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Having recently reviewed (and loved) Sony’s debut ‘True RGB’ TV, the Bravia 7 II, I’m more than a little excited by the arrival of the 65in Bravia 9 II. It’s a flagship True RGB set that boasts substantially more local dimming zones and greater brightness than its step-down sibling, as well as a new anti-reflection screen surface. The 65in Bravia 9 II does cost a pretty eye-watering £1200 more than the £2299 65in Bravia 7 II, though, and long experience shows that more potent spec doesn’t inevitably result in better picture quality.
Experience also shows, though, that Sony more than any other brand tends not to deliver extreme picture features for extreme picture features’ sake - instead it uses a screen’s extremes to unlock more natural, accurate and natural pictures. So hopefully the Bravia 9 II’s step-up talents will prove to be nothing but a force for good.
Picture Quality
Two of the Bravia 9 II’s three step-up features - its extra brightness and anti-reflection screen filter - make their presence felt right away. High dynamic range 4K Blu-rays and streams are delivered with more intense light peaks than the Bravia 7 II achieves, as well as retaining more brightness for fullscreen bright HDR shots. Especially if you’re using the default ‘Standard’ picture preset with all of the TV’s ‘eco’-related features deactivated.
The anti-reflection screen is something of a marvel. It suppresses reflections from light sources and bright objects in your room almost as effectively as the extreme filters on Samsung’s flagship TVs, yet it’s less prone to black levels being diluted by greyness in very bright environments. Its matt finish doesn’t feel as ‘alien’ as it can with some rival anti-reflection technologies, either.
The Bravia 9 II’s substantial extra brightness doesn’t just make HDR highlights feel more intense and ‘daylight’ scenes feel more realistic. It also feeds into more colour intensity, especially using the massively enjoyable ‘Standard’ preset and especially in bright areas, than the Bravia 7 II delivers. Meaning it provides an even more dazzling display of the colour range benefits of True RGB technology, which uses actual red, green and blue LEDs to produce colour, rather than shining white or blue light through RGB filters or Quantum Dots.
The Bravia 9 II can cover more than 90% of the BT.2020 colourspace that currently represents the most extreme palette in the AV world, and delivers brightness peaks pretty much up there with the 4000-nit capabilities of Sony’s £32k BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitor. The extra core brightness and colour response means the Bravia 9 II can retain outstanding amounts of shading detail and colour tone finesse at both the dark and bright extremes of its pictures, too. There’s no crushing details out in dark scenes, colour bleaching in HDR highlights, or desaturation in the darkest scenes. In other words, Sony’s flagship TV uses its greater extremes to express more subtleties, rather than just dialling everything up to 11.
Remarkably, the Bravia 9 II’s colour and brightness extremes don’t prevent it from producing fantastically deep, rich black colours. Blacks often achieve depths and natural tones, in fact, that seriously challenge OLED TVs.
Just occasionally a tough shot containing a particularly strident mix of very bright and very dark elements can take on a slightly grey hue in ‘Standard’ mode, and slightly more often a bright part of a film with black bars above and below its images can cause a trace of backlight bloom to creep into those framing bars. Otherwise blooming is limited to a remarkably limited spread - even tighter than you get with the already brilliant Bravia 7 II. The RGB LED lighting system also means that what (very) little blooming there is appears infused with the colour of the picture element causing it, making it less noticeable than the grey blooming you get with regular LCD TVs.
Sharpness and detail are phenomenal on the Bravia 9 II, and this sharpness remains consistent in dark scenes - some of the most pristine handling of near-black picture information I’ve seen from any TV delivers the faintest details or colour saturations without noise or instability. The image’s clarity holds up very well when there’s fast motion to contend with, too, which is something other RGB LED TVs can struggle with. The screen also retains total stability during cuts between extremely bright and extremely dark content, and the screen’s far-reaching colours are achieved without any tone looking overcooked.
Provided you’ve turned off the TV’s ‘eco’ features, for the most part pictures hold up spectacularly well regardless of whether you’re watching them in the TV’s bright, punchy ‘Standard’ preset or the phenomenally accurate and natural-looking ‘Professional’ preset. This TV is an outstanding option for anyone who could use such room-condition adaptability.
One last picture quality ace up the Bravia 9 II’s sleeve is that it supports much wider viewing angles before colour or contrast take a dive than the vast majority of LCD TVs.
