Verdict
Sony’s unique new LED backlight engine helps its latest top TV range deliver the brightest, most colourful and essentially most all-round futuristic pictures I’ve ever seen
Pros
- Spectacularly bright, colourful pictures
- Groundbreaking backlight controls
- Powerful multi-channel sound
Cons
- Blooming becomes more noticeable when viewing off axis
- No HDR10+ playback
- Only two fully features HDMI 2.1 ports
Key Features
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Screen sizes Available in 65-, 75- and 85-inch sizes
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Mini LED XR Backlight Master Drive to improve black levels and brightness
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Google TV All the main streaming apps through Google TV
Introduction
Sony likes to keep people guessing about where it’s true heart lies when it comes to TV technology. One minute it’s turning out a state of the art OLED TV, the next it’s serving up an ultra-bright 8K TV with a price tag to match.
The latest twist in Sony’s ever-changing TV journey finds the brand going back to the backlight drawing board for new 4K Bravia 9 TVs designed to be a perfect partner for the latest ultra-bright Hollywood mastering monitor.
Availability
The 65-inch Bravia 9 costs £2,799 in the UK at the time of review, and $3,000 in the US. It went on sale towards the end of 2024 in the UK, a few months after its bigger 75- and 85-inch models launched. In Australia the Bravia 9 range is only available in the two larger screen sizes.
Design
- Feet can attach in multiple configurations
- Heavy and chunky by today’s standards
How much you like the Bravia 9’s design depends on whether you’re more drawn to svelte barely thereