Sony X1 OLED TV: Surprisingly Enduring Display Technology

The Sony X1 OLED TV from 2008 still holds up well today, surprising with its performance and similarity to modern devices.

### Sony XEL-1 OLED TV: A Blast from the Past
* 📺  The Sony XEL-1, released in 2008, was one of the world's first OLED TVs, featuring a **shockingly thin profile** and **high price tag**.
* 🔍  Despite its age, the XEL-1 still holds up well today, with **impressive motion clarity and overall picture quality**.
* 🎮  The TV's **960x540 resolution** and lack of modern features like **VRR** make it less suitable for gaming, but it still performs **admirably**.
* 🌈  Color accuracy and brightness fall short of modern standards, but the XEL-1's performance is **surprisingly close to current OLED displays**.
* 🔊  The TV's audio quality is **decent, but not exceptional**, especially compared to modern compact devices.
* 💰  OLED technology has advanced significantly since the XEL-1's release, with improvements in **longevity, color accuracy, and brightness**.
* 🏭  The high cost of OLED production, including **low yields** and **complex manufacturing processes**, has historically limited its adoption.
* 🔮  The future of display technology may include **microLED or emissive quantum dot displays**, potentially surpassing OLED in the **premium consumer market**.

I just picked up a sick new OLED TV and okay adamir 11 diagonal Ines. The Sony X1 isn't going to impress your friends with its size anymore, but back in 2008, this thing stunned the world with its organic LED screen, its shockingly thin profile, and of course, its astronomical price. According to OLED info.com, Sony initially viewed this product as more of a prototype, but by the end of its run, tens of thousands of these little guys had made their way into the hands of wealthy, eagle-eyed enthusiasts. Kind of surprising given that even by 2008 standards, it was woefully Impractical. What's more surprising is that as far as OLED technology has come in 16 years, it still holds up shockingly well today. I mean, just look at the definition of this segue to today's sponsor, see Sonic reliability check, aord ability check, efficiency ability double-check. Take a look at the new vertex lineup on sale for Prime day using our Link in the description. Back in 2007, OLED had been

invented, and even featured in commercial products like this Pioneer car stereo. But most people had only ever seen one in a magazine or in an online article, and I still vividly remember the buzz around this thing, both from the optimists who saw it as a window into the future, and from the haters who criticized, well, everything 'cause they're haters. I'm really excited to try it 'cause I never got a chance back then, but first let's do a quick tour, shall we? All the brains are in this bottom box down here, and then it's attached using this kind of funky arm to what is, true to Sony's marketing, a shockingly thin panel. Though it kind of reminds me of LG's earlier OLED models where they had the really, really thin display but then a pretty big caboose down at the bottom of them. There isn't much in the way of viewing angle adjustments other than tilt, though if that's what it took for them to have this tank-like build quality, honestly, I'm okay with it. So many of these

survived. That you can still readily find them on eBay. We got a big fat speaker girl in the bottom that kind of makes it look more like a Bluetooth speaker. Now with display technology new product category anyone, huh, music video players, uh, anyway, unlike a lot of old display Tech that we look at, it's modern enough that we've got an HDMI input, a USB port in case we want to play our MP4s, RF coax, a landport because we've got the Japanese version, and a handy dandy headphone jack on the side in case you want to quietly game or watch TV next to your sleeping partner. You know, if I hadn't been porish back in 2007, I might have been able to see what a sick bougie bedside TV this thing could be. As it was, I was just like fairness to me, that's a pretty reasonable reaction too. Let's give it a shot. Almost feels wrong playing PlayStation 5 on it, but hey, it can. Doesn't support the most modern features. There's no variable refresh rate. It's

only 60 HZ, and even the resolution is a little bit of an oddball. It runs 960x540, which is exactly one4 of the pixel count of 1080p. Which even at the time was weird because HD was often 1366X768. For some reason kind of makes me wonder if like a 22in full HD model was ever considered, but then scrapped out of concerns for cost. I mean it have probably been like 20 grand. There's definitely things about the display that are not perfect by modern standards, but if you didn't tell me that this was 16 years old, I would not know. The motion clarity is awesome. There's a bit of a weird flicker, almost like Black frame insertion, but it's super clear. Even just like input leg is fine. Like dude, this plus a PS3 back in the day. I mean yeah, you got to sit kind of close and everything, but like holy crap, at this size, the resolution's fine. Overall, the most surprising thing about this to me