There are a few small niggles with the Sony, mind you. One is that in the otherwise-gorgeous ‘Standard’ mode, very dark shots can sometimes take on a slightly bluish tinge. The ‘Standard’ image is a touch cool in its colour temperature generally, in fact - but unless you’re toggling between it and the perfectly judged ‘Professional’ mode, you’ll only notice it in the darkest shots.
Very occasionally, too, the generally immaculate backlight control succumbs to a slightly exaggerated dark area shade shift here, or a momentary flare-out there. But such moments really are vanishingly rare.
While the TV supports much wider viewing angles than most LCD TVs, blooming becomes more noticeable when the screen is viewed off axis. Also, as with all TVs that carry strong anti-reflection filters, bright ambient conditions can cause black levels to slightly wash out. The extra ambient brightness that causes this issue also actually disguises it quite nicely, though.
The ‘Vivid’ picture preset is insanely over-saturated and, while ‘Standard’ mode is usually a joy to behold, the Bravia 9 II’s extra brightness can occasionally reveal some slightly strange blocking noise in extremely dark areas (such as during the scene in Sinners where a woman walks down a dark corridor towards the room where her husband has just been attacked by a vampire), and cause traces of colour banding (such as in the evening sky in the same movie as someone tries to get the electrics to the new Juke Joint working). Such issues really are rare in ‘Standard’ mode, though, and don’t appear in the TV’s ‘Professional’ preset at all.
Finally, the reddish-pink ‘Blade Runner’ text at the end of the opening explanatory text of Blade Runner 2049 can become a bit brown in the ‘Professional’ preset - this happens with the Bravia 7 II as well. But I don’t ever see similar issues occur in any other content.
Sound Quality
The 65in Bravia 9 II carries a completely redesigned multi-speaker sound system that includes up-firing ‘beam’ tweeters in the TV’s top edge, ‘frame’ tweeters in the screen’s upper left and right edges, two substantial midrange drivers (using Sony’s ‘X-Balanced’ design) that also fire their sound out of the TV’s sides, and a dual subwoofer arrangement where ducts run off from the main drivers to help the TV produce deeper, cleaner low frequency sound. Most of these speakers are built along the same, unusually high, horizontal line on the TV’s rear, as Sony’s research suggests this delivers the most coherent and balanced sound.
The size of the soundstage the 65 Bravia 9 II achieves with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks is huge, with spectacular levels of ‘throw’ left, right and above. Details are placed with the utmost precision in this huge soundstage, and the sound is detailed and pristine without anything sounding too bright or too harsh. The sound has a remarkably three-dimensional feel to it, and even presents forwards despite there being no speakers facing this way.
The speakers can manage cinematically high volumes with ease, and expertly track a soundtrack’s dynamic rises and falls - including showing enough range to keep expanding no matter how dense and bass/treble rich a movie mix might get. Dialogue is locked at the heart of the onscreen action, as well. Not below it or behind it, but right in the middle of things, exactly where it should be.
The only area where I find the Bravia 9 II’s sound even slightly lacking is bass. There’s actually more of it than the vast majority of TVs provide, and what there is hardly ever distorts or breaks down - even at ear-challenging volumes. But in the context of such a large, powerful and detailed sonic performance, it’s the only area I’d like a touch more oomph.
Living with the Sony Bravia 9 II
While the 65in Bravia 9 II is, by today’s standards, chunky around the back, the frame around the screen is actually quite trim. The TV’s narrow metal desktop plate stand, and a repeat of the nifty see-through neck feature found in the Bravia 7 II, complete the illusion that the 65in Bravia 9 II is actually quite cute and unimposing.
The see-through neck isn’t actually entirely see-through. In fact it uses a clever set of lenticular lenses to make any cables that might be trailing up behind it invisible to anyone looking at the TV from the front.
Sony supplies two remotes with this TV: a basic plasticky number with a full numerical button count, and a much more elegant, cooler alternative with batteries rechargeable via USB-C, plenty of direct app-access buttons, and even nice bright backlighting to aid use in a dark room. You can also control the TV via the Bravia Connect app on your iOS or Android device.
