It happens every few years. A high-end TV so hyped up, so intensely anticipated, that anyone and everyone who cares about TVs just has to know how good it really is. People start asking, “Is this the TV that, finally, does so many things OLED TVs can’t, that it could take the honors of being the best TV of the year?
This is that TV everyone’s fussing over – the Sony Bravia 9 II. It’s an icon. It’s a feat of engineering. But is it the best? And should you buy it? Well, let’s get into that.
Even I’ve been hyping up this TV, if only passively. I spoke at length about how Sony’s True RGB looks like it might be the best, most meaningful implementation of RGB backlighting out there — though the jury is still out on whether it makes a big enough difference to be worth all the extra effort, size, and cost. So, could the Bravia 9 II be the one that proves RGB is the future of mainstream TVs?
Trust me when I say this isn’t a spoiler: the Bravia 9 II is probably the most fun I’ve had watching TV in a long time. Maybe ever.
I can say with a great degree of confidence that the Bravia 9 II is likely to be the people’s choice TV. Theoretically, if you sat a bunch of folks down in front of each TV — either with the TVs separated or side by side — I think more people would vote for the Sony. That’s not based on a mountain of empirical data, mind you — it’s vibes, albeit … vibes based on experience.
But speaking of empirical data— how does this TV literally measure up to the competition, including Sony’s own Bravia 7 II? My headlines questioned whether it was too good for the newest Bravia 9 to make sense. Now we’re going to find out. I mean, the Bravia 9 II is bright, no doubt about it. But is it color accurate? How does it handle greyscale and low-luminance colors, and does the RGB backlight meaningfully reduce blooming?
Also, what’s up with the new anti-glare, anti-reflection screen and why is it the best we’ve ever seen? What about new features like connecting a Sony wireless subwoofer directly to the TV to add more bass and impact, or the My Cinema upgrade — what does that do? And, finally, is the Sony tax justified in this case? Is Sony really moving away from OLED? I might have to change my answer.
This sounds like a lot, but I’ll make it easy for you. Let’s dive in.
Remote, Inputs, and Design
I’ll start with the remote because there are only two upgrades to mention here: USB-C charging — no batteries to change — and a bright backlight, which I really appreciate. Everything else is the same, including the remote-finder function.
Next, let’s get it over with: you get two HDMI 2.1 inputs, and one of them is HDMI 3, the eARC input. (If you want to know why — and why I still don’t think it’s a huge deal for most people — check out that section of my Bravia 7 II review.) There’s also a coax connector that leads to an ATSC 3.0 tuner.
Underneath, we see the same sort of holographic stand that we saw on the Bravia 7 II– it does a good job of hiding cables. Sony feels it gives off a sort of floating vibe, but for me, the real treat is how easy it is to install.
Display and Sound
Now let’s talk about the screen. First off, let me tell you that I compared this directly to Samsung’s own remarkable light-eating screen, and frankly, Sony’s worked a little bit better for me both in tests and in real life. Samsung has dominated this field, so it’s nice to see Sony stepping up with some competition. You know Samsung’s going to respond, and that is good news for consumers. And for enthusiasts who have beef with so-called “matte screens,” I’ll address that in depth in my upcoming Samsung versus Sony comparison.
But if there were ever a “bright room TV,” this is it. And the reason I say this is that it seems to maintain better contrast in bright environments; it doesn’t just overpower ambient light with unmitigated brightness — though it is bright, as I will demonstrate below.
The Bravia 9 II runs Google TV, but with a recent update, you can now add a wireless subwoofer and/or surround speakers directly to the TV, no soundbar required. This applies to the Bravia 9II, along with the Bravia 7 and 7 II, the Bravia 8 and 8 II, and even the Bravia 5, as far back as the A95L. I think that’s pretty awesome. Now, it will need to be one of Sony’s newer subs, but the Sub 9 will knock your socks off, and I like where Sony has gone with its new Atmos speakers.
I do have to say, since the TV’s speakers are going to hold down the Left, Right, and sort-of-center-channel fort, they’re going to do a lot of heavy lifting in a system with a real subwoofer and proper surround speakers. I think that’s a task the A95L is up to; I know the Bravia 8 II is up to it, but what about an LCD-based TV like the Bravia 9 II, which doesn’t have the advantage of the screen also being the speakers? Can it hang? How does it sound on its own?
One thing I am concerned about is how quickly the backlight system works. It is no doubt a super-advanced backlight system, with more granular control over each Red, Green, and Blue backlight than we’ve seen even on white-backlit systems, where there was only one color to coordinate with. That subtle gradation becomes pretty obvious when you watch some dim scenes, but as I was testing the TV, and it would bounce between bright patches and darker ones, I could see the adjustment just sort of slowly sliding into place. It does not strike me as a particularly quick-to-adjust backlight system. Which is perhaps why Hisense puts a “fast and normal” backlight speed switch in its picture menu; I’m not sure. I just noticed that when I was steeply off-angle from both the side and above, and very close to the TV, as I was when I was testing it, I could see the blooming around the menu die pretty slowly when I exited the menu.
