Sony Bravia 8 II

The Sony Bravia 8 II might just be the most confusingly named TV in AV history. 

For starters, contrary to what you might expect, the Bravia 8 II OLED TV is going on sale alongside the original Bravia 8, rather than replacing it. This is because the Bravia 9 model slot (which might have been a more natural home for the Bravia 8) has already been taken by Sony’s flagship LED models - and Sony doesn’t want to position the Bravia 8 II above the Bravia 9, so it couldn’t elevate them to Bravia 10 status.

The Bravia 8 II isn’t even a direct successor to the first Bravia 8! It’s actually designed to replace Sony’s A95L - a model which, like the Bravia 8 II, uses relatively new Quantum Dot OLED technology, rather than the ‘traditional’ WOLED tech found in the original Bravia 8.

Still with me? Then hopefully you can also take on board the fact that the Bravia 8 II only supplants the 55in and 65in A95L - the 77in A95L continues in Sony’s range, using its older QD OLED panel.

Thankfully it turns out that, ultimately, none of what I’ve just gone to great lengths to explain matters. All you really need to know in the end is that both the £2499 55in and £2999 65in Bravia 8 II are absolute stunners.  

Picture quality

Although it hasn’t been around long, the Quantum Dot OLED technology used in the Bravia 8 II has already transformed the OLED TV world. Its pure RGB approach to colour and ability to render extreme levels of brightness has spurred the makers of traditional WOLED screens into a frenzy of sudden innovation too. The result is more OLED TV progress over the past three years than we saw over the previous 10. 

Unlike Samsung with its latest S95F QD OLED range, though, Sony’s second generation of QD OLED TVs doesn’t focus on putting on a show of the technology’s most exhibitionist outer limits. Instead, it uses QD OLED’s remarkable attributes to unlock levels of subtlety, accuracy, balance and flat-out beauty that are pretty much the stuff of home cinema dreams. 

In a moment I’ll try and break down why the Bravia 8 II’s pictures inspire such an emotional response, but first I should stress that Sony’s new OLED TVs deliver their picture masterclass right out of the box. Their default settings for standard HDR, Dolby Vision HDR and SDR are all expertly and lovingly crafted to deliver an immaculately refined and immersive experience - I didn’t really feel any need to manually tweak anything. 

Such default awesomeness is practically unheard of in my long experience of the TV world, and I have become increasingly convinced it’s the result of the Bravia 8 II being designed and tuned right alongside one of Sony’s professional mastering monitors. 

The Bravia 8 II’s policy of putting balance and refinement over shock and awe starts with the gorgeously detailed, sharp and dense way its pictures look - nothing looks forced or artificial. Source grain doesn’t become exaggerated or gritty, hard object edges don’t suffer with haloing, heavily textured areas don’t draw too much attention to themselves, and the sense of depth and three-dimensionality created with the help of Sony’s fantastic XR processor always looks uniquely organic and realistic. So much so that I find myself gaining new appreciation for shots and scenes in films I’ve seen countless times before - the Bravia 8 II somehow makes it easier to take in the entirety of each shot rather than drawing my attention to the most obvious highlights. 

The Bravia 8 II’s colour-handling is almost perfect, too. Its QD OLED panel essentially covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut used for most HDR mastering, as well as more than 90 percent of the much wider Rec 2020 gamut. Having such a range of colour to work with means the Bravia 8 II can reproduce tones from the deepest, darkest shades right through to ultra-bright HDR highlights and the purest primary hues, without anything feeling off-key or exaggerated. 

Colour tones and blends are reproduced with consistently immaculate subtlety, further underlining the sense of detail and nuance in the overall image. Plus, as we’ve come to expect with OLED screens, the technology’s pixel-level light control delivers perfectly deep, greyness-free black colours during dark scenes, providing the perfect foundation for the Bravia 8 II’s far-reaching colours. 