Smart features are provided by the Google TV smart system, which is now enhanced by a TV-focused version of Google’s Gemini AI system. All the streaming apps anyone could want are present and correct, including the BBC iPlayer (which Google doesn’t typically support) and Sony’s own Sony Pictures Core service (which streams a large collection of Sony-owned films and TV shows at a high 80Mbps bandwidth for improved picture quality). Buying the 65in Bravia 9 II gets you credits to purchase 10 movies from this exclusive streaming service.
Sony’s latest menu system features a new ‘My Cinema’ system, where you can select from a series of themed presets that contain various preconfigured picture and sound settings. You can adjust each element of these ‘macro’ presets at will, but the out-of-the-box settings are actually very good for the most part.
The Bravia 9 II only supports three of the ‘big four’ HDR formats: HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision - HDR10+ is not on the menu. Sony’s dynamic tone mapping system is so good with base HDR10, though, that I don’t miss HDR10+ at all. More disappointing is the Bravia 9 II’s gaming potential. Remarkably, Sony has only provided two HDMI ports capable of supporting 4K@120Hz and variable refresh rate gaming - and one of those also functions as the TV’s eARC port. The number of people impacted by this limitation will be small, it’s true - but pretty much every other flagship TV nowadays provides full gaming support across all four of its HDMI sockets.
The screen takes around 9.8ms to render 60Hz graphics in its ‘Game’ preset, an excellent result for a TV with so many picture-producing components to manage. However, the backlight system seems to be reined in a bit to keep input lag so low, which results in a slightly cloudier look to dark game scenes, while motion even at 120Hz feels a little blurry versus most flagship TVs.
Conclusion
Despite its gaming limitations, the 65 Bravia 9 II has enough extra in its tank to justify the additional outlay over the Bravia 7 II. Provided, anyway, that you’re looking for a TV capable of doing double duty in bright and dark room conditions - its bright-room talents are something OLED TVs can’t compete with.
While RGB LED debutantes from other brands I’ve seen so far have generally impressed, the Bravia 9 II is the first one that already, at the first time of asking, sets new all-round LCD TV standards, rather than just unlocking more colour.
Test samples
Babylon 4K Blu-ray
As well as being an incredibly underrated film, Damian Chazelle’s Babylon features some of the most challenging imagery around. The Bravia 9 II, though, handles the extreme contrast and tricky colours of the early Hollywood mansion ‘orgy’ sequence in both its bright ‘Standard’ and accurate ‘Professional’ modes better than any other LCD TV, while also presenting the sun-drenched vistas of the deserts near Los Angeles with a level of full-screen brightness no OLED TV can achieve.
Sinners 4K Blu-ray
The night-time club sequences that make up most of Sinners running time are very challenging to make look believable, consistent and enjoyable in both accurate and bright-room picture preset modes. The Bravia 9 II, though, achieves this accurate and ‘expanded’ picture feat for different viewing conditions better than any other TV I’ve seen.
Spider-Man: No Way Home Sony Pictures Core
As well as delivering sensational picture quality if your broadband can get the full benefit of the Sony Pictures Core service’s unique 80Mbps streaming rate, Spider-Man: No Way Home is presented throughout in the beautifully clean, screen-filling IMAX Enhanced format the Bravia 9 II has been certified as capable of doing full justice to.
The Bravia 9 II is phenomenally, arguably uniquely, good at adapting its picture quality to look sublime in both dark and bright room settings. Its anti-reflection filter is, for my money, the most impressive example of its type, while the screen’s extra brightness opens up an extra level of impact and quality relative to the already spectacular efforts of Sony’s step-down Bravia 7 II RGB LED TV.
The Bravia 9 II’s sound is also outstanding, delivering excellent power, dynamics and detail in one of the largest and most convincing soundstages any TV has ever produced.
The Sony Bravia 9 II really deserves to be partnered with a 4K Blu-ray player - one of which can be found, handily enough, in the Sony PlayStation 5 console. It’s a console which also enjoys a couple of exclusive features when partnered with Sony TVs, including the ability to detect which TV it’s connected to and select the most appropriate HDR output accordingly.
I’d also recommend taking advantage of the free 10 movies on the Sony Pictures Core streaming service your Bravia 9 II gives you access to, and finally the TV’s built-in sound system is good enough to hold its own with the new optional rear and subwoofer speaker options you can now connect directly with the TV.