Now, maybe the TV’s algorithm is like — I know where we’re going here; this isn’t active content; I don’t see the need to rush, folks — that very well could be the case, because I didn’t notice any slow transitions while watching real content. But during the testing — slow to adjust. I don’t remember the Bravia 7 being that way, and I feel like I would have noticed.
Deez Nits
Let’s get into some of that empirical data I mentioned.
First, what I know you want to know is: what’s the peak brightness? Well, in the right mode, it will definitely hit 4,000 nits, and in real gaming content, it looks like it will keep on hitting 4,000 nits for nearly 5 minutes, which is bonkers. Peak brightness in the professional mode, without a bunch of brightness-preferred maximization settings, came in at more like 3,600 nits, which is outstanding. Full-screen brightness hit almost 1,000 nits. Think of what you could do to SDR content with that kind of power. The right processing could make SDR content look like HDR content if that’s what you want.
HDR
Moving beyond the nits, in HDR, the gamma curve looked pretty good. The 2-point white balance out of the box matched Sony’s preference, but because of how Calman works, I needed to calibrate to D65, which required taking quite a few points off blue and a couple out of red to arrive at what was pretty stinking great at 100% stimulus. However, oddly, the better I made the bright side, the more the errors crept up on the low side – curious. I wondered if it would do the same in SDR.
Greyscale and EOTF tracking looked awesome right up until the end. I assume that’s because I didn’t do a 10-point white balance, but that dip in the EOTF is a little suspect. I ran this test twice just to be sure. I even threw the ol’ 10% window softball at it, and it still came up strangely just before it hit peak luminance. And I have to wonder if that has to do with preserving highlight detail. That’s a shot in the dark, but the dip in brightness right at the end is confusing.
Color Saturation and Luminance sweeps showed results more or less the same as I’ve seen with other ultra-bright TVs, except these were more closely aligned with the target boxes. However, as the TV tries to reach the outer reaches of the BT.2020 high-luminance space, it falls a little short. But that’s the best expected — nobody out there is doing more than 92% coverage of the BT.2020 area. The color volume here was a bit lower than I’d hoped, perhaps because I’ve looked at some brighter TVs. Note how much impact having the TV in RGB mode had compared to having the backlight in always-white mode here. That’s significant. And that option — moving it to a white-only backlight — is something we haven’t seen on other RGB TVs. The most popular theory is that professionals want to see how their content will look on non-RGB TVs, so manufacturers include that option.
The color checker looked good — just remember these primaries are always a problem because they can’t get bright enough. This causes a similar impact on luminance sweeps. The color saturation was excellent at both 75% and 40% testing parameters.
Overall, excellent HDR performance, preserving bright highlight details if you ask it to, and then punching up the bright areas to the max if you don’t mind the TV clipping a bit.
SDR
In SDR, the TV performed admirably, but it wasn’t the picture of perfection I expected. In the stock Professional mode, I corrected the white point to D65 for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. Once again, just like the Bravia 7 II, peak luminance was set at right around 100 nits – which is purist territory. You can, of course, pump that up to extremely bright levels if you want, because, as I mentioned earlier, it’ll do 1,000 nits full-screen white.
Gamma strays a little bit in the dark areas, which is to say that the brightness of the dark greys is a little low — not crushed blacks low; that looks more like a choice than a flaw to me. The 2-point white balance had a max Delta E of 0.78, and the low-luminance white balance was so good as to be undetectable. I actually got better on the Bravia 7 II, but I think that’s because local dimming makes TVs really difficult and unpredictable to measure, despite our best efforts.
In greyscale, we get the same story: the gamma is a little high coming out of black, but otherwise outstanding. I’m literally picking apart nits here. Most TVs wish they were this good.
Color saturation was actually slightly better at low luminance than at high luminance, which was a surprise, but I think that’s because, the luminance test shows, we see that the red primary, cyan, and blue are way out of whack. I don’t know why this is, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen this before on an RGB TV. The color checker test shows that blue and cyan aren’t problems in the luminance area like red, which is way less bright than it should be in SDR. This looks like a bug, because we’ve seen what it can do in HDR.
I noticed similar issues with high gamma and red primary accuracy on the Bravia 7, though they were slightly more pronounced than on the Bravia 9.
Takeaways
I had to pick this TV apart, piece by piece, to find something to complain about, and frankly, I think that says everything we need to know about the Bravia 9 II.
