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Hi!
First time Sony TV buyer here and a 4K HDR TV is a first for me too.
I saw that my KD-75XH9005 does not support nor 4K nor HDR outside the official Sony's Video Player app.
No other video player (Kodi, VLC, Nova, MX Player,...) support native 4K nor HDR when installed directly on this TV.
I suspect the system resolution is locked to something like 1080p in any other app.
If I connect a Mecool KM9 Pro Classic Android TV box via HDMI and change the resolution on that box to 4K, it plays 4K and HDR content on that TV box correctly, albeit slower because of the slower GPU.
It is sad that I can not fully enjoy the 4K HDR content on my BRAVIA TV.
Proof?
When playing the same Youtube content on my TV I get 3 different outputs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2IOPPwJoLM
The chess pattern is the most notorious one that you should closely watch. The image is static and there should be no moving pixels anywhere on the screen.
1.) When playing directly from the Youtube app the chess pattern is randomly missing black pixels here and there (it's animated).
2.) When you download the 2160p mp4 from YT and open it in Kodi/VLC/MX... it shows as an analog TV with no signal (slow snow animation). 1px horizontal/vertical lines are OK. I suspect the video is first downscaled to 1080p and then via the great Sony's upscaling it is upscaled to 4K, but with strange artifacts on the chess pattern.
3.) When you play this same mp4 file in Sony's Video Player it plays correctly with the static chess pattern clearly visible.
Further proof is in the attached picture. It must show all lines otherwise this is not 4K!
Original picture URL: https://ibb.co/ZMhGLsj
Now for HDR, this one is a bit tricky because it's hard to prove, but the same thing applies as above.
If the player/TV does not support HDR the image is not so vibrant, I got an HDR movie from the internet and tried playing in above-mentioned players, the only difference I saw was that the OSD control buttons were more bright on all players when HDR content was playing, and the colors were not so bad, at least not so bad as on my non-HDR monitor, but the difference was very clearly visible in a few scenes of the animated movie where the animation was completely different (spectacular) on the Sony's Video Player. All the other players had only good picture.
Now for the sound, if Sony promotes Dolby Atmos for this TV why only support for E-AC3 (Dolby Digital Plus 5.1) and not TrueHD 7.1? It can downsample the output because of limited speaker configuration or something or allow audio-passthrough to a soundbar or something similar. TrueHD codec could always be supported in Sony's Video Player.
Hope this only refers to my TV set and other customers really get that nice 4K and HDR on all android player apps.
Else I feel sorry for whoever thought he's watching nice 4K HDR on his BRAVIA TV because he's not.
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First off I would like to thank user stormyuk for the detailed input.
And second I would like to make clear that I believe that real 4K with real HDR is available thru an external HDMI port (BD players, TV boxes, PlayStation,...). I got excellent results playing content thru Mecool Android TV box for 50 bucks, I believe the same is true for a BD player or a PlayStation even though I don't own them to actually test them.
Picture is also excellent when playing thru the Sony's Media Player app. All this is already stated in my first post.
Where I have high doubts of real 4K and real HDR are all the other video players (eg. VLC, Kodi,...) when running thru Sony's Android TV implementation.
To first off reply to user stormyuk:
At first, I also thought that this is a video player issue (VLC/Kodi), but when playing the same content thru HDMI on Mecool Android TV box I get real 4K and real HDR. So I concluded that it must be an issue with Sony's Android TV implementation. This is not to be confused with the Picture settings that you both with Peter_S were trying to point out, picture as already stated in my first post is great! So great that it greatly masks the fake 4K shortcomings, only under a video stress test the impurities were shown.
I can not comment on Netflix if it really shows real 4K and real HDR because I don't have an account, I would suspect it does not play because YouTube also does not (more in attached images).
I installed Aida64 and under Display, it shows a Screen Resolution of 3840x2160, so the resolution is really 4K.
Now to comment YouTube:
Those stats for nerds are completely useless, because I changed resolution on Mecool Box to 1080p and to 2160p and both times the Viewport and Resolutions were the same, the only thing was to check if HDR was really enabled, and even that is useless, because I already stated in my first post that HDR detection works because the screen's brightness and OSD control buttons become brighter. And thanks to your picture I also checked that the HDR tag always appears in the Picture settings.
I attached two images of the 4K test video, sorry about the real closeup, but to see what do I mean you have to look at the picture from afar to see that there are white spots in the picture on the chess pattern. This is what I'm talking about. Instead of black pixels there are white pixels shown at random every 5 seconds. I would advise you to play the 4K Ultra-HD Test Pattern video for at least 20 seconds and really closely inspect the chess patern.
To really test 4K I would advise you to install VLC from the Play Store and download this video to a USB drive and play it on your TV:
https://app.box.com/s/bj9go0sbfrc4xvhd8gfcvypl9tkb54dh
Anyone, please contribute with your findings on the chess pattern! This is the real 4K test!
This file is a direct download of the YouTube 4K Ultra-HD Test Pattern video.
Even though I would advise anyone not to compare videos on YouTube because YouTube re-encodes content and this is not 1:1 original copy, but in this instance it's good enough because we'll be searching for pixels.
Lastly the comment on "real HDR".
Your provided video is really stunning, on both YouTube and in Sony's Media Player app.
It just didn't play with enabled HDR mode in VLC/Kodi on any device, I'm guessing VP9 and HDR don't mix together with other video players.
HDR is really a hard topic (as already stated in my first post), I would not try to comment because it depends on our perception of the image and how much can we intake with our eyes.
I will just bluntly state next:
I watched Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017) and at 44:30 there's a scene with the dragon's skeletons hanging from the ceiling, and in Sony's Media Player (real HDR) it feels like the image is in very faint stereoscopic 3D mode. There was no such feeling when playing this exact same video on other players. All I can confirm for sure is that all players played the content in HDR mode and all had great vivid colors, but other players didn't have that effect that almost completely changes the animation style of the movie. But this is just my personal opinion.
Lastly, I played a little with the refresh rate on my Mecool and it could also be because of the refresh rate, I really don't know because I'm new to all of this HDR and 4K stuff, I just say what I have observed and try to be as scientific as possible, so I would advise to pay close attention to the 4K Ultra-HD Test Pattern video and leave the HDR for now alone.
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