I’ve been eyeing both the LG C1 and Sonly X90J for a semi-dedicated 48/50" gaming setup in a bright room. I’ve drooled over the inky blacks and amazing contrast of OLED for a few years, but I really needed the C1 to be miles ahead in performance to justify the huge price difference - and overcome (my personal) concerns of low HDR brightness, lack of shadow details, and potential burn-in.

So when the LG C1 review came out with less than stellar brightness performance (worse than the CX I believe), it pretty much cemented the decision for me. But then I started seeing videos and other reviews suggesting the X90J may be a step down from the X900H. Which we’ve seen happen with Sony’s newest models on a number of occasions.

But knowing this review was in the works and with a solid Best Buy return policy, I pulled the trigger on a 50" X90J which I’ve been using over a week now hooked up to an Xbox Series X. So I’m pretty pleased to see these scores - which are nearly spot on to my experience so far.

For context, I’m moving from a 65" X850C, which I’d been playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk on the Series X for a few months - and while it supports 4K 60hz HDR making games look pretty great, I’m now adding Local Dimming and a few other fancy picture advancements Sony has developed in the past 6 years.

A few observations:

• I’m super impressed with the blacks and the shadow detail in the night scenes of Cyberpunk. I’d see some youtube ‘reviews’ that said the Local Dimming was terrible and showed huge blooming. And I have to say, I see very little of that, if anything. Yes, sometimes there’s a small gradient halo around the odd on-screen white text, but hardly noticeable (at least to me). I think I even only adjusted one or two settings from the default Game mode picture settings - moving the LD to high (which oddly improved the brightness of the shadow scenes) and setting the black adjust from None to Low (which inked it up a bit more). So I’m curious to see what picture settings RTINGS will be recommending.


• I’ve connected the Xbox on HDMI 4 at 4k/120hz and am running Performance mode on Cyberpunk so it’s 4K 60fps(ish) and I’ve not seen any of the juddering a couple reviews had complained about. I did do the firmware update right at the start, which corrected a known issue with the early release models.


• I’ve got a 4k Apple TV on HDMI 3 running Dolby Vision and the picture looks amazing. I know there’s been some complaints of it having a green tint, but I rewatched the Season 5 final episode of The Expanse so I could check out the space battle scenes in all their glory again and it was a little mind-blowing. Yes, I’m doing a direct comparison to a 6 year old VA panel (that was highly rated and still a great set) and not OLED, but wow I was impressed with the quality of the dark scenes. No artifacts in the gradients, excellent detail in the shading (no black crushing), and deep blacks in the background where needed (which admittedly blotted out a few of the less bright stars in the background). I never even touched a picture setting other than the Dolby Vision defaults, so there’s perhaps room for improvement.

A few small complaints:

• Only HDMI3 and 4 support 4K/120hz and VRR (in a future firmware update) but not at the same time as Dolby Vision. I don’t use my Xbox for watching movies and have yet to pick up a PS5, but it kind of sucks not to have this setting auto-switch sort of like the Apple TV can based on content.


• eARC is also supported through HDMI3, which means if you want Dolby Atmos via a sound bar or receiver, it will need to support 4k/120hz passthrough. I’m using the new Xbox Wireless Headset at the moment, so not an issue for me (yet), but it still would have been better if they put the eArc on HDMI 1 or 2 as many/most passthrough devices at the moment will not support 120hz. 
 I know the LG CX/C1 support 4K/120hz on all 4 HDMIs which is awesome. And I will keep an eye on LGs future OLEDs for when the X850C is due for a living room upgrade, as it’s the main movie TV. But until then, I’m super happy with my X90J purchase, which I think is amazing bang for buck.

One thing I noted in the ratings, which will perhaps be called out in the full review - is the mention ALLM is not supported, but Sony say it is. Though perhaps as a future firmware update with VRR, which is maybe while it will earn an asterisk*.

Thanks for the great reviews! Looking forward to the full writeup. And glad knowing I won’t be sending this one back to Best Buy.

Oh - one last thing - How would you rate this compared to both the X900H and X950H. Better overall than the former, but perhaps not as high quality picture as the latter…?