It’s designed to match up to the $42,000 HX3110 reference monitor — and based on what I saw in Tokyo, it does. In fact, the Bravia 9 II is so accurate if you want it to be, you have to question whether it’s maybe too close for Sony to be charging $42,000.
I initially thought the Bravia 7 II might make the Bravia 9 II unnecessary. I was wrong. The Bravia 7 II is a stellar TV, but the level of excellence the Bravia 9 II reaches is virtually unimpeachable.
At least, by the measurements. But measurements mean a whole lot less than they used to. So how is it to actually watch this TV?
Audio
I’ll get to picture quality in a moment; first, audio. I’ve got good news and bad news.
After spending more time with the Bravia 7 II — the model just below this one — I’m impressed by how much its sound improves with use. Sony’s room calibration system truly enhances the audio to suit your environment.
The bad news about the Bravia 9 II is that, even though the remote was supposedly paired via Bluetooth, it wouldn’t let me use voice search or do acoustic auto calibration. It could be a faulty remote, or maybe there’s some rogue setting I’ve never, ever had to deal with before, but one thing is certain: it’s always worked right out of the box with every Sony I’ve tested that had this feature.
The good news is that even without the benefit of that auto calibration, the TV sounds exceptional. I’m not gonna tell you not to go get a soundbar or add a subwoofer and surrounds to this TV, but you won’t be disappointed with the onboard sound. Sony is kicking everyone’s tail with its built-in sound. I’m sorry, everyone else — it’s true. If you have the Bravia 9 II you bought, compare it to your flagships, listening to them side by side. You don’t have to go public with it, but behind closed doors, you have to admit what Sony is doing here is working.
Except when it isn’t.
I had a lot of HDMI handshake issues keeping my Klipsch The Nines II connected to the Bravia 9 II, and I just didn’t with other TVs. I just did half a Just Ask Caleb episode about how maddening HDMI CEC and eARC are; but just because it’s expected doesn’t make it ok.
Otherwise, the audio system gets two enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s one of the best TVs I’ve heard, maybe even better than the Bravia 8 II, which uses its screen for more directional sound. We’ll see … er, hear about that later.
Picture Quality
Finally, on to picture quality. Here’s what you need to know. This TV is an absolute blast. I had so much fun watching this TV. I may actually cry a little when I ship it off. Or maybe I’ll beg Sony to let me keep it as a reference for LCD TVs because I’m telling you –– this TV is just outstanding.
I had a bunch of guests over while I was reviewing this TV, a few of whom saw some other high-end TVs in here the last time they came through, and they saw the same scenes from The Greatest Showman on both – and they were like – now that’s what a flame should look like – it’s so crisp ... if a flame can be crisp, one said.
Another was just astonished by the color brightness, noticing that, in professional mode, the HDR color popped off the screen harder than anything he’d seen in a house before.
Hyperbole isn’t possible with this TV. It’s just that good.
I’ve used certain scenes from The Greatest Showman to test more TVs than I can count, but I watched it all the way through for the first time on the Samsung S95H — and the picture was exquisite throughout. But the Bravia 9 II did a few things that the S95H OLED couldn’t.
And don’t think all the brightness excitement means this TV is going to blind you. No, Sony just reproduces the content how it was intended to look. So, if someone made a super-bright movie, well, it may be super-bright. But tasteful HDR highlights hit different on this TV.
I could go on and on. I watched so many movies and TV shows on this TV. The cleanup of low-quality content was second to none — though Samsung is right behind Sony right now and maybe pulling up even, so watch out, Sony.
As for off-angle viewing, it does pretty well at maintaining contrast and color saturation off-angle compared to other LCD TVs. But like all LCD TVs, this is where you’re going to see blooming and halo the most. That’s just how it works with these.
Gaming
I think it’s pretty well established that I’m not a gamer. But I can tell you I measured a 17-millisecond lag at 60Hz and a 9-millisecond lag at 120Hz. Not the best we’ve seen, but better than we had years ago. I can also tell you it’s got all the cool game-bar features. It works flawlessly with the PlayStation 5 – I mean, it’s great for all but the most hardcore of gamers who only game on high-end gaming PCs and really want that legit 165 or 240 HZ on a TV because, let’s face it, it’s fun to game on a big screen.
But the Sony Bravia 9 II isn’t built to be a gamer’s delight. It’s built to be a movie- and TV-buff’s dream. And that it is. It’s a dreamy TV.
Final Thoughts
This TV is about as artifact-free as an LCD TV gets, but it’s still an LCD with local dimming, and its dense local dimming zones do make the Bravia 9 II better than the Bravia 7 II below it. They make it brighter, too.
But does this LCD TV kill OLED?
That’s another article, and it’s coming. But I’m telling you, it’s the first LCD TV good enough to make OLED worry.