The Bravia 8 II goes beyond most, if not all, of its OLED rivals with its control of near-black picture details. Faint details don’t get crushed out of very dark pictures, faint colour shades never look washed out or grey. And there’s no hint of dotting or blocking noise in the darkest shots that some OLEDs can suffer with.

The ability to hold on to subtleties in extreme areas extends to HDR’s brightest highlights, too, as the Bravia 8 II brings out shades of light and colour in even the most intensely luminous parts of HDR pictures that most screens end up ‘flaring out’. 

Yet more good news finds the Bravia 8 II’s motion-handling looking phenomenally natural out of the box, gently massaging away the worst excesses of judder without making movies look at all soap opera-like or throwing up any ugly processing nastiness. And while we’re on the subject of processing, Sony’s upscaling of HD and SD pictures to fit the 4K resolution is as good as it gets.

If there’s anything approximating an elephant in the room regarding the Bravia 8 II’s pictures, it’s their brightness. Peaking at around 1,930 nits on a 5 percent HDR test window, and around 1630 nits on a 10 percent test window, the Bravia 8 II gets brighter than most OLED TVs - including being more than 300 nits brighter than its A95L predecessor. However, it only gets around half as bright at its peaks as Samsung’s latest S95F QD OLED models, and only about two-thirds as bright as LG’s G5 OLEDs. 

As someone who appreciates brightness more than most, though, I’d say the Bravia 8 II doesn’t actually feel in any way dull. Also, and more importantly, everything the Bravia 8 II does suggests that Sony has chosen these brightness levels quite specifically, in the interests of balance, accuracy and immersion. 

The Bravia 8 II’s pictures aren’t perfect, inevitably. For instance, tiny bright details can reveal a slight red fringe (presumably caused by QD OLED’s unusual triangular sub-pixel structure). In Dolby Vision Dark or HDR10 modes darker than ‘Standard’, grey or deep blue sky colours can look slightly ‘heavy’ and flicker occasionally. Skin tones sometimes take on a marginal greenish hue, and the 16.2ms the screen takes to render images in its ‘Game’ mode is a handful of ms higher than the figures achieved by rival LG and Samsung OLEDs this year. High levels of ambient light, finally, can cause the generally fantastic black levels to grey a touch. These sorts of issues are so puny, rare, or specific to an avoidable setting, though, that I’m already regretting bothering to mention them.

Sound quality

As usual with Sony OLED TVs, the Bravia 8 II uses ‘Acoustic Surface’ technology to produce its sound - the screen itself functions as the TV’s main speakers. This has the benefit of enabling effects and dialogue to sound as if they’re coming from exactly the right place, and it allows much of the TV’s sound to emerge forward into the room. This instantly gives it more impact and directness than most TV speaker systems can manage.

Other ‘frame’ tweeters, ranged around the outside of the TV’s rear, are used to cast off-screen effects, ambient sounds and musical scoring out left, right and even upwards to create a remarkably wide, far-reaching soundstage capable of doing much more justice to a good Dolby Atmos soundtrack than most TV sound systems can. A pair of integrated subwoofers inject substantially more bass depth and power into the sound than most TVs manage too, without sounding distorted or overwhelming. 

Treble effects can sound a bit peaky at high volumes, and the occasional low frequency sound can cause a momentary buzz of interference. For the most part, though, the Bravia 8 II sounds good enough to make adding a soundbar more of a luxury than an immediate necessity. 

Living with the Bravia 8 II

The Bravia 8 II enjoys suitably premium build quality, while the combination of ultra-thin bezel and desktop feet that feel like an extension of the outer left and right edges give it a chic, minimalistic, quite elegant feel. It’s reasonably trim around the back, too.

It’s a pity the Bravia 8 II’s feet only attach right at the edges of the screen, with no option to put them closer together to suit narrow pieces of furniture. At least you have input into how high the screen sits on these feet, potentially leaving you space for a soundbar under the screen.

