The micro-whale is undoubtedly the strongest black horse in Internet TV in the past two years. The speed of this brand that was born out of fashion is unprecedented! The micro whales were founded in 2015 by Mr. Li Ruigang and Mr. Li Huaiyu. The promoters also include Chinese culture, Alibaba and Tencent, and it is obvious that the company has come a long way. From the first TV release in August last year to less than a year now, micro-whales have become one of the most well-known brands in Internet brand television. The new whale that I experience this time is the 50-inch 4K TV W50J codenamed "Assassin."
Given the length of this review, I directly ignored the out-of-box process and went directly to the physical test link. This is a performance test article, followed by another dismantling report.
The appearance of the W50J is very simple, with a dark grey ultra-narrow full metal frame and a simple base that fits my personal preference.
The appearance of the W50J is very simple, with a dark grey ultra-narrow full metal frame and a simple base that fits my personal preference.
The left side of the bottom border of the TV is the only raised part: a fully transparent plastic, this is the W50J's power indicator, which can be set in various colors in the setup menu.
At the bottom is the English word "WHALEY", which is the only print that can be seen positively.
The W50J's metal frame is only 9mm wide, and the thickness of the screen part is only 9mm, similar to the iPhone6s mobile phone. Of course, the lower half of the TV will be thicker and used to hold the circuit board, and the thickest bottom is reserved for the built-in speakers.
Most of the back side of the W50J is covered with silver brushed aluminum alloy, and the plastic housing at the bottom is obviously the place where the circuit board and speaker are installed.
In the middle of the back is the label of the TV. The sign of DuPont's sound effects and DTS sound effects are impressively listed. In addition, the microwhales have been publicizing the tuning by Li Jian, and people have certain expectations about its sound quality.
W50J's power cord is very intimate, both ends are 90-degree elbows, can make the line as much as possible docile.
The power switch is located directly on the right side of the fuselage and is not as difficult to touch as hidden ones.
The fuselage control buttons use five-dimensional arrow keys suitable for blind operation, which is also a recent mainstream practice.
The interfaces of the W50J are all side-inserted. The TV wall-mounted installer knows how intimate the design is, and the thick and hard HDMI cable can easily reach the wall if it is not inserted sideways. The interface W50J provides two USB3.0, one USB2.0, SD slot, three HDMI, optical fiber, network port, AV, etc. For this price TV is quite rich.
The W50J's remote control is extremely simplified, with a total of only 12 buttons, which is far more convenient than my SONY old TV remote control. And this remote control is Bluetooth connected, there is no direction limit when remote control operation, much more convenient than infrared.
On such a small remote control, the microwhale added a microphone to it, allowing it to search the contents of the program by voice, bringing great convenience to the TV that was originally in trouble.
Micro Whale's WUI system is based on Android's deep development. It uses a waterfall flow homepage design to make it intuitive and convenient.
I use a diagram to list all of the WUI's functional modules and get an overview of the functional components of the WUI. The signal source is the external access signal, and my TV is the quick integration of major functional modules. The wonderful recommendation and classification are the content of the online video. The application naturally refers to the installed APP, and the settings are understood by everyone.
Online video content should be the issue most people care about most. The licensee of the micro-whale TV is the partner of GITV, which is the new media company of the Central People's Broadcasting Company, Galaxy Internet Cable Company. The iQiyi Litchi TV is released through their shells.
In addition, the microwhales also cooperated with Tencent and also joined the variety show of Mango TV. The contents of CMC's flagship film industry, Oriental Dream Factory, IMAX China and other film institutions were also included. Micro-whales are rich in resources for movies and TV shows. The speed of renewal is extremely fast. For instance, Ye Wensan, the mermaid and wilderness hunters have entered the exclusive use of micro-whale members.
The micro whale's film source introduction page is also quite an Internet feature. It not only has a brief description of the film, but also watercress score to help understand the quality of the film.
The following can also view the actor, director information, provide similar video recommendations and video reviews. Compared with online video sites, it is worse to add screen-captioning.
In the aspect of playing, we must also pay special attention to the mobile phone APP terminal of the micro-whale. The content information of the micro-whale can be directly ejected under the mobile phone APP. APP remote control operation is also very convenient, more valuable is the ability to provide two-finger click screen capture, screenshots will be saved directly to the phone, while watching TV while tweaking the Internet too convenient.
In addition to the remote control, the mobile phone APP also provides the functions of installing applications and screencasting. The iKey, Mango, Sohu and other mainstream video applications can be easily installed on the TV.
The installation method provided by the micro-whales is not limited to mobile phones. It also provides remote installation and U disk installation channels.
Enable remote installation can be installed through a mobile phone or computer, which makes APP resources expanded to unlimited.
For example, I installed the iQIYI APP and the result was a GTV. . .
Of course, there are all kinds of other news apps, game apps, and so on. The operation is extremely simple.
The screencast function of the mobile phone APP is also very practical. It is possible to directly display the photo video on the mobile phone to the TV screen. When a friend meets, it is convenient to analyze the travel photos and the like.
In addition to online resources, viewing locally downloaded videos is also an extremely important use. Going back to the TV to see the “Local Play†feature under “Apps†is one of my favorite features. It can directly identify my two NAS hard drives: NAS and WDMYCLOUD.
W50J's playback performance is very powerful, this is LG's 4K demonstration, 60fps frame number of H.265 encoding, on the i5 6500 computer software solutions are severe Caton, W50J playback is extremely smooth.
