Sony makes great TVs. Look at our best TV guide and you’ll see.
But despite being responsible for the PS5 – one of the best consoles we’ve ever had the pleasure of using – it’s surprisingly never been THE best at making a premium TV to match it.
Head over to our best gaming TV guide and you’ll find there’s not a single Sony set in it. This isn’t because they offer poor picture or sound quality or lack key features like 4K/120Hz or VRR – in fact, read our review of the Sony A95K and you’ll find it delivers in spades in all of these areas.
It’s because, unlike LG, whose C2 and G2 dominate our best gaming TV guide, it makes a crucial mistake: even the most premium TVs only have two HDMI 2.1 slots that can take full advantage of a PS5’s and Xbox Series X/S’s, most interesting features.
This may not sound like a big deal, but in my experience this limitation is a major annoyance that gets bigger over time.
It should come as no surprise that I love my gadgets. So in addition to a PS5, I have a top-notch gaming PC, a sound bar, and an Apple TV 4K that I want to connect to my television.
Having a miserly two HDMI 2.1s, one of which doubles as the eARC port, means I can’t easily plug them all in at once. This has kept me from bothering to change cables every week depending on what console I’m playing and if my significant other is streaming Ted Lasso that particular evening. The annoyance isn’t helped by the fact that I have terrible cable management.
This is why when Sony’s shiny new A95L was unveiled this afternoon, I felt a slight disappointment when I found out halfway through news from TV and AV editor Tom Parsons that Sony hasn’t fixed this issue on the new flagship.
Despite being packed with great new gaming features – highlights include a ‘200 percent’ brighter QD-OLED panel, Dolby Vision gaming support and a new game menu with a cool option to reduce the size of the window in which games are played – it has an identical number of HDMI 2.1 ports as its predecessor.
To be fair to Sony, it’s not the only company to make this mistake. Philips and Panasonic sets also work. There is also a technical reason for this. Specifically, that the MediaTek-made HDMI chips these companies use do not support more than two 2.1s.
But I can’t help but think that Sony, as a gaming company, should do better. I mean, it’s not too much to expect the company behind the PS5 to understand what gamers want, is it? If this problem isn’t fixed on the new A95L, it feels like a real missed opportunity.
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