The Bravia 8 II’s connections are mostly impressive -  you get four HDMis, two USB ports, an RF port, and support for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity. The only shame is that even this flagship OLED set only supports full 4K/120Hz gaming on two of its HDMIs rather than all four.

And talking of gaming, the Bravia 8 II also supports variable refresh rates on those two high bandwidth HDMIs, as well as auto game mode switching and support for the ‘Perfect for Playstation 5’ system where a PS5 console can automatically detect that it’s connected with this TV and optimise its HDR output accordingly. The TV also supports ‘PS Remote Play’ and Dolby Vision Gaming, and the regular on-screen menus are replaced by a dedicated gaming menu when a game source is detected.

Smart features are provided by Google TV. This is still a little too buggy to be my favourite smart system, but it does now offer a graphically rich, reasonably customisable interface that offers decent support for multiple user profiles and a fairly deep level of voice control. Plus Sony has gone to the trouble of ensuring that all the UK’s most important catch up apps are present and correct.

It’s worth reiterating, finally, that the Bravia 8 II carries the best out-of-the-box pictures I’ve seen from any TV. It’s a great option for technophobes.

Conclusion

While it might not be 2025’s showiest OLED TV, the Sony Bravia 8 II delivers some of the most refined, immersive and beautiful pictures I’ve ever seen from a TV. Even better, it does this right out of the box, without you having to lift a finger, while its innovative sound is bigger, bolder and more detailed than most, too.

Test Samples

It: Chapter One 4K Blu-ray
The first instalment of Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel feels like it was specially created to put TVs through the wringer, with its mixture of ultra-bright, deliberately heavily saturated daylight scenes and ultra-dark but also extremely detailed dark scenes. The Bravia 8 II is so good, though, that it makes this usual ‘TV killer’ film feel like a demo disc.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout 4K Blu-ray
As well as being my favourite Mission: Impossible film, Fallout on 4K Blu-ray features a number of spectacular sequences that were shot using 6K and 8K cameras. You can spot them by the way the presentation shifts to a narrower aspect ratio when they kick in, and all of them are taken to another level of splendour again by the subtleties and refinement of Sony’s new OLED TVs.

Zombieland: Double Tap 4K Blu-ray
As well as being a criminally under-rated comedy horror flick, the 4K Blu-ray of Zombieland: Double Tap is one of only a handful of titles released with IMAX Enhanced certification. This means it was mastered using IMAX’s proprietary techniques for emphasising detail and clarity, and the results on the IMAX Enhanced-certified Bravia 8 II are jaw-droppingly good.

If you care about precision, accuracy, consistency and the total immersion into what you’re watching, then you simply can’t do better than the Sony Bravia 8 II. Especially if you want to be able to experience such picture glories right out of the box, without having to spend loads of time poking around in the TV’s set up menus. The powerful and dynamic built in sound system is a cut above the TV norm, too.

While the Bravia 8 II is unusually great at upscaling sub-4K content to the screen’s native 4K resolution, a TV this good still deserves to be partnered with the best-quality sources you can find. So we’d strongly recommend a good 4K Blu-ray player such as the Panasonic UB9000 or, if that’s too steep for you, the UB820. 

The Sony connection also means that, unless you’re firmly entrenched in the Xbox world, adding a PS5 console to the TV also makes sense if you want to simplify the process of getting optimised HDR out of your console. You could also just about make do with the PS5’s integrated 4K Blu-ray player if you go for the disk drive version - though this does not support playback of the Dolby Vision HDR format.

Sony’s new Bravia Theatre 8 and, especially, Theatre 9 soundbars also make good partners for the TV if you want a more powerful sound to go with the Bravia 8 II’s exemplary pictures. Especially as Sony’s own soundbars make it possible to take advantage of the TV’s ‘S-Center Speaker’ input, where the TV’s speakers can take on centre-channel duties and allow the soundbar to focus on delivering the other channels.