Sony Bravia 9 Review | Best Mini-LED TV Ever?
Okay folks, the wait is finally over. Welcome to the most requested TV review I've ever made. It's time to talk about the super hyped, hugely ambitious, highly anticipated Sony Bravia 9 TV. Better buckle [Music] up. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Caleb Denison, and let me start by thanking you for your patience. I mean, not patience in spirit because all of y'all in the comment section of just about every video I've made for the last 6 weeks or so have seemed anything but patient. But you've waited, you're here now, and I thank you for enduring the wait. Now, for those of you who don't count yourselves among the TV Enthusiast crowd, the buildup to the Sony Bravia 9 TV, also known as the XR90, has been rather dramatic. It started
with a rather exclusive trip to Sony's Tokyo headquarters where, for the first time, Sony peeled back the super secretive curtain and a few TV panel layers on its mini LED backlight technology. The anticipation was then further intensified more recently at a special press event that Sony held at the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, California, where journalists who had previously only read about the forthcoming Bravia 9 got to see it in action. The acclaim for this TV has been almost entirely universal. So, super exciting TV. You'd think that I'd hurry up and review it, but as I explained in other videos, between the availability of Sony Bravia 9 review units, a short 9-day vacation that I took, and the arrival of a rather imposing 115-inch monster TV, this review was always going to be a little later than I wanted. But there were some other TVs I wanted to test before I got to the Bravia 9, the reasons for which will soon be clear. And frankly,
I feel like the stakes are pretty high for this review. And I mean, even right now, I really want to get this review right. Doing things right takes time, so thanks again for your patience. Now, I hope to make that patience pay off. So, for anyone unaware, what makes the Bravia 9 seem like such a big deal? Well, for the full story on that, check out this video that I did digging into Sony's new backlight tech. But the short and sweet version is this:
Sony developed a new little IC chip that allows very granular dimming control over its mini LED backlights. That control promises to deliver intensely bright HDR highlights and overall brightness while also delivering the kind of high-performance black levels and contrast one could previously only get from an OLED TV. And with that promise, the question that has managed to arise in discussion forums has become: is the Sony Bravia 9 an OLED killer? Well, I'll tell you right now that I have always thought that was the wrong question to ask. And
I'll take it a step further and tell you right now that the Bravia 9 is not an OLED killer. No consumer LCD-based TV ever will be an OLED killer, and I'll explain why shortly. But, like I just said, asking if the Bravia 9 is an OLED killer is a distraction. Now, I'm going to do something I don't normally do, and I'm going to give you the goods on this TV right now. The Bravia design is an astonishing, thrilling, and otherwise absolutely delightful TV. It's a marvel of engineering. It raises the bar, and yet it is not perfect, and it will not
be the right choice for everyone. I'll make the reasons why that is the case clear soon enough. Now, I know a lot of you want me to just get to the picture quality already, and I hear that. But we have to talk about everything this TV offers and doesn't offer for one very important reason: the AA 9 is remarkably expensive, $3,000 right now for the 65-inch, and that's like barking into LG G4 premium OLED territory. And while stellar picture quality is reason enough for some folks to pry their wallets wide open, most folks are going to want to know that if they lay down big bucks for a premium TV, that it's going to feel like one of the best investments they've ever made. So, let's dig into that notion first.
Best as I can tell, Sony skimped on nothing with the Bravia 9. Now, for those of you rushing to your keyboards about HDMI 2.1 inputs, I'll address that in the nit nerds section. Just hold on to your shorts for a second. Everything really about this TV feels premium and delightful. I don't say delightful about TVs a whole lot, but I kind of feel like doing that with this TV. I mean,
it starts with the fact that this TV is exceptionally well packed for safe transit, minimizing the risk of damage to the panel. Sony offers a four-way stand that allows for a narrow stance on smaller cabinets or a wider one for a bit more stability. In either placement, the TV can be positioned at two heights: one low slung for a sleeker look, the other slightly higher to accommodate a soundbar, and the feet are metal, not plastic. The TV's cabinet is light yet strong with a brushed metal frame that yields virtually no bezels along the top and sides and a thin plastic border at the bottom. Now, the remote is not metal this year, which seemed like a skimp until you know it's made of Sony's Sorplas material, which was created by Sony's own Material Sciences division. It's light and strong, so it's built to last. The remote is backlit, yay, USB rechargeable, yay, and has a remote finder speaker built in, again, yay.
