Sony 65-inch Bravia 9 QLED TV (K-65XR90) review

Sony’s Bravia 9 is a beautiful flagship QLED TV with a panel that rivals comparable Hisense and TCL models in brightness, and a sleek design that includes its own spatial audio sound system with height channels. It’s a fantastic performer, though at $3,299.99 for the 65-inch model we tested, it’s one of the more expensive TVs we’ve tested this year. And in that price range, the OLED LG Evo G4 ($3,399.99 for 65 inches) offers the best color and black levels with a bezel-less design and sub-millisecond input lag, so it remains our Editors’ Choice winner for high-end TVs. .

Design: Sleek and delicate

The Bravia 9 looks and feels almost identical to its OLED sibling, the Bravia 8. It has similar metal bands on the top and sides, and the same narrow brushed metal strip at the bottom edge of the screen The biggest difference sits below that edge. A curved black lip extends below the metal strip, indicating the TV’s 2.2.2-channel audio system’s front-firing driver, which the Bravis 8 lacks. The Bravia 9 is slightly thicker at 1.9 inches by 1.5 inches, but it’s negligible.

Around the back, you’ll find the same port configuration as the Bravia 8, with all connections sitting on the left side of the TV. These include four HDMI ports (two 4K120, one of which is eARC); two USB ports; 3.5mm port for an infrared sensor, center channel speaker input and RS-232C; an optical audio output; an Ethernet port; and an antenna/cable connector. This section contains a power button and a physical mic mute switch.

As with the Bravia 8, Sony offers four options for placing the Bravia 9 on a table. Its two long, flat metal feet can be mounted at your choice of two heights and in two positions near the center or edge of the TV. You can mount it on the wall.

The remote is a simple rectangular stick with a large circular navigation pad on top. Volume and channel rockers sit below the pad, along with dedicated service buttons for Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Netflix, Sony Picture Core and YouTube. Menu and power buttons are on top of the pad, along with a pinhole microphone. The remote has a unique black look with blue spots; This material is made from Sony’s SORPLAS recycled plastic, discarded water bottles and optical discs

Features: Big sound, powerful software

Bravia 9 is an attractive TV for users who want a powerful audio experience out of the box thanks to its 2.2.2-channel speaker system. There are two channels and driver sets each for the front, height and bass channels, and a dedicated center channel audio output if you want to incorporate front and height-firing drivers into your existing speaker setup. It lacks the side-firing drivers of the Hisense U9N (4.1.2 channels) or the Hisense 98UX and 110UX (4.2.2 channels), though those TVs are significantly larger and visually busier.

Sony uses Google TV for its smart TV platform. All major streaming services are supported, including Amazon Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Netflix, Twitch and YouTube, plus local streaming from phones, tablets, PCs and Macs via Apple AirPlay and Google Cast. You can use Google Assistant voice control with Bravia 9 to search for content, control the TV and any compatible smart home device, get general information, and other functions. You can even video chat on the TV with the optional $200 Bravia Cam accessory that attaches to the top of the screen.

Image quality: Excellent contrast and color

The Sony Bravia 9 is a 4K QLED TV with a 120Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG). It features an ATSC 3.0 tuner for 1080p and 4K over-the-air broadcasts.

We test the TV with a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator and Portrait Display’s Kalman software. As a mini-LED-backlit TV, the Bravia 9 is significantly brighter than its OLED sibling or any other OLED. In fact, it comes close to the record-breaking light output that Hisense and TCL are achieving with their latest high-end TVs.

Out of the box, in HDR Cinema mode, the Bravia 9 shows a peak brightness of 725 nits with a full-screen white field and a blazing 2,440 nits with an 18% white field. This is within reach of the Hisense U8N (2,755 nits, 18% HDR) and the U9N (2,630 nits). It doesn’t break 3,000 nits like the TCL QM851G (3,308 nits), but it’s still much higher than any brightness level we’ve seen from LG, Sony, or other TV makers.

