Sony Bravia 8 review: A solid and lovely OLED TV

Sony Bravia 8

Score Details

“The Bravia 8 is the Sony OLED TV most folks should buy”

Pros

• Gorgeous right out of the box
• Excellent motion and upscaling
• Amazing contrast
• Impressive HDR
• Great sound

Cons

• Missing deep calibration features
• Not as accurate as most Sony TVs

Earlier this year, Sony announced the Bravia 8 — an OLED TV sandwiched between two mini-LED TVs, the Bravia 7 and Bravia 9 — and since then I’ve been curious about it. This TV’s predecessors — most recently, the A80L and the A80K before that — have always had one clear advantage over the competition: Sony’s processing. However, competitors like LG have done a lot of catching up on the processing front. Now, the Bravia 8’s leg up on the LG C-series OLED TV isn’t quite as stark as it has been.

Still, Sony has managed to hold on to a dedicated and enthusiastic crowd, and so far has maintained a major pull with premium buyers. My question has been: Does the Bravia 8 deliver what those folks want? Who should buy this TV over the LG C4? What does it have and what’s it doing better than the competition? Let’s get into it.

Sony Bravia 8 OLED specs

The right amount of bright

The Bravia 8 is an OLED TV, so right off the bat, it has tremendous appeal thanks to its amazing contrast and color. It’s a Sony, so we can expect all the processing that drives its OLED panel to be top-tier and simply among the best you can buy.

There are three types of OLED panels used in TVs today: the relative newcomer, QD-OLED, uses quantum dots to achieve extremely impressive color volume and accuracy. Then there’s WRGB OLED, sometimes called W-OLED, which uses a white subpixel to boost brightness. Finall,y there’s a hot rod version of W-OLED called MLA OLED, which uses tiny little lenses to boost brightness even more.

The Bravia 8 uses a standard W-OLED panel, meaning it is not trying to be the most intensely bright OLED on the market. Sony leaves that bragging right for its award-winning A95L QD-OLED. That doesn’t mean this TV can’t get impressively bright. It just means that it’s not a hot rod, and you don’t have to spend hot rod money to get it.

One thing you’ll notice about this TV is that it doesn’t flaunt its ultrathin OLED panel like other brands do. It’s still very thin, but Sony gives the TV a uniformly thin chassis, rather than one that’s ultrathin at the top with a big bump-out toward the bottom — like the LG C4.

Impressive, clear sound

The TV comes with two feet that can be mounted toward the center, reducing the width of its footprint so it can fit on smaller platforms or out toward the edges. You also have a choice of two different heights in either of those positions: one that slings the TV low for a sleek look and one that elevates the TV, allowing for a wide array of soundbars to fit just in front of it without blocking the screen.

The Bravia 8’s remote is backlit and made of a recycled material Sony makes called Sorplas, which has little flecks in the finish. It uses two triple-A batteries, and has a microphone for voice control and calibrating the TV’s sound.

There are a couple of transducers mounted to the back of the panel that allow the screen to act as a speaker, which, when paired with a little bass driver on the back of the TV, adds up to really impressive and clear sound. On larger models, it may seem like the voices are coming from the actors’ mouths.

The TV comes with two HDMI 2.1 inputs; one is an eARC connection for feeding a soundbar or A/V receiver. The TV also includes an ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV tuner. Compare that to the LG C4, which has four HDMI 2.1 inputs, but no NextGen tuner on board.

The Bravia 8 runs on Google TV (my favorite) with a built-in smart TV interface that has been customized by Sony. The LG C4 runs LG’s WebOS (which is fine, but definitely not my preferred smart TV platform).

If you choose to augment the Bravia 8 with a Sony soundbar or a Bravia Theater Quad Dolby Atmos surround system, the TV’s speakers can work as a center channel and otherwise expand the sound. Sony has a few other little bells and whistles available, but that’s the most notable one.

Numbers for Nit Nerds

Before digging into measurements, let’s talk about some curious things you may have already heard about.

On Vincent Teoh’s HDTVTest channel, he noted that this TV was missing some deeper picture settings and adjustment options and wondered if the restricted bits were just for his region or if it was a global thing. He confirmed that the Bravia 8s in Japan were also missing some settings, and I can confirm that this is also true for the North American versions.

