Sony Bravia 65XR90

The Bravia 9 is the most quintessentially ‘Sony’ television the brand has released for years. It reveals a brand confident enough in its vision to follow its own path - even if this runs in the opposite direction from ‘established wisdom’. It reveals a brand ambitious enough to commit substantial R&D budget (and time) to making an unconventional vision a reality. And it’s joined-up enough in its thinking to make it a key part of a wider company strategy that starts with a new Sony professional mastering monitor and includes unique support for Sony’s PlayStation 5 games console.
With a price tag of £2999 for the 65in Bravia XR90 MiniLED I’m looking at here, Sony’s new flagship TV has to do more than just make a philosophical point. It has to be a rocking good television. Well, spoiler alert: that’s exactly what it is…

Picture quality

The big story behind the Bravia 9 (AKA the XR90) is brightness. Sony has long been vocal in the TV world about proper high dynamic range (HDR) video needing lots of light, despite the sort of brightness it’s talking about not traditionally being a strength of the OLED screen technology many AV fans love so much. However, no mainstream Sony TV has pursued brightness as hard as the Bravia 9. Its ability to hit light peaks above 3000 nits brings it close, in fact, to the 4000-nit capabilities of the ground-breaking new Sony BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitor.

This brightness hits you in the face (in a ‘‘‘Woo”, that looks awesome’ sort of way) right from the start, illuminating high dynamic range sources with an intensity and vigour only matched by a handful of more expensive rivals. This isn’t brightness for brightness’ sake, though. On the contrary, the Bravia 9 ensures its light ends up in all the right places. The brightest highlights of HDR pictures, such as reflections of sunlight on glass or metal, or artificial light sources, look as blisteringly intense as they do in real life - yet at the same time the depths of blackness the screen can hit are also outstanding. Almost OLED-like at times. 

The brightness of lighter HDR images is arguably even more striking than the intensity of HDR highlights, with the screen holding on to well over 800 nits of brightness even if you completely fill it with a full white HDR test screen. This measurement confirms my subjective impression that the Bravia 9 delivers a generally bolder, more vibrant HDR presentation than any current OLED TV. 

Maybe the Bravia 9’s most important HDR talent, though, is its ability to describe the most nuanced colour or brightness differences even in the brightest, most heavily saturated parts of the picture. This sort of high brightness and vibrant colour subtlety can be as difficult to achieve as ‘near black’ details, and the extra finesse it brings to bright HDR images such as the opening snow-bound fight of Deadpool & Wolverine on 4K Blu-ray is a revelation.

The Bravia 9’s prowess with extremely bright details doesn’t stop it from also excelling with near-dark content, too. Shadow detail is consistently excellent, and the image is exceptionally stable for such a bright TV, with neither obvious signs of dimming zone activity, nor distracting jumps in backlight brightness if a scene cuts sharply between light and dark shots. There’s no significant dimming of stand-out bright objects to limit backlight haloing, either.

This lighting consistency is every bit as important as the Bravia 9’s brightness to both its instant and, especially, long-term picture quality attraction. After all, without consistency, there’s no immersion in what you’re watching. 

Further bolstering the way in which Bravia 9 pictures hold your attention are their phenomenal sharpness and depth. This is especially true if you use the ‘Standard’ picture mode, which applies both Sony’s excellent ‘Reality Creation’ sharpness and detail enhancer and the depth refinement talents of Sony’s ‘Cognitive XR’ processing. Even in the rawest, least processed ‘Professional’ mode, though, you’re never left in any doubt that you’re watching a true 4K picture.

Joining the Bravia 9’s exceptional light control and sharpness in developing such a convincing 4K experience is some stunningly deft colour handling. The high brightness, wide colour gamut panel unlocks a huge HDR-friendly colour volume that ensures the picture never feels flat or thin, even in its brightest areas. The radiance never stands in the way, either, of infinitely clean, natural colour blends and fades.

The Bravia 9 supports Dolby Vision HDR, with which it performs beautifully - especially in its Dolby Vision ‘Dark’ mode. As a further sign of how exceptional the engine behind Sony’s latest flagship TV pictures is, though, its dynamic tone mapping system also handles basic HDR10 feeds so well that they’re almost indistinguishable from Dolby Vision.

While the Bravia 9 is clearly built from the ground up with HDR in mind, it also handles standard dynamic range (SDR) beautifully. Some of its picture presets actually give SDR a surprisingly subtle and effective HDR make-over, though the ‘Professional’ preset is there to keep SDR picture values accurate if that’s what you prefer.

The Bravia 9’s pictures aren’t completely perfect, inevitably. While its advanced local dimming system does a remarkably good job of delivering extreme contrast without backlight clouding or blooming, even in scenes that contain an extreme mix of light and dark areas, it can’t quite stop faint traces of clouding creeping into the black bars above and below wide aspect ratio films. And motion with 24 frames per second films looks a little juddery by Sony’s usual standards - a result, I think, of the picture’s high brightness. But the gentle settings of Sony’s ‘Motionflow’ processing do a good job of taking the edge off this judder or throwing up lots of digital processing nasties.

Dark HDR10 shots can look a touch red with some of the out-of-the-box presets, and the TV’s (mostly effective) reflection-reducing filter can cause very bright reflected light sources to spread a rainbow effect an inch or two across the screen. Even lumped together, though, these niggles aren’t nearly enough to stop the Bravia 9 from making its high-brightness case with dazzling aplomb.

