important for HDR content because it requires a much wider color gamut than SDR content. The Sony A1E has no issues with accurately reproducing the colors necessary for true HDR.
Cons
Con Requires calibration
You'll need to spend some time calibration this TV because it's out-of-the-box colors are noticeably off. Namely, all the colors look horrible at the default settings. All the critical calibration parameters are available on the Internet.
Con The main interface has ads
There are a lot of ads and suggested content in the main interface of this TV. Sadly, there's no option to opt out of that.
Con Suffers from image retention issues
The main drawback of OLED panels are image retention issues with static images — pixels on the panel gets burned in when the picture doesn't change for extended periods of time. Noteworthily, the static image doesn't have to be whole like a full wallpaper on the TV; it can happen with content that has a static image anywhere on the screen (e.g. the logo of some TV channels).
As the Sony A1E has an OLED panel, it unfortunately suffers from this problem. There might be some retainment of artifacts for ~10 minutes when this happens, and it usually goes away after watching other content without static images. It's worth noting that while this issue is present, the Sony A1E reportedly handles this pretty well — most users report the artifacts going away only ~5minutes of playing normal content.
Con Lacks support for Dolby Vision
The Sony A1E can currently only play HDR10 content. It does not support Dolby Vision.
Con Might be hard to access inputs when mounted to a wall
The Sony A1E is extremely thin and it has a reflective finish on the back. After mounting it to a wall, the inputs might be hard to access and because of the reflective finish, it can pick up fingerprints/smudges when attempting to access the inputs (which also becomes hard to clean because of how thin it is).