Review: Sony KDL-55W955

Introduction and featuresAfter blowing our socks off with its 2014 TV debut, the 50W829, I'm salivating at the prospect of wrapping my eyeballs around Sony's flagship 55-inch HD TV for 2014, the KDL-55W955.The 55W955's appearance does little to dampen my ardour. While there are elements of its design that could potentially divide opinion, for the most part it's a seriously stylish hunk of telly.Introducing the wedgeThe thing that most sets it apart is its wedge shape. Look at it from the side and you'll see that it gets wider the further down from top to bottom it goes, with the bottom edge ending up quite chunky by today's super-slim standards. What's more, Sony has boldly emphasised this chunkiness by fitting the TV's sides with a glinting metallic finish.Sony hasn't shunned the modern obsession with size zero TVs merely in a bid to look different, though. The wedge also delivers two significant practical benefits.The first of these is stability. As in, loading the bottom half of the TV with width and weight makes it stand more robustly than your typical flat TVThe other, more important, benefit of the wedge is that the wider base gives Sony's audio people more room to work with. This enables them to build a more powerful version of the long duct down-firing speaker system introduced on some of Sony's 2013 models.DesignThe 55W955 can be mounted low on either a pair of spindly legs (which can sit either right at the TV's outer edges, or tucked nearer the TV's centre if your table can't support a full-width attachment). Or it can be wall hung slightly awkwardly via a special mount.While the 55W955's backside is chunky, the bezel round the screen is extremely slim on its top, left and right edges. The bottom edge is a bit wider, but it still looks attractive – especially thanks to its carriage of a slim, coloured light that changes colour based on what source you're watching.Connections on the 55W955's protruding rear are extensive. The four HDMIs will provide most people's main video options, while a trio of USB ports and both LAN and Wi-Fi network options provide the multimedia features now so fundamental to any high-end TV.Multimedia supportThe USBs can play the main video, photo and music file formats, with similarly wide multimedia streaming support available from networked DLNA computers. The network options enable you to take the 55W955 online via the latest Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) platform.This platform is, for me, a considerable improvement over 2013's Sony smart TV offering. It has been designed to make it much easier to find content quickly – especially via the new Discover system. Press the Discover button on the remote and you get a row of suggested content links along the bottom of the screen. The come from both the tuner and on-demand services you're connected to, based on an assessment of the sort of programming you most like to watch.What's more, you can easily scroll down from this first list of options to all sorts of other content shortcut lists, including one for YouTube videos. This system works really well – especially in conjunction with the 'one-flick' remote control you get with the 55W955.The 'one-flick' remote employs a tactile thumb-swipe touch pad, a hugely streamlined button count and a clever and quite intuitive contextualised usage system. This all comes together to provide a mostly welcome alternative to the more standard Sony remote.App supportThe number of apps available via the SEN is decent, with a sensible focus on video sources such as the BBC iPlayer, Demand 5, Sony's Video Unlimited service, Netflix (which gets its own button on Sony's main remote), Amazon Instant and Sky News. It's a shame Sony still hasn't managed to get the ITV Player and 4OD signed up to the SEN, but we live in hope that it might happen at some point.This being a World Cup year the 55W955 has a Football mode, which adjusts the picture to settings Sony believes are best suited to football playback. It also provides access to various online footie sources – including the FIFA World Cup clip archive.Social interactionYou can use the football mode in conjunction with new Social View functionality that combines a hashtag-themed ticker tape Twitter feed with the facility to Skype call multiple mates to share a game's highs and lows using the built-in camera.I remain deeply sceptical of the idea that such 'social' features belong on a family TV. Especially when the Twitter feeds contain no bad language filters! But Sony has gone to more trouble than most to make the social features work here, including such clever technologies as an audio filter that stops you hearing your own words over your friends' Skype feeds. You also have