![Sony's XBR-A1E Bravia 4K OLED TV doesn't have speakers. It is a speaker.](/content/dam/images/g/t/m/a/o/9/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gtmafq.png/1483598334430.jpg)
It hardly seems possible given the understated way in which it was announced, but Sony appears to have just jumped into the OLED TV market with a TV that looks like it could give LG quite a headache.
Sony's XBR-A1E Bravia 4K TV won't just use superior OLED technology when it comes out (presumably) some time this year, meaning that Sony will join the short list of just LG and Panasonic as the only manufacturers of OLED TVs.
The A1E will also use so-called Acoustic Surface technology, that turns the screen itself into a giant speaker by vibrating the glass. That's right, Sony's first OLED TV won't have speakers. It will be a speaker. Or, hopefully, more than one speaker for stereo sound, though how that might be possible wasn't exactly made clear at the fairly cursory launch of the TV, at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas.
But the OLED is a more important breakthrough.
![Sony's XBR-A1E Bravia 4K OLED TV from side on](/content/dam/images/g/t/m/a/k/u/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1483588166900.jpg)
Up until this week, LG has been the only company capable of making OLED TV screens at a commercially viable cost.
It achieved that by using a modified version of OLED known as WOLED, which uses White Organic Light Emitting Diodes in conjunction the red, green and blue (RGB) OLEDs that are found in smaller OLED displays, such as those used on Samsung phones. WOLED displays are incredibly good, but regular RGB OLED is expected to be even better if and when it can ever be commercialised at TV-like screen sizes.
Details of Sony's new OLED display are scant, and it could be that the company has yet to figure out how to make its own RGB OLED screens (which it has been working on for years) cost effectively, and is instead simply buying WOLED panels from LG. Panasonic is said to be doing the same with its just-announced OLED TV.
If Sony is simply using an LG panel, it would mean that the A1E would have a picture quality more or less the same as LG's picture quality, perhaps a little better because Sony tends to be better than LG at upscaling lower-resolution images to 4K. Given LG's WOLED displays have arguably the best picture quality on the market, that would still make the Sony TV terribly good.
It supports Dolby Vision HDR, just like LG does. Plus, the new Sony A1E has that sound thing going for it, and it uses the Android TV operating system, which has vastly more apps than LG's WebOS operating system.
Which is to say that, even if Sony is only buying in LG panels, the A1E could still be the best TV of all time.
Or it could also be that Sony has figured out how to make its own RGB OLED panels in commercially viable quantities, in which case the A1E could be amazing, with more colour depth than even LG's TVs. If that's even possible.
The XBR-A1E Bravia 4K TV will come in 56-inch, 65-inch and 77-inch variants. Pricing and availability has yet to be announced.
I'll update this story as more details appear. My own thinking is that, if Sony were indeed making its own OLED panels, it would have made a bigger deal of the XBR-A1E, rather than announce it alongside a whole slew of other prodcuts.
John Davidson is in Las Vegas as a guest of Samsung.