The Bravia 9, like all Sony TVs, runs the Google TV smart TV OS with Sony's custom UI laid over it, and I've grown to love how Sony has set this up. So, you have all the essential settings in a ribbon at the bottom of the screen, with less popular and more granular settings available if you dig just a bit further. I really appreciate that Sony limits the number of clicks that you have to make to get to what you need and want, and that extends to Sony's choice to have the TV tune to the last used input when you turn it on. So, instead of always going to the Google TV home screen like so many other TVs do when you turn it on, if it was on HDMI 1, like where you might have your cable TV box, the TV will be tuned to HDMI 1 automatically when you turn it back on, instantly showing you what's on your cable TV. You're never forced to navigate to an input from the home screen unless it's a switch from your typical routine, and I think that will count for a lot with a lot of folks. But the most premium non-picture quality-related aspect of the Bravia 9 is the onboard audio system. Guys, I don't think viewers are talking about this enough. The built-in audio system on
this TV is tremendously good. It is, by a significant margin, the best-sounding TV I've ever reviewed, and that includes Sony's own OLED TVs where the sound literally comes from the screen. What this TV has going on that others don't is some seriously robust bass response. The bass doesn't just get deep and provide a sense of rumble that other TVs just don't, but it adds weight and makes the overall sound super robust. The fidelity is outstanding for
an onboard TV audio system, but what really pushes it over the top is Sony's Voice Zoom tech, which makes dialogue clear and intelligible even in super challenging situations. At least, that is when you connect a compatible Sony audio system. I had a way better experience with Voice Zoom on the Bravia Theater Quad than I did directly from the TV. Still, this TV has the goods to make dialogue very clear and audible. I just think Sony needs
to tweak it a little bit on the TV itself, which I'm going to try to work with them on. Anyway, I've always felt that a premium TV, especially the most expensive ones, needed to have super impressive sound, and this TV has got it big time. Huge kudos to the audio engineers that built this TV's sound system. You all deserve a shiny medal and a fun night out on the town. So,
you're going to spend big money on this TV. I mean, the Sony tax is in full effect here, but I feel like Sony has done a sufficient job of delivering a premium experience outside of picture quality. But, as we all know, the picture quality is what counts most, and I've already told you it's tremendously good. Now, I'm going to describe how and why
it's so good, along with whether it may or may not be what you want or need. To kick that off, it's time for numbers for nit nerds. This is the section where we dig into the deeper technical data that I gathered on this TV. If you aren't interested, that's all good. I'll summarize what you need to know in a moment, and you can skip to that part using the time code links we've put down in the description. For you nit nerds out there, here we go. For the most part, I did my evaluation with the TV in the professional picture preset, both for SDR and HDR. This would be the equivalent to a filmmaker mode on other TVs. I did, however, also test the cinema and standard picture presets so I could get a feel for the TV's bright room capabilities. For SDR content in professional SDR mode, I got almost exactly 100 nits peak
brightness, which is the most PR mode thing that you can do since SDR content only has info for up to 100 nits. You can, of course, make the TV insanely bright for SDR if you want. Choosing cinema mode bumped up peak SDR brightness to 400 nits, which is more than enough for most people, even in bright rooms. In fact, many pro calibrators I've spoken to say they rarely take their calibrations past 300 nits for SDR. You can, as you'll soon learn, make the TV even brighter though, brighter than you will need or want it to be for most viewing situations. Now, the two-point white balance didn't come out quite as I'd expected. Sony doesn't tend
to target D65 with its in-house calibration, so I didn't expect that right out of the box. But I didn't expect the blue channel, and only the blue channel, to be low in the bright whites. Now, this chart makes it look far lower than it actually is. The Delta E here is under four, so barely perceivable to the naked eye and easily remedied with a little calibration. So, not at all an issue, just kind of a surprise to me as a reviewer. Now, when we take a look at the grayscale, it tracks with what the two-point white balance suggests: deadly accurate toward the low end and just barely off at the high end, again assuming a D65 white point standard is your intended target. Now, the gamma measurement is also very good here, though not perfection.
