OLED TV and affordable are two phrases that don’t often come together. Touted as a high-quality OLED TV that also won’t hurt your wallet, the Prism+ 55AL might be an option if you’re shopping for one in the Dragon Year.
The Prism+ 55AL is a 55-inch version of the Singapore electronics company’s latest OLED TV. With a viewing distance of 2m away, it easily occupies about 50 per cent of my field of vision, which is optimal when viewing movies.
Think of it like watching your Netflix streaming service from a meter away with a 27-inch monitor. The Prism+ TV is big enough for the living rooms of many a 4- or 5-room HDB flat in Singapore.
Using OLED technology or Organic Light-Emitting Diode, the TV screen can emit light at the pixel level. This translates into better colour representation by showing the right intensity to show the correct colour hue for each pixel, thanks to the TV’s 99 per cent DCI-P3 colour gamut.
Moreover, the Prism+ 55AL offering 850nits of brightness, I do not need to draw the living room curtains just to watch my favourite show.
The new TV is sleek looking with thin bezels and sits on a single stand. It looks like a giant TV monitor without the legs but such stand is useful when rotating the TV to clean the table top or face another part of the living room.
The Prism+ TV’s OLED display panel provides much better image quality than my old LED TV. The colour is more vibrant and “contrasty”, thanks to its ability to switch off the light source at the pixel level to provide deep blacks.
Skin tone is good, and you can immediately see the imperfections of an actor’s skin if you look closely enough. This is especially with Dolby Vision-enabled video content.
The TV also supports HDR10+ and Filmmaker Mode. Filmmaker mode turns off post-processing features like motion smoothing and preserves the correct aspect ratio, colours and frame rate, as the a filmmaker intended. For movie purists, this is something to look forward to.
Setting up the Prism+ OLED 4K TV is relatively easy. I plugged in the LAN Cable from my home’s Internet gateway router and installed the digital antenna to get Mediacorp’s digital channels. After logging into my YouTube, Netflix and Prime streaming services, the TV worked without any glitches.
For folks living in typical space-constrained apartments in Singapore, the good news is that the new 55AL now comes with built-in 2.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos speakers. This TV’s sound system is enough if you are watching news or YouTube, where the clarity of speech or dialogue is important.
Movie buffs will be disappointed because there is not enough space on the TV to house a larger subwoofer that produces deep rich bass, a key element when listening to cinema-quality audio.
It does not have a wide soundstage too, so all the audio content often sounds cramped in the middle. That said, the TV performs much better than some mid-range TVs with stereo speakers.
After hooking up to my Creative SXFi Carrier Dolby Atmos Soundbar to the Prism+ TV, I can instantly sense the difference that a separate subwoofer offers.
Watching Masters of the Air on Apple+ feels more immersive, as you can hear explosions all around the room, as though you are in a plane with the characters. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, you hear the roar of Godzilla reverberate in the room.
Despite the positives, there are areas in which to improve. Disney+, a popular app, could have been pre-installed on this Android TV. It would also be nice if the remote controller is programmable so I can assigned any buttons to Disney+ or Apple+.
The Bluetooth-enabled controller should also be more responsive. For some reason, I must point the controller right in front of the TV just to start it.
Worse, it sometimes takes me a few tries just to see the Google TV splash screen. Who would have thought a remote controller would be the Achilles heel of a modern TV in the 2020s?
The price of S$1,899 for an OLED TV, after applying the discount code, really caught my eye and ears as it comes with a built-in sound system.
An OLED TV from more established brands such as LG and Sony will likely cost more, and often without Dolby Atmos speakers. Add a proper Dolby Atmos soundbar and it will bump up the price tag for a home entertainment by a several hundred or even thousand Singapore dollars.
If you are just looking for a good looking TV that sounds better than the competition then this Prism+ TV will fit the bill. At least with the S$1,899 price tag, I can afford a better sound bar to pair with it.
Now, if Prism+ would fix the remote controller as well, the 55AL would make for a more attractive OLED TV package.
