I recently bought the KD-43XD8305 TV to combine with my Sony UBP-X800 4K UHD Blu-ray Player, Q Acoustics M2 Soundbase and BT-TV Youview player. I connected these with a set of "Premium, High Speed" HDMI cables. However, I had an extremely frustrating and worrying four days of trying to get a stable image off the Blu-ray player - experiencing, image flicker, image dropouts, blanks screens, and image resets on both disk playback and even on the system menu.
I rang up for help from the retailer, but received no advice. I was told since my purchase was more than 28 days previous, I would have to go to Sony support. Meanwhile, I had already followed the set up advice from the installation guide, and off the Sony support pages. I had sat for hours trying each menu option, reading blogs and re-initialising the components, but nothing worked. I (like many others) thought the player was at fault and was all for sending it back.
To cut a long story short, the problem lay in the cables I had used. They said they were “Premium, High Speed” cables, but when I replaced them with a mix of the expensive (£80/£90) Sandstrom Silver 21 GBps and Gold 27 GBps HDMI cables, the results were remarkable - no jitter, just crystal clear, highly detailed images from both the player and the much improved Youview box. These are very expensive cables but, for me, any 4k HDR TV requires investment in high quality, high speed, lossless HDMI cables or you are wasting your money.
In my opinion, Sony should insist on using cables above 18 GBps and explicitly exclude the term “Premium HDMI cables” from their set up manual & webpages - as this opens the customer to thinking that any premium HDMI cable will do. THEY WON'T. Customers needs to know that unless they buy high quality, lossless cables when they are buying a 4K HDR TV – they are heading for trouble.
Please, Sony, update your guides and webpages and avoid disappointed customers!