Color gamut readings are excellent. Everything other than white is below a Delta E of two, though technically the LG G4 OLED I tested was slightly better, not that you can tell with the naked eye. The Bravia 9 also aces the challenging color checker in CalMAN. Again, only the whites daring edge over Delta E of three, so outstanding here as well. Color saturation: again excellent. Color luminance: mostly excellent,
except oddly enough low luminance blue was out, which is kind of curious. Moving on to HDR, which I know is where the exciting numbers tend to be. PQ EOTF tracking was excellent, just about dead on the entire way, super impressive. The brightest whites:
again a little lean in the blue, which I'd want to fix in a calibration. This was in the Pro mode, though. If you choose the cinema mode, though, the EOTF tracks high, so it boosts HDR brightness across the board, which is not accurate, but it is going to be preferred by most viewers. I think that was a super smart decision on Sony's part. Peak luminance with a 10% white window was right at 2800 nits, with full-screen white coming in just under 1000 nits. That's important because it's a clue toward how intensely bright this TV's APL can be. Now, when I ran the Spears and Munsil peak HDR highlight test,
HDR highlights came in at 1800 nits. However, you have to think of that as an average. The TV did provide HDR highlights above the 2000-nit level; it just depended on the APL of the scene it was working on. HDR color accuracy was again outstanding. Color volume was excellent, and predictably, the TV does great with Rec. 2020 color up to a certain color brightness level where it peters out. That's just LCD technology for you. 2D OLED remains the king of Rec. 2020 coverage,
but keep in mind there's precious little Rec. 2020 color content out there today. Now, what's more important is total DCI-P3 color coverage, and the Bravia 9 nails it. So, if you're just rejoining us because you skipped ahead, the summary is: by the measurements, the Bravia 9 comes in as one of the top three 2024 TVs you can buy this year. The LG G4 and LG C4 are its toughest competition in the measurement department,
but the Bravia 9 holds its own very well considering it isn't an OLED. Now, I want to do a quick breakdown of some key picture quality performance observations. But first, let me just tell you what the Bravia 9 actually is. I mentioned it isn't an OLED killer, but why is that? What is this TV? Well, in short, the Bravia 9 is the best mini LED TV ever made, in my judgment, and that's because it manages to strike the best possible balance between what a mini LED-backlit LCD TV can do and what an OLED TV can do. The Bravia 9, at times, could pass for an OLED TV. However, in very challenging dark scenes and if you're watching in the dark, you can see where it comes up short of OLED. But in most scenes, its prodigious brightness power makes it
clear that it is a better bright room TV than even the LG G4 OLED. It's just got more muscle. Let me be crystal clear in the briefest way possible: if you do most of your watching in a dark room, an OLED is still the better choice. But if you need your TV to be as flexible as possible, and you want it to look amazing no matter what the ambient conditions may be, the Bravia 9 does that better than anything else. Here's how and why. Now, the Bravia 9's brightness capabilities are right up there with the brightest TVs on the market. Now, that statement may not make sense when I have reported on TVs that measured much
brighter, but real brightness capabilities must always be measured in real-world performance, and that performance is determined by the TV's processor. Sony's processing delivers the brightness where and when you need it. The Bravia 9 often comes off as brighter than TVs like TCL's Q8, which measures in the 4,000 to 5,000 nit zone, and that's simply because it can deliver high brightness in more real-world scenarios. This TV is awesomely bright. I do want to be super clear here, though. The brightness capabilities of this TV won't always be apparent. It's highly content dependent. Like here, we've got the Mad Max 4K HDR Blu-ray going to both the Bravia 9 up top and the A95L QD OLED on the bottom. Both are in the accurate
professional mode; all the other settings are about the same. You might expect the bright flames in this scene to be notably brighter on the Bravia 9 than they are on the A95L. However, they aren't. In fact, they are very closely matched. But what makes the Bravia 9 different than other mini LED TVs that could be here in this comparison is the subtlety in the contrast that other mini LED TVs cannot pull off. That's why it looks so OLED-like. But in other scenes, particularly those mastered at 4,000 nits, the tiny HDR highlights will be brighter than the A95L OLED can pull off, and in very high APL scenes with a lot of snow or maybe hockey or something like that, it will not only be brighter on the Bravia 9, but it isn't going to dim ever. So, that's the story with this TV's brightness. It's there when it should be, there when it needs
to be, and it gets out of the way at the right times too. Which brings us to the next section: high brightness is only impressive if it's part of a high contrast image. If you don't have deep blacks and great overall contrast scene to scene, that high brightness makes a picture look washed out instead of pop. This right here is what makes