the ability for the camera software to track your friends' faces so that they always appear in the centre of the portion of their Skype image that's reproduced on your TV.Picture technologyMoving on from the multimedia and 'social' features of the 55W955 to what makes its pictures tick, I should start by reiterating that this is a full HD TV, not a 4K/UHD one. As part of Sony's flagship HD range, its pictures benefit from one of Sony's local dimming systems applied to its edge LED lighting array. Sony has set new local dimming standards over the past year or two, so obviously we have high hopes for the brand's take on the technology again here.Also likely to play a major role in the 55W955's picture fortunes is Sony's X-Reality Pro processing engine, which uses a huge content 'database' to streamline the processing it applies to whatever type of source content it receives. It's backed up from a processing point of view, too, by Sony's MotionFlow XR 400 system, delivering a 400Hz-emulating effect via a combination of backlight scanning and frame interpolation. Though I'm a bit puzzled that this is a clear 'down spec' from the MotionFlow XR 600 system sported by the considerably cheaper Sony 50W829.3D indicationsIt's interesting to note, too, that the 55W955B uses a passive 3D system rather than the active one of the 50W829, clearly revealing that it uses a different panel source. The shift to passive 3D will mean, of course, that the 55W955's 3D will likely have less resolution but also less crosstalk ghosting and flicker. Finishing this section up by looking through the 55W955's picture adjustments reveals a solid array of calibration tweaks. A more standard set of colour and gamma management tools would have been a good idea, but the 55W955 makes this oversight easier to forgive by providing easily the most useful and well-considered array of picture presets in the TV world. What's more, thanks to X-Reality Pro the 55W955 is uncannily good at figuring out what presets to apply to different sources without any input required from you at all. Excellent.Picture qualityI might as well just cut to the chase here and say that tragically the 55W955 is one of those rare events in the TV world: a flagship TV that's significantly less satisfying to watch than a model lower down Sony's range.What's the problem? Dark scenes. It's apparent almost immediately that the panel Sony has chosen to build the 55W955 around is nowhere near as secure in the contrast department as the superb 50W829.This fact makes itself known in a number of ways. The most troubling of which is a general grey mist that hangs over any dark scenes, reducing their naturalism and dynamism compared with how they appeared on the 50W829.Black level problemsThe greyness can also cause some greyscale detailing to slide into oblivion, and is unbearably bad if you attempt to watch the TV without using its LED Dynamic Control system. What's more, while the LED Dynamic Control can indeed deliver significant contrast improvements, even on its highest setting it can't produce a black level to rival that of the cheaper 50W829.There's also the issue of uneven backlighting to consider, whereby dark scenes sometimes appear behind gentle, but still distracting, clouds of unintentional extra brightness.There is one good bit of news to report here, though, namely that Sony's local dimming system continues to impress in the way it manipulates light on a reasonably local level without causing too many obvious 'rectangles' of light around stand-out bright objects.But the bottom line here is that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And the lack of black level response from the 55W955's core panel is just too big a problem for even Sony's local dimming cleverness to turn round.More bad newsWhile there are actually some good things about the 55W955's pictures, there is still a lot of bad news. The slightly low-res look to its 3D images, which manifests in the shape of a soft finish compared to the extreme, almost forensic clarity we're now becoming accustomed to seeing on the best active HD and UHD 3D sets, and a stepped look to contoured edges. Also the 55W955's screen is rather prone to picking up reflections from your room – especially direct light sources opposite the screen. It would be unthinkable for a modern-day Sony TV not to get lots of things right in a flagship HD TV, though. And so it is that the 55W955 produces frequently spectacular colours thanks to Sony's Triluminos colour technology. ColourConfusingly this is not the same Quantum Dot technology that delivered 2013's Triluminos expanded colour gamut. Instead it's some sort of wide colour gamut panel design (the details of which Sony was oddly unwilling to be drawn