Sony A8F 65" Class HDR UHD Smart OLED TV

This 65" TV was ordered directly from Amazon via Amazon Prime. Unfortunately, Amazon shipped the TV via UPS rather than using a white-glove delivery service as one would expect for such an expensive and large TV. The UPS delivery person did not want to deliver the TV. My wife saw him check out the box and then drive off. On the third day of this horrible treatment, when the truck was about to drive off, my tiny wife physically blocked the truck and demanded the TV. The delivery box had a scary hole in it and the delivery-person was very angry/aggressive but we took a chance and signed for it anyway. Luckily, the TV was not damaged! This was a horrible experience (not at all what I imagined) and I would think twice about ordering in this way. The hardware design of this TV seems very nice. It is not excessively fragile and I like it that there are no apparent speakers (which I would not use). The look from the front and all other directions is very clean without any annoyances. I would say that the design objectives have been met perfectly. This TV produces a very bright and clear picture. As delivered, the picture mode (the most important parameter to change) is set to "Standard" which adds contrast texture processing to make grains of sand and pores on people's faces much more apparent, while also making white somewhat blue ('Vivid' is more blue). This is a very intense and (soon) tiring experience with exaggerated colors and textures, which is definitely not what the director intended. The picture is very striking. After changing the picture mode to "Custom" or "Cinema Pro", the colors and contrast appear to be correct without the extra contrast/color processing and the color of white is correct. The picture is still super-bright so I adjusted it to half brightness (25 out of 50/max) which is still a bit too bright for watching in a darkened room. One professional review I read suggests setting the brightness to 9 out of 50/max when viewing in a totally dark room. It may be that OLED is not capable of producing the extreme brightness demanded by HDR but for normal viewing, this TV feels like a light-cannon. I have yet to notice any sign of burn-in or even any faint image retention at all. I have also not noticed an annoying light gray texture when the whole image is almost completely black (e.g. 5% black) as some have indicated. The gray scales are excellent and the color decode is excellent according to a calibration Blu-Ray and associated color filter. There is no observed banding or posterization at all given good quality input. The TV is connected to an Integra DHC 80.2 processor using HDMI ARC to get audio/control from the TV into the processor and on through the amplifiers to the speaker system. This works well. Some HDMI devices work better with the TV than others in terms of being detected and being select-able as an input using the TV input selection menu rather than via the Integra remote. I can select Roku and Chromecast via TV input selections, but the TiVO DVR and Oppo Blu-Ray player are not listed there and I must use the processor's remote to select those inputs. I do like it that when I turn on the TV that the Integra processor and amplifiers turn on, and then turn off when I turn off the TV. The TV remote needs to be aimed perfectly at the white LED indicator at the bottom of the TV, or aimed at the reflective white ceiling, or else it will not work reliably. This is annoying. One strange issue I have noticed is that network 'ping' from a computer on the network will lose half the packets whereas all other components attached to the same switch do not lose any packets at all. It is not clear if this is a hardware or Android issue. The network apps such as Netflix and YouTube work well when the TV is 'on' and provide a very clear picture so it does not seems like the hardware is at fault. Android TV takes some getting used to. It does not appear to be possible to disable/remove Android apps that came with the TV. It is likely possible to re-arrange the location of apps on the screen but I have not figured out how to move them yet. Additional apps may be added via the Google Play Store but many of them will not be usable without an add-on Bluetooth (or USB) keyboard due to requiring text input. Many favorite Android apps are not available for Android TV. Be sure to use the search mechanism to look for apps because otherwise many will not show up. In particularly, the voice recognition is really really good and helps a lot with inputting the search request. Unlike some others have commented about Android TV in the past, I have not noticed any particular sluggishness or hanging when using Android TV menus or applications. It feels reasonably snappy to me. I still have not figured out how to enable Cast (built-in ChromeCast) capability. The TV is hard-wired via Ethernet and seemed to become confused when trying to use both Ethernet and WI-Fi. The YouTube app provides a way to pair a phone to that app via WiFi or (apparently) a LAN-based pairing mechanism. I have not tried either method yet. Maybe this would reveal the hidden Cast functionality. Be aware that while the TV is delivered with some documentation for how to assemble it, and turn it on, there is no documentation provided for the Android TV software or Sony's customizations to it. There is a built in help system which provides a bit of documentation for some of the settings menu options.