the Bravia 9 so special. It makes the right choices when managing its backlights so that you get the right blend of deep blacks, high contrast, and bright highlights, as well as bright and punchy high-brightness scenes. And due to the decisions Sony's processor executes on, you also get blooming and halo that is so minimized it's a non-issue. Now, that does mean that there are some extremely challenging scenes in which you can see the backlight doing something that you might not expect. That happened to me during
this evaluation. I referenced it actually in a little YouTube short that I did. Check this out. This is the end credits of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus. Now, as you can see, we've got a starry space scene here, and onto it splashes these bright credits. When the bright credit comes up, you'll notice that not just the bright credit comes up, all of the stars get brighter too, and then when the credit disappears, the brightness of the stars goes back down. It kind of looks like global brightening and dimming. Now, you may wonder, as I did, why Sony didn't just juice up only the backlights behind the credit. I mean, isn't that the point of local dimming? But as Sony explains it to me, there are two choices here, right? One is that you do juice up just the backlights behind the credit, which would leave the rest of the scene at the same luminance, but the trade-off there is that if you did that, you'd have a lot of blooming, and we'd complain about that, right? That blooming is not very OLED-like. Or you can choose to raise everything in a challenging scene like this,
and yeah, the stars brighten up and then dim down, but you don't get any blooming. Guys, there are only two choices here, and that's true of any mini LED-backlight TV, anything other than a dual-cell LCD TV that has basically pixel-level dimming or an OLED TV. Those are the two choices, and I think Sony made the right one. If you have a particularly dark image on the screen
and then a huge bright object comes up, you'll notice the illuminated elements on the dark background might get a little bit brighter. But those instances are few and far between, and the benefit of this approach is that when those instances do happen, you don't get blooming. And the really great news is that something small and more localized to one portion of the screen, like closed captions, they don't trigger that decision. So, you get virtually blooming-free closed captions on a jet-black letterbox bar with no adjustment to the overall picture level.
Now, as I mentioned in the nit nerd section, the color on this TV is tremendous. QD-OLED can beat it mostly because it can have higher color brightness, and that gives off a brighter-feeling image, but for most of what you'll watch, the color is top-notch both in terms of accuracy and pop. For motion, well, it's an LCD TV, so it's not going to have the instant response time of an OLED, but I actually see that as a benefit more than a liability. With OLEDs, the pixel response time is so instantaneous that bright pixels lighting up so quickly can create a strobing or stutter effect. You won't get that here, and Sony's processing reduces judder as well as, if not better than, others. You're getting top-quality motion
with this TV. I didn't watch a ton of sports, but what I did watch was fast-paced, and it looked great to me without the aid of motion smoothing, so that's a win for the motion section. Now, as for gaming, I think what makes this TV great for gaming is the fact that it has all the gaming feature support that most people want and need. It offers some of the best picture quality that you can get from a non-OLED TV while not running any risk of burn-in or running into auto brightness limiter. You know, it doesn't do 144 Hz,
so it isn't perhaps going to unlock that one feature for those using high-end gaming PCs, but it does support VRR, ALLM, and source-based tone mapping, so it's a great companion to both the Xbox and PS5 consoles. Again, pixel response time isn't as quick as OLED, so you may get a little more color smearing than you do with OLED, but with picture quality like this, no burn-in risk, no dimming, it's hard to imagine most folks playing video games being disappointed. So, guys, the Bravia 9 is not trying to be an OLED. It's trying to be the best
of both worlds when that is nearly impossible to pull off. Remember, compromises are inevitable. It's always going to be a question of were the right decisions made, and I think Sony has made all the right decisions here. That's a matter of personal preference, but that's where I stand on the matter. Guys, there's just no question that the Bravia 9 is
a remarkable TV, and it's got a remarkable price to match. I suppose you feel empowered to do that when you're making something that nobody else is making. But frankly, the high price is the Bravia 9's only real weakness, and it is a major one since that is what will stand in the way of more folks owning such an amazing TV. But at the end of the day, it is amazing, and I'm glad about that. I wondered if it could stand up to the hype, and I think it absolutely does. Thanks so much for watching, everyone. What's your take on the Bravia 9? Have you seen it in
action in person? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. If you like this video, do us a favor and smash that like button. Subscribe if you want to see more. I'll see you on the next one, and until then, here are two other videos I think you might like. you know what you're going to timeout the robot vac is in timeout can we start this thing
2024-07-26 06:31
