I have strong feelings about unboxing TVs. Before we even start to talk about Sony's latest and greatest, let’s talk about unboxing. No matter who makes the TV, unboxing and setup is always a nightmare of unwieldy cardboard. Once you're through that circle of hell, you're faced with an ouroboros of plastic bags, nested together with all the elegance of a pile of swarming rats doing their best to form a rat king. Next up, you have to find the cables— those are often entombed inside a sarcophagus of shrieking styrofoam.
So when the Sony A8H showed up, I rolled up my sleeves, pulled out my box cutter, and enlisted a family member to help me unbox and set the thing up. I should've been sporting a bullwhip and a fedora (m'television). What I didn't expect was just how quickly and painlessly we'd get it done—about 15 minutes. I was dumbstruck. Surely we were missing something. This is a trick, I thought. Sony sent me a dummy TV, and it's going to shatter into a million snakes any minute. I waited, and waited. No snakes. It wasn't even set up yet, and I knew this TV was something different.
The TV is braced by a couple of styrofoam endcaps in the box, but the packaging is otherwise minimal. Once you pull it out of its protective plastic, just choose which stand configuration you want (tall enough for a soundbar or shorter to hide cables) and pop the legs into the bottom. You’re done. There's no need to go find a screwdriver and awkwardly lay the TV on a table while you wrestle the legs into the stand. Nope. The A8H is a very polite houseguest—it didn’t even leave too many styro-crumbs on my floor.
The onscreen setup is familiar if you've ever used an Android TV before. Or any other device that hails from Google, really. You sign into your Wi-Fi, then your Google account, and the TV does the rest. The menus are snappy and quick, a big improvement over the laggy A8G model. Navigating menus on that TV was an exercise in frustration. But this year's model isn't without faults. Android TV is often clunky; managing your apps can be a pain, and so can removing all the promoted and preset content on your TV's home screen.
Finding the right menus for basic setup is easy enough, though, especially for setting up a soundbar. And if you're investing in a TV like this, you really should get a soundbar. The Sony A8H boasts a set of speakers inside the display itself, and the sound is decent. It's like listening to a movie on your Apple earbuds. It's fine. For a cinematic experience to match the killer display (more on that in a bit), you should absolutely pair it with good speakers or a soundbar.
Even though it looms in my living room like an obsidian idol, a TV becomes a part of the decor after a while. Especially when it’s not in use. But every now and then a TV comes along and I just can't stop gawking. I’ve had the Sony A8H in my living room for a few weeks now, and I still catch myself stealing glances over my shoulder while trying to get work done. It’s a 65-inch pane of glass as black as the night sky, and it’s thinner than my smartphone. Even when it’s turned off it cuts an impressive figure. Like a black hole, the A8H has an inescapable gravity.