on). But all that matters is that within the limitations of the black level response problems it delivers a scintillatingly wide dynamic range packed with subtle tonal details and potent saturations that at the very least rival those of the PurColour technology found in Samsung's HU8500 UHD TVs.It's in this respect, too, that the 55W955 delivers its most persuasive picture advantage over its 50W829 sibling.HD 2D pictures on the 55W955 looks superbly crisp and detailed, while X-Reality Pro proves its worth again when it comes to up-scaling standard definition sources to the screen's HD resolution. Even YouTube videos are made easy on the eye, and there can be no greater proof of X-Reality Pro's abilities than that!Motion clarityThe 55W955's sharpness owes a debt of gratitude to Sony's strong motion handling abilities too, which tread a finely judged line between applying processing to reduce judder and blur without making the picture look unnatural and processed.In short, where Sony's engineers haven't had to wrestle with the inescapable contrast flaws of the panel at the 55W955's heart, they've been able to work their usual perfectly pitched magic. But in the end this just makes the multiple black level woes all the tougher to take.Usability, sound and valueUsabilitySony has really tried to improve its smart interface for 2014. The addition of a Discover menu certainly streamlines content finding, and once you get used to it (which does take a little time) the new One-Flick remote turns out to be well-judged.Sony's prowess at applying the right picture presets to the right sources also saves tons of time that might normally have to be spent calibrating images manually.On the downside, it's a pity Sony doesn't give you any real means of sorting apps in its 'store' by category, leaving you having to scroll through everything to find specific app types you're after. The decision to put the main adjustment menus and smart menus all on the same screen, with the adjustment menus relegated to tiny icons to the picture's top right, feels like an unnecessary over-complication. It would have been easier to just give each set of menus their own dedicated remote control button and starting page.SoundSo has the wedge transformed TV sound? Sort of. Certainly it's allowed Sony to use larger drive units this time round than it could on last year's equivalent models, this does lead to a more open, dynamic sound. It's probably the best example of TV audio we've heard from a set with down-firing speakers, despite the fact that Sony's 2013 audio efforts seemed to have inspired a frenzy of audio improvement from other brands too.I can't quite forget how brilliant the front-firing speakers found on Sony's upcoming 4K TVs are sounding. But you could say there's no point dwelling on features that are only found on much more expensive TVs.ValueWhen you think that Samsung's flagship 55-inch HD TV, the 55H8000, will set you back a cool £2,300, you could argue that the £1600 Sony is asking for the 55W955 doesn't look unreasonable.However, while Samsung's set is excellent, Sony's isn't. In fact, I feel strongly that I'd rather watch Sony's 50W829 – a set which also goes considerably easier on your wallet than the 55W955.VerdictThe build up to the 55W955 really couldn't be better. Last year's Sony 9 series TVs were outstanding, and the 50W829 got Sony's 2014 off to a belting start. The 55W955 shows all the right signs of living up to its pedigree too, thanks to its startling, sound-boosting 'wedge' design and an eye-catching feature count dominated by Sony's new and improved smart TV platform. Some aspects of its pictures – especially colour - deliver on the 55W955's flagship HD model status too. But sadly the 55W955 is ultimately undone by a single but potent frailty: an inability to render dark scenes convincingly. This is so much of a problem, in fact, that ultimately I found I'd much rather watch Sony's cheaper W8 series.We likedThe wedge design works, despite its chunkiness – especially as it helps the 55W955 serve up an excellent audio performance by flat TV standards. Colours are superbly handled too, and pictures always look sharp and clean no matter what the source.We dislikedThe 55W955 is curiously underwhelming with its black level reproduction, which leads to dark scenes looking unnatural and patchy. Its screen is a little over-reflective too, and while the wedge design sits well on the provided legs, it looks a bit awkward hanging on a wall.VerdictIt's tragic that a TV with so much going for it and such heritage behind it should be let down so dramatically by the shortcomings of the core third-party panel Sony has chosen to place at the 55W955's heart.

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