Black levels reached 0.0002cd/m^2 in testing, which can be chalked up to any ambient light rather than a panel. Effectively perfect black levels are increasingly common with mini-LED-backlit TVs, which means light bleed (the effect of slight bleeding of light along high-contrast edges that doesn’t appear on OLED TVs) is a big factor to consider when evaluating contrast performance. As an OLED TV, the LG Evo G4 has an edge over the Bravia 9 in this regard, with the trade-off being a lower, but still very bright, panel (1,103 nits). That said, the Bravia 9 is a light bloom.

The charts above show the Bravia 9’s color levels in Cinema mode with an SDR signal compared to Rec.709 broadcast standards and an HDR signal compared to DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. Whites are just about perfect, as are SDR colors. HDR colors are generally great, although magentas are a bit red, which we often see on QLED TVs. The color range is slightly less than DCI-P3, but it’s still very wide and slightly skewed beyond the magentas. This is where the LG G4 really excels, with colors that are just as accurate and much closer to covering the full digital cinema color space.

BBC’s “Singh” episode dynasty Looks great on Bravia 9. Colors are balanced and look very natural, from greens and grass yellows to lion fur and white. Shots of a lioness silhouetted against a sunset and trees silhouetted against a stormy sky are very detailed; Both the shape of the lioness and the texture and color of the leaves and bark of the tree come out without being blown away.

The Great Gatsby The Bravia 9 exhibits strong contrast. The black suits in the party scene look dark while maintaining their cut and contour, and the whites of the lights and balloons are just right bright. IMAX preserves detail in extended films better than Cinema mode, which looks a bit muddy, especially in darker shots. Splashes of color pop nicely and skin tones look natural in both modes.

Snow-filled footage from the Spears and Munsil Ultra HD benchmark disc proves that the Bravia 9 can look extremely bright without clipping. In these clips, clouds and falling snowflakes are clearly visible instead of merging into solid white. Darker and more colorful nature footage also looks fantastic on disc. Shadow detail is maintained when viewing in the dark, and in a scene of a valley at dusk, the house lights shine brightly without showing any light bloom. Very colorful objects look bright and vivid without being oversaturated or cartoonish, and shots with those objects against completely black backgrounds also show minimal light flare.

Gaming: Adequate features, moderate speed

The Bravia 9 has a native 120Hz refresh rate with variable refresh rate (VRR) support up to 144Hz. Typical of Sony TVs, it has no official PC-focused VRR certification like AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync, but it will automatically adjust sync and picture settings for PlayStation 5.

Testing its input lag with an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix, the Bravia 9 showed a latency of 11 milliseconds. That’s less than one frame per second at 60 frames per second (about two frames at 144Hz), which is still fast enough for gaming comfortably, but falls short of the 10ms threshold we consider a TV to be good for gaming. The Bravia 8 is much faster at 4.6ms, and the Hisense U8N and TCL QM851G also come in line at 7.4 and 6.4ms respectively. The LG G4 Evo and Samsung S95D showed sub-millisecond latency, the lowest input lag we measured.

Verdict: A premium QLED TV

Sony’s Bravia 9 is an excellent flagship LED TV that literally outshines its OLED sibling, the Bravia 8. It doesn’t come cheap, but the Bravia 9 offers a bright panel with accurate colors and a beefy 2.2.2-channel speaker system. For about the same price as the 65-inch Bravia 9, you can bump up to 75 inches with Hisense’s U9N, which offers comparable specs and picture quality and a more advanced speaker system. Otherwise, the LG Evo G4 delivers better-looking pictures than the Bravia 9, with a wider color gamut and no light bloom, so it stands out as our Editors’ Choice among premium TVs.

About Will Greenwald

Principal Analyst, Consumer Electronics

I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering TVs and everything you want to connect them with. I’ve reviewed over a thousand different consumer electronics products, including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to assure you that you won’t do it for at least a few more 8K to think about for the year).

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