Sony's Whopping 84-Inch 4K TV Will Dominate Your Living Room

Sony has announced what might be the daddy of all TVs for a very long time to come. The Bravia XBR-84X900, unveiled at IFA 2012 in Berlin as the KD-84X9005, is an 84-inch LED TV with 4K resolution — 3840 x 2160 pixels, four times the resolution of Full HD.

The headline numbers: a dynamic edge-lit LED panel, Sony's three-chip 4K X-Reality Pro picture engine with 4K upscaling (handy, since almost nothing you watch in 2012 is actually in 4K), passive Full HD 3D, and a detachable 10-unit Live Speaker system pumping out virtual 5.1 surround sound. It also carries the full Sony Entertainment Network suite — Music Unlimited, Video Unlimited, Netflix, Pandora — with a tablet or smartphone doubling as the remote.

The headline number that matters: at CEDIA 2012, Sony announced pricing and availability — $24,999.99, with pre-orders from September 6 and shipping in November. Rival LG was right behind with its own 84-inch 4K set, the 84LM9600, at $19,999.

The catch, as always with first-generation tech: this is a $25,000 window into content that doesn't exist yet. Broadcasters and studios were barely delivering 1080p; Sony's answer was upscaling, which is a sophisticated guess, not native 4K. Early adopters weren't buying a TV so much as a statement — and a bet that the content would follow.

It did, eventually. But in August 2012, the XBR-84X900 was less a product than a prophecy: your living room wall was about to become a cinema, and the pixel count was only going up from here.