is how close it is to a modern device. Even the marketing is the same. Sony boasted rapid pixel response times, super high contrast ratios thanks to inky blacks, high peak brightness on a per pixel level, and they talked about the thin panel. All stuff that's only just starting to give way to new marketing focus points like AI. Goodie. Now, for funsies, what we wanted to do is take it another step and compare it to Apple's new Ultra Retina XDR Display with tandem OLED. This thing is incredible. Not only does the SDR and HDR accuracy rival the $20,000 reference display that we looked at last year, but this thing gets bright. And while 1600 nits isn't as high as some of the newer OLED TVs, this can do a th000 nits full screen sustained. And there's just nothing else like that at the moment. Though, with that said, if we account for the differences in time, boy, is this ever impressive. Like damn, it looked good in games, and I was like, Wellow, this looks really good for.

the time in games, but it's not even HDR. It just has nice punchy SD. HDR didn't exist yet as a standard. Holy crap, what is going on right now? This should not look this close. You can really see it in a couple spots, like when she brings up the flame. The flame gets really bright. Like even there, that it's way brighter on the iPad. Moon looks like more highlighted on the iPad. Like you can tell. Yeah, and the colors are a little off. Y, I am super impressed right now. Right, it's so good. Oh yeah, the highlights look way better on the on the iPad. Little bit of a green cast to that brown. We'll get to color accuracy later. It's, but if I took this away and you said watch this movie, enjoy this movie, I would enjoy this movie. Hold up, I'm going to let you finish, but LTD Store is having one of their biggest sales of all time. You can get 40% off a 3D down jacket, 50% off stealth hoodie Pro and

stealth sweatpants Pro and 40% off the and favorite RGB shirt, which is super comfy and comes with little specs of RGB throughout, just like my life. These special deals are only on for today, but we'll have more exclusive all the way until July 19th, so keep your eyes peeled by using our Link in the description. I was dude when I pitched the comparison to this for the video cuz this was something I asked plof to arrange for. My expectation was that it was really going to put in context the development that had been done over the last six years. Instead, all it's really showing us is how far ahead Sony was. Now there's issues it falls short of the coverage of even the srgb color space, and while its average Delta 2000 of 6.36 is about in line with high-end LCDs at the time, it's on a completely different planet from our calibrated tandem OLED. Even if it's the sort of thing that only a big nerd is likely to notice, frankly, these ended

up looking so close to each other that we were digging around in the shield menu to find out if it was doing some kind of HDR to SDR tone mapping, or something that was giving the xcl1 an advantage, but it just looks really good. I mean, I ran into the same thing on my TCL TV at home where SDR content looks great on it because it just allows itself to take full advantage of its full brightness, giving it a more poppy HDR look, even if you're definitely missing some color volume. And in How to Train Your Dragon, that difference in color volume, we saw that in the night scenes where there wasn't enough saturation. Also, the difference in color accuracy are very noticeable; you can really see the pink cast in the sky here compared to a properly calibrated display. One thing that's come a really long way in the last couple decades is audio performance in compact devices, so I'll be curious to see how the speakers are and now the spinning not too loud you got to kind of.

Crank it useless. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just get me off of this thing. Good dialogue clarity though. God, this is a good soundtrack, and these speakers do not do it justice. Plug your headphones in. Yeah, plug your headphones in, which isn't a guarantee they'll sound good. Hold on. I'd watch theit out of movies like this. Yeah, it's almost like dialog enhancement is on. Yeah, so the musical score is not standing out enough. The clarity, if I was an elderly person watching content on here though, is outstanding. There's a whole other paragraph scripted talking about how they compare to each other, and I just don't know if we need it because you can have the conversation of well, which one is the more bestest in these specific ways, but at the end of the day, for most people, that's not what they're asking. What they're asking is, am I enjoying this experience, and I am even seeing it next to the state of the art. I am. I don't need it, but one area where a lot