The Bravia 8 does not have a Smooth Gradation slider, which lets you alter the strength of the algorithm that aims to smooth out jarring transitions in color shades. Smooth gradation is still at work in this TV — you just can’t make adjustments to it. This TV has a 10-point white balance calibration menu as opposed to the more granular 20-point white balance you’ll find in TVs like the Bravia 9 and A95L. There is also no color management system at all.

Professionals need all the controls to calibrate a display as close to perfection as possible. However, for most people, this isn’t an issue — not in practical terms.

When I asked Sony why the Bravia 8 is missing controls we have come to expect in its TVs, a spokesperson pointed out that with the controls available, this TV can be adjusted to have white balance and color errors with a Delta E of less than 3, which is considered to be below the threshold of human perception. They are correct: I got Delta errors of less than 3 for white balance and most colors.

In my opinion, Sony probably thinks that its super-enthusiast audience or those in professional circles aren’t looking to get a Bravia 8 — instead they are more likely to get a Bravia 9 or an A95L. I don’t think anything meaningful has been lost by not including those controls, so I feel comfortable acknowledging this is not a disadvantage to Sony customers.

When I asked Sony about what advantage is gained by not including these controls, they politely declined to answer. Left to speculate, I think it may perhaps reduce the cost of production. Otherwise, if it doesn’t save them money, why not just leave those things in? (Teoh speculates it is possible that a coprocessor chip was omitted. However, it appears that Sony’s processing is as effective here as it is in other Sony TVs.)

Along those lines, Sony essentially says that its picture processing engine — the XR processor — evolves year by year, and the user interface and specifications are optimized for each model and panel type as far as customer usability and convenience are concerned. Therefore, certain features differ between years and in between models.

That sounds like processing demands are lower for the Bravia 8 than for the Bravia 9 — which has a new backlight system that Sony has likely tweaked the XR processor for — and for the A95L, which has a QD-OLED panel that behaves differently and needs its own special treatment.

I suppose that if the Bravia 8 had an MLA OLED panel, it might need its own special treatment as well. I don’t sense anything nefarious here, however, the fully transparent answer would likely get extremely deep in the weeds and likely misconstrued by less savvy media, so it’s probably not worth risking the PR nightmare of a misguided discussion on forums. I could be dead wrong, but I’ve been in this business a while, and that’s what it feels like to me.

In the end, does it really matter? I’m going to say no, it doesn’t matter to 99.99% of humans on this planet. What does matter is how the TV performs.

Test results

To conduct my measuring, I placed the Bravia 8 in Professional mode for both SDR and HDR. When I subjectively evaluated the TV with Dolby Vision content, I used Dolby Vision Dark.

In Professional SDR mode with the default settings — which has the brightness set to 40, and more importantly, the peak brightness setting set to off — here’s what I got:

Peak luminance was 100 nits — very strict adherence to SDR — which is what I would expect for Professional mode. The two-point white balance was a little odd. Sony doesn’t always target exact D65, but the blue channel at just 100 nits seemed really off. That is easily calibrated out using the white balance controls.

With a 20-point grayscale measurement, the blue channel was hot all the way up the chain. The color balance was OK, but not what I expect from Sony.

In Cinema mode default, the brightness was maxed out and the peak luminance was set to “medium.” It was better in some ways, and worse in others. I saw a lower error at the very brightest white, but it was more off through the top half of the grayscale, which was weird.

Next, I tested in Professional mode with everything maxed out, which is how I had the TV set most of the time I was watching SDR content. In some ways, it was better; in other ways, it was more of the same. The factory tuning leaned cooler, which I have to presume was intentional. It was a marginal difference.

When messing with color temperature, in just 10 minutes I was able to make adjustments to the white balance to get everything below a Delta E of 2.

Credit goes to Teoh for making this next part much easier for me: Electro-Optical Transfer Function (EOTF) tracking with the peak brightness setting at “high” was the default for the HDR Professional mode, and the tracking was off in a couple of places. It wasn’t bright enough in some areas and too bright in others, which is very un-Sony-like. When the peak brightness setting was bumped down to “medium” the EOTF tracking was spot-on. However, peak HDR brightness went down significantly.