In the demonstration of the MV can also feel that the W50J's sound quality really does a good job, at least in the ultra-thin TV is worth noting, in addition to the volume of the bass is limited by a sense of volume is limited, the performance of the high-middle or very good. However, compared with external speakers, the effect is significantly different. If there is a requirement for sound quality, adding a set of thousands of sound bars or active speakers will be greatly improved.
This is a 64M bit rate SONY 4K demo and it is equally no problem.
The classic scenery film "TimeScapes", but I did not download the perverted version of 300G, just downloaded the 15G H.265 version.
After introducing the main entertainment features of WUI, I still want to introduce the setting menu, where you can make some necessary settings for the network, sound, images, and so on.
For example, you can set the screen saver, signal light color, automatic shutdown, etc. in the personalized settings.
The sound settings are characteristic because the microwhale not only does a good job of the built-in speakers, but also runs audio through the optical fiber and HDMI ARC, along with its own external speakers.
In the setup menu, navigation settings for external speakers are specifically provided to make the installation process more intuitive.
However, the image adjustment function is rather disappointing. On the one hand, there are too few options to adjust, only the brightness, contrast, saturation and color temperature are adjustable, the lack of a very important tone adjustment, on the other hand can not be played when the adjustment Instead of using video clips with a blue overall tone, it is not suitable for adjusting the color of television.
Before the TV can be calibrated in order to achieve the best state, a few simple clips of Super Hivi Cast are used to assist the color correction. Since the WUI can only adjust the data in the "image parameters", and then go back to the home page and then verify the effect of the adjustment in the "local play", each time a value is adjusted to switch back and forth, the entire tuning process is very troublesome.
Fortunately, the micro whale's factory tuning is not bad, the contrast and brightness are in a very suitable position, do not need to adjust them.
The W50J cannot adjust the hue, but the hue of the different modes is also different. Finally, the best hue is found in the movie mode.
However, the parameters cannot be adjusted in all scene modes. At this time, the saturation is not correct.
All of these parameters can only be adjusted in the custom mode, which is the best combination of my adjustment in the custom mode.
The saturation under this parameter can be adjusted well.
However, the hue is also biased. In short, it cannot achieve the best of both worlds. This seems to be a common problem with domestic smart TVs. The smart TVs I contacted from $2,000 to $89,000 have no tone adjustment function.
No matter how or take a look at the screen after adjustment, this is SONY's 4K demonstration, the picture quality performance is quite good.
The screen shot of the "TimeScapes" movie can be compared with the previous screenshot to see how it works.
This is a 4K HD photo. The same effect is quite good, but another problem is also found here: the resolution does not reach 4K when looking at the image, but is 1080p. I hope that this problem can be corrected when the system is upgraded next time.
Before entering the following objective comparison, I would like to emphasize one point: The method of displaying the effects of the television screen by screen shots is wrong. The screen shot cannot show the effects of the display device at all. This is related to the camera imaging quality, shooting parameters, post-processing, and other factors. Great relationship. There is only one reference for screen shots, which is to take two TV shots together to compare the difference between the two TV screens!
Here I chose Hisense's 40-inch 4K TV as a comparison, because the micro-whale is ready to replace it.
Let's look at the light leakage of the pure black screen. The slightly larger left is the microwhale, and the smaller right is the 40-inch Hisense. It can be seen that the light leakage of the two TVs is relatively close, but the light leakage of the micro-whale is more even, and the light leakage of the other is particularly serious in the lower right corner.
Compared with white and RGB solid color screens, the brightness of the two TVs is close to white, but the brightness of the whale is obviously higher when comparing RGB solid colors. The reason is that Hisense used RGBW screens.
This is a macro picture of the W50J's pixels. It can be clearly seen that each pixel has three sub-pixels of RGB.
The RGBW macro map has obvious differences, in addition to RGB, there are more white sub-pixels, and here is the 2 sub-pixels have been composed of a square (a pixel), so the clarity of RGBW will be significantly lower RGB screen. However, white pixels cannot emit light when a solid color image is displayed, resulting in a low luminance of the RGBW screen under pure color.
The above are a few comparison charts, from which you can see some differences
In Figure 1, the blue color of the RGBW screen is even darker, but it is actually caused by the lack of blue solid color.
The details of the dark part of the RGBW screen in the lower left corner of Fig. 2 are displayed more. This is the effect of white sub-pixel brightening, but from a distant point of the sea level, the RGB details are more abundant.
The details of the RGB screen in the cloud part of Figure 3 are too rich
Overall, the RGBW screen resolution is half as low as the RGB screen, and the white sub-pixels have the advantage of rich details in the shadows, but also make the details of the highlights more lost.
This review made me understand that the rise of micro-whales is no accident. On the one hand, they have strong background support. On the other hand, they really do meticulous products. Whether it is content support or physical work, it is outstanding in the same price products. . In particular, after the dismantling, the layout of the interior horizontal and vertical lines are far better than any television I have detached.
Needless to say, the disadvantages are not absent, I hope that the next firmware upgrade can be improved
1, only brightness, contrast, saturation adjustment, no color adjustment, and can not be adjusted in the school color video adjustment options.
2, built-in viewing software does not support 4K, but also install third-party software to see photos
3, when connected to the computer was identified as 4096 * 2160 resolution, set to 3840 * 2160 after two black, can not achieve point to point, so originally planned to test the computer I was forced to cancel.
Notice: We will release the W50J dismantling evaluation later!