Sound quality

The Bravia 9 benefits from a unique ‘Acoustic Multi Audio+’ system, where a series of Frame and Beam tweeters built into the TV’s sides and top respectively fire different elements of the sound out to the side and even upwards. This creates a strikingly large and detailed soundstage that does startling justice to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X sound mixes, even delivering a sense of height to the mix. 

Dialogue is clear and clean at all times, thanks in part to a new AI voice enhancement feature that essentially extracts vocals from the mix so you can tweak their relative volume without affecting the rest of the soundtrack elements. There’s plenty of deep, clean bass too, while the highest trebles have enough headroom to avoid harshness. Even though the Bravia 9 doesn’t have any forward firing speakers, the sound feels as though it swells forward towards you, making it room-filling and immersive. 

While it’s at its best with Dolby Atmos sources, the Bravia 9 also carries processing that can upgrade 5.1 and even stereo sound mixes to 5.1.2 channels. On occasion an ambient effect in a film mix can sound a little exaggerated, though, while Hollywood’s most extreme and protracted bass rumbles can cause a hint of buzzing interference. As with the picture niggles, though, these audio issues are barely noticeable against all the things the Bravia 9 does right. 

Living with

The Bravia 9 is a seriously heavy TV - this 65in model is not something the average human will want to handle by themselves. If you’re thinking of hanging it on a wall, you should also note that it sticks out a few centimetres further at the back than most of today’s premium TVs.

The Bravia 9’s desktop feet can be attached either under the TV’s corners (where they look the most elegant), or much closer together if you need to place the TV on a relatively narrow stand. You can also choose between two height settings for the screen, depending on whether or not you want to tuck a soundbar underneath it.

Smart TV features come courtesy of Google TV. As usual this requires you to sit through painfully slow software updates and feels less intuitive to use, and less intelligent with its content recommendations, than some rival smart TV systems. The Bravia 9 runs the platform stably and reasonably slickly, though, and includes the Google Assistant voice control system - and Sony has managed to onboard the YouView app to circumvent Google TV’s blind spot when it comes to some of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services.

The Bravia 9’s connectivity is good for the most part, with four HDMIs joined by USB media inputs and the usual Bluetooth and wi-fi content sharing options. There’s even an ‘S-Centre’ port that lets the TV’s built-in speakers handle the centre channel in a wider surround-sound Sony speaker system. Only two of the Bravia 9’s HDMI ports support the full gamut of today’s gaming graphics features (including 4K HDR at 120Hz and variable refresh rates), though - but then most people will only have a couple of gaming sources at most. And the set does at least support the PlayStation 5’s auto-HDR tone mapping and auto-genre picture mode switching features. 

The Bravia 9 carries an excellent auto-calibration system, finally, that compensates beautifully for the specific configuration of your room.

Conclusion

Sony’s latest attempt to turn AV fans to the MiniLED bright side combines stunning new backlight engineering and control with arguably the most natural-looking picture processing in the TV world. The results are among the most immersive and consistently spectacular images we’ve seen from any TV this year, reminding us in no uncertain terms that OLED technology is certainly not the only premium TV fruit. 

Test Samples

Alien: Romulus 4K Blu-ray

The mixture of dark corridors and corners, and bright artificial lighting and displays, that populate so much of the latest entry in the Alien franchise prove a fantastic showcase of the formidable contrast and colour range Sony’s new flagship TV is capable of.

Deadpool & Wolverine 4K Blu-ray

The opening sequence of Deadpool & Wolverine, where Deadpool takes on a horde of enemies in spectacularly bloody fashion against a pristine snowy backdrop, is brutally good at exposing how truly bright - or otherwise - a TV or projector is. And it looks as explosively punchy and vivid on the Bravia 9 as I’ve ever seen it, keeping up with even Samsung’s much more expensive 75QN900D 8K TV.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 PS5

With HDR tone mapping automatically taken care of by the Bravia 9’s special compatibility features with the PlayStation 5, the stellar 4K HDR graphics of the main campaign of the latest Call of Duty game look so good you’ll never want to stop playing. Well, that’s my excuse anyway. 

If you’re looking for a TV to go into a bright room setting, or (like me) you buy into Sony’s belief that true, convincing HDR needs brightness, then you’ll struggle to find any other that delivers pictures as punchy and vivid, but also supremely well-controlled, as the Sony Bravia 9. Its built-in sound system is potentially good enough to let you put off adding an external sound system, too.

A TV as besotted with HDR as the Sony Bravia 9 has to be partnered with a 4K Blu-ray player if at all possible. And a good quality one at that - ideally the Panasonic UB9000 or, if that’s too much, the Panasonic UB820. I’d strongly recommend paying what you need to for the premium quality versions of whatever streaming services you subscribe to, and you’ll struggle to find a more spectacular and immersive big-screen partner for a PlayStation 5 console.
While the Bravia 9’s built-in audio is impressive, you could still benefit from partnering it with one of Sony’s new Bravia Theatre soundbars, or the Bravia Theatre Quad. Especially if you take advantage of Sony’s ‘S-Centre’ feature, where the TV’s sound becomes the centre speaker in a wider speaker set up.