“The best combination of OLED and mini-LED TV picture quality we've seen yet.”
- Super-clean picture
- Deep blacks, minimal blooming
- Excellent contrast
- Searing HDR highlights
- Excellent motion handling
- Backlight fluctuations visible in dark rooms
- Very expensive
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. Better buckle up!
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 an 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 further intensified more recently at a special press event Sony held at the Sony Pictures Studio lot in Culver City, California, where journalists who had previously only read about the forthcoming Bravia 9 got to see it in action. And the acclaim for this TV has been almost entirely universal.
So what makes the Bravia 9 seem like such a big deal? Sony developed a new 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 get only from an OLED TV — which, to be clear, the Bravia 9 is not.
Does that mean the Sony Bravia 9 an OLED-killer? I have always thought that was the wrong question to ask. But the Bravia 9 is definitely not an OLED-killer. No consumer LCD-based TV ever will be an OLED killer, and I’ll explain why shortly. But even asking if the Bravia 9 is an OLED killer is a distraction.
The Bravia 9 is an astonishing, thrilling, and otherwise absolutely delightful TV.
I’m going to do something I normally don’t do, and give you the goods on this TV right now. The Bravia 9 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.
We have to talk about everything this TV offers — and doesn’t offer — for one very important reason: The Bravia 9 is remarkably expensive. And while stellar picture quality is reason enough for some folks to pry their wallets wide open, most want to know that it’s going to feel like one of the best investments they’ve ever made. So let’s dig into that notion first.
Video review
Bravia 9 design
Best I can tell, Sony skimped on nothing with the Bravia 9. (I’ll address HDMI 2.1 in the nit nerds section in a bit.) Everything about this TV feels premium and is delightful. 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 smaller cabinets, or wider one for a bit more stability. In either position, 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.
The remote is not metal this year, which may seem like a skimp until you know it is made of Sony’s SORPLAS material — it’s a post-consumer recycled plastic created by Sony’s material sciences division. It’s light, strong, and built to last. And the remote is backlit, USB-rechargeable, and has a remote finder speaker built-in.
The Bravia 9, like all Sony TVs, runs the Google TV operating system with Sony’s custom user interface on top. I’ve grown to love how Sony has all the essential settings in a ribbon at the bottom of the screen, with less-popular and more granular settings available if you dig a bit further. I really appreciate that Sony limits the number of clicks you have to make to get to what you want. That extends to Sony’s choice to have the TV tune to the last-used input. So if you have a cable box or some other streaming platform, it’ll go straight to it when powered on. (Other TVs do that, too, of course.)
Perhaps the most premium non-picture-quality aspect of the Bravia 9, though, is its on-board audio system. It is tremendously good and 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 don’t — it adds weight and makes the overall sound super robust.
What really pushes it over the top is Sony’s Voice Zoom tech.
The fidelity is outstanding for an on-board TV audio system. But what really pushes it over the top is Sony’s Voice Zoom tech, which makes dialog clear and intelligible even in super-challenging situations — when you connect a compatible Sony audio system, that is. I had a way better experience with Voice Zoom on the Bravia Theatre Quad than I did directly from the TV. Still, The Bravia 9 has the goods to make dialog exceptionally clear and audible. I just think Sony needs to tweak it a bit.
Numbers for nit nerds
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 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 TVs bright-room capabilities for SDR content.
In Professional SDR mode: I got almost exactly 100 nits peak brightness, which is the most pro mode thing you can do, since SDR content only has information 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. Many professional calibrators I’ve spoken to say they rarely take it 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.
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 calibrations, 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. This chart makes it look far lower than it actually is. The Delta E here is under 4, so it’s barely perceivable to the naked eye and easily remedied with a little calibration. So it’s not at all an issue, just a surprise to me as a reviewer.
When we take a look at the grayscale, it tracks with what the two-point white balance suggests. It’s deadly accurate toward the low end, and just barely off at the high end — again, assuming a D65 white point standard is the intended target. The gamma measurement is also very good here, though not perfect.
What’s more important is total DCI-P3 color coverage, and the Bravia 9 nails that.
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, with only the whites daring to edge over a Delta E of 3. Color saturation, again, was excellent. Color luminance was mostly excellent except, oddly enough, low-luminance blue was not. That’s 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, lean on blue, which I’d want to fix with a calibration. This was in the Pro mode. If you choose Cinema mode, the EOTF tracks high, so it boosts HDR brightness across the board. That’s not accurate, but it is going to be preferred by most viewers. I think that was super smart on Sony’s part.
Peak luminance with a 10% white window was right at 2,800 nits, with full-screen white coming in just under 1,000 nits. That’s important, because it is a clue toward just how intensely bright this TV’s APL can be.
When I ran the Calman peak HDR highlight test, HDR highlights came in at 1,800 nits. Think of that as an average. The TV did provide HDR highlights above the 2,000-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. QD-OLED remains the king of Rec. 2020 coverage, but keep in mind there’s precious little Rec. 2020 color content out there today. What’s more important is total DCI-P3 color coverage, and the Bravia 9 nails that.
If not an OLED-killer, what?
If you’re just rejoining us because you skipped ahead, the summary is this: By the measurements, the Bravia 9 comes in as one of the top three TVs you can buy in 2024. The LG G4 and LG C4 are its toughest competition in the measurements department. But the Bravia 9 holds its own very well, considering it isn’t an OLED.
I mentioned it isn’t an OLED-killer, but why is that? What is this TV?
In short, the Bravia 9 is the best mini-LED TV ever made, in my judgement. 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. In very challenging dark scenes, you can see where it comes up short on 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: 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 — if 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.
Off-angle
I’ll start with one of the Bravia 9’s few weak points, at least compared to OLED, and that’s off-angle viewing. Even with Sony’s X-Wide Angle technology, you will lose some color saturation and see a bit more of the backlight effects on this TV. It’s better than most LCD TV’s for off-angle viewing, but Samsung’s best off-angle panel is a little bit better.
Reflection handling
The Bravia 9’s reflection handling is as good as it gets for a non-matte screen. Unfortunately, you can see some rainbow effect across the screen if you’re watching dark content with lights directly hitting the screen, but that’s true of a LOT of TVs. It’s that, or annoying reflections and washed-out picture quality. Given the choice, I’ll take this every time.
Brightness/Punch
The Bravia 9’s brightness capabilities are right up there with the brightest TVs on the market. That might 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. It often comes off as brighter than TVs like TCL’s QM8, which measures in the 4,000- to 5,000-nit zone, simply because it can deliver high brightness in more scene scenarios. Real world? This TV is awesomely bright if you ask it to be, and when you need it to be.
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. I watched the Mad Max: Fury Road 4K HDR Blu-ray on both the Bravia 9 and the A95L QD-OLED. Both are accurate in Professional mode. You might expect the bright flames to be notably brighter on the Bravia 9 than they are on the A95L, but they aren’t. In fact, they are very closely matched. But what makes the Bravia 9 different than other mini-LED TVs here is the subtlety in the contrast that other mini-LED TVs can’t 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 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.
Blacks/resulting contrast
High brightness is only impressive if it is 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 popping. That is what makes the Bravia 9 so special. It makes the right choices when managing its backlight 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 makes, you also get blooming and halo that is so minimized it’s a non-issue.
That does mean that there are some extremely challenging scenes in which you can see the backlight doing something you might not expect. That happened to me during this evaluation.
This screenshot is of the end credits of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+. 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 all of the stars get brighter, too. And then when the credit disappears, the brightness of the stars goes back down.
Now, you may wonder, as I did, why Sony didn’t just juice up only the backlights behind the credit. Isn’t that the point of local dimming? But as Sony explained it to me, there are two choices here: One is that you do increase 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 then we’d complain about that, because blooming isn’t very OLED-like.
Or, you can choose to raise everything in a challenging scene like this — the stars brighten up and then dim back down — but you don’t get any blooming. There are only two choices: a dual-cell LCD TV that has basically pixel-level dimming, or an OLED TV. Those are the two choices. I think Sony made the right one.
The benefit of this approach is that when those instances do happen, you don’t get blooming.
So, 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 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 good news is that something small, and more localized to one portion of the screen — like closed captions — doesn’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.
Color performance — gamut and volume
As I mentioned in the nit nerds section, the color on this TV is tremendous. QD-OLED can beat it with some content? But for most of what you’ll watch, the color is top notch, both in terms of accuracy and pop.
Motion
As for motion? Well, it’s an LCD TV, so it isn’t 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. That’s a win for the motion section.
Gaming
What makes this TV great for gaming is the fact that it has all the gaming feature support most people want and need, and offers some of the best picture quality you can get from a non-OLED TV while not running any risk of burn-in or running into auto-brightness-limiter annoyances. Yeah, it doesn’t do 144Hz refresh rate, 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 of the Xbox and PlayStation 5 consoles. Again, pixel response time isn’t as quick as OLED, so you may get a bit more color smearing. But with picture quality like this — no burn-in risk, no dimming — it’s hard to imagine most folks playing video games being disappointed.
The bottom line
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 a question of “were the right decisions made?” And I think Sony has made all the right decisions — that’s a matter of personal preference, but that’s where I stand on the matter.
There’s no question the Bravia 9 is a remarkable TV. It’s got a remarkable price to match. I suppose Sony feels empowered to price it that way when it’s making something nobody else is making. But, frankly, the high price is the Bravia 9’s only real weakness. And it’s a major one, since it 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. I wondered if it could stand up to the hype, and I think it does.