of advancements have been made are in OLED longevity. We did notice some reverse burning on the display where the sides are a little bit brighter than the middle, and our suspicion is that this is because a lot of content back then was letter-boxed, so those pixels probably weren't used as much. Now, part of why our Sony looks so good is it's taking advantage of modern processing tricks that didn't exist back when it came out. It's hooked up to an Nvidia Shield, but part of why it looks so good is that it's just kind of incredible. So, I guess the question is why did it take so long to get from this to this? Well, research and development costs a lot even at the best of times, and unlike with LCD, which can be manufactured in a few separate parts before being assembled, OLED is put together in mostly a singular package. So, instead of a product ecosystem with a few companies that are focused on components like backlight, Liquid Crystal layer, color filter, polarization film, and then tossing individual components if there are errors within the batch, it's

one company focused on one finished good for the most part speaking of Errors. You can get notified about our next round of scribe drivers at LTT store.com. Every pen is made of a failed screwdriver shaft so you can own your own piece of one of my most expensive mistakes. Another huge Factor making OLED expensive is the difference in yields from a single sheet of mother glass due to the Precision and cleanliness that are required at the deposition step to make an OLED panel display. Companies needed to learn to work more like a semiconductor Fab. You vaporize organic material in a vacuum and you deposit the sublimated particles perfectly onto the mother glass. A bit too much material or a bit too much moisture or heat during this process and that entire sheet is ruined necessitating the use of clean rooms. On the other hand, LCD is a lot more tolerant to dust and defect so in a less perfect environment you could still get a perfectly working panel. And don't forget just like with our OLED here LCD prototypes and little concept models.

were coming out decades before we saw a mass adoption of that technology. Companies like Epson and Sharp were releasing early LCDs as far back as the 1980s, and it wasn't until about 20 years later that big for the time 40, 50, 60-inch LCD TVs started replacing the bulky CRTs in everyone's living rooms. So the progress here is largely thanks to LG, if we're being realistic, who really banked on making OLED a premium but obtainable option and who continue to invest in new innovations like the tandem OLED panel that this iPad has. That stacks two OLED layers on top of each other to produce that brighter image. Now that the competition is heating up though, and manufacturing processes are a lot more mature, and there's some actual demand thanks to HDR advances on the content side of things. Who knows in another four years, OLED, whether it's tandem QD W or otherwise, could be your standard issue, and future technologies like microLED or, man, those emissive quantum dot ones, woo.

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this thing gets hot, dude. 38 Watts passively cooled in a chassis this size, she toasts.

I Bought the World’s First OLED TV from 2008!

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV stunned the world in 2008 with its organic LED screen and incredibly thin profile, despite being considered impractical at the time.

The product gained popularity and was viewed as a prototype, but still holds up well compared to modern OLED technology.

It offered limited viewing angle adjustments but had a durable build quality and is still available for purchase on platforms like eBay.

Comparison of Sony's 2005 Display and Apple's Ultra Retina XDR Display

Sony's 2005 display, despite its low resolution and odd refresh rate, still offers impressive motion clarity and image quality, comparable to modern standards.

The display's features, such as rapid pixel response times and high contrast ratios, are similar to modern marketing points, showing how ahead of its time it was.

In comparison, Apple's Ultra Retina XDR Display offers incredible SDR and HDR accuracy, as well as unmatched brightness, making it a standout in the current market.

The comparison highlights the impressive performance of Sony's display, considering the 16-year gap between the two devices.

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The comparison of the development of the products over the last six years shows that Sony was far ahead, with the Stealth Sweatpants and RGB shirt offering a great user experience.

The audio performance of the tech devices has significantly improved in the last couple of decades, providing outstanding clarity, especially for dialogues.

The Long Road to OLED Technology Advancement

OLED technology took a long time to develop due to high research and development costs, the complexity of manufacturing, and the precision required in the production process.

Unlike LCD, OLED is put together as a singular package, with a much lower tolerance for error, making it more expensive to produce.

The progress in OLED technology is largely attributed to LG's investment in innovation, with the company's development of the tandem OLED panel contributing to brighter images and the overall advancement of the technology.

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