I’m OK if a TV brand wants to offer an overly brightened HDR setting — most people find that approach easier to watch. However, that’s not what I think most folks are expecting out of Sony’s Professional mode, and I don’t think that folks should have to decide between accurate HDR tracking and full HDR brightness capability. It’s not a compromise Sony has asked anyone to make in the past, and I don’t understand why we would be asked to accept it now.

However, Sony could be reading its audience and knows this is not going to bother the vast majority of folks who buy this TV. What advantage does Sony gain by going this way? Cost savings? That will just have to remain a mystery.

Here’s my takeaway: This is not really an enthusiast’s TV. Not only is it missing those typical granular calibration controls, but the white balance and grayscale is further afield than I’d expect. It can be corrected well, but if you’re looking for Sony’s historically excellent out-of-box accuracy, the unit I tested didn’t have it. Also, seeing it track so low on the EOTF with the peak brightness set to high was just odd.

Your eyes will thank you

The Bravia 8 is reasonably accurate in its Professional and Cinema picture modes right out of the box, and you can tweak it to be even more accurate if you want to. With the peak brightness setting at high, you will get a very enjoyable, if not technically dead-on-balls (that’s an industry term) accurate picture. If you want extremely accurate HDR tracking, the trade-off is a fair amount of brightness. Most of you, though, are going to be thrilled with this TVs HDR performance, as it can get very punchy in bright highlights and it generally makes all content look amazing.

The Bravia 8 is an excellent OLED TV. It has great upscaling and image cleanup capabilities, making it an ideal choice for folks who watch a lot of cable or live TV streaming services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, or Fubo TV. It has a super clean picture 95% of the time. The color isn’t just accurate, it’s gorgeous. It’s an OLED TV that starts at a baseline of awesome, and also happens to be an excellent example of an OLED TV, thanks to Sony’s outstanding processing.

The Bravia 8 is a mind-blowing treat for the eyes. There are brighter hot rod OLED TVs, and mini-LED TVs can get a lot brighter. But when you start from perfect black and there are no backlight anomalies? You will be dazzled.

I enjoyed watching the Bravia 8 a lot — and I have access to the world’s best TVs. I never feel the need to take the Bravia 8 down and put up the Z95A because the Bravia 8 is lovely. If you are looking at getting your first OLED, or even replacing an OLED that’s four years old or older, the Bravia 8 is absolutely worth considering.

Worth the extra money?

The question is not a matter of whether this TV is worth buying — it absolutely is. The question is whether you should spend more to buy this TV as opposed to an LG C4 OLED. At the 65-inch size, the Sony Bravia 8 is about $200 more than the LG C4. Does the Bravia 8 earn that extra $200?

The LG C4 has four HDMI 2.1 inputs while the Bravia 8 has just two — and one of them is taken up with the eARC functionality. If you have both the Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5 or a gaming PC and you want to use eARC to get audio to your soundbar or A/V receiver, I suppose the LG C4’s additional HDMI 2.1 ports are an advantage. However, for most folks, they aren’t.

The Sony has an ATSC 3.0 tuner whereas the LG C4 does not. I suspect it isn’t going to sway many folks. However, the Sony Bravia 8 has better sound quality than the LG C4. If you want the best dialogue clarity, the Bravia 8 is a better choice.

The Bravia 8 has a standard remote as opposed to LG’s magic motion remote. I know which one I prefer — what about you?

The Sony runs Google TV as opposed to LG’s WebOS. Again, I know which one I prefer — what about you?

I’m a fan of the LG C4 and I’d be quite thrilled to own one. But, if I’m spending my own money, would I shell out an extra $200 on a 65-inch Bravia 8? Yes, because of the better sound, Google TV, and a remote that doesn’t drive me crazy.

I think that extra $200 is gonna break down to maybe an extra $4 per month over the course of four years, which is as long as I can keep a TV before upgrade-itus sets in.

Transparently, I’m a top-tier OLED kind of person when it comes to my living room. If I’m buying an OLED TV, I’m probably going to save up a little longer to get the Sony A95L, the LG G4, the Samsung S95D, or the Panasonic Z95A, which has really captured my heart (even though I hate Amazon Fire TV). If I’m going big, it’s going to be a huge mini-LED TV.

The Bravia 8 is a solid and lovely OLED TV. It gets a full recommendation from me. The question is: Is it the right TV for you? Hopefully, I’ve helped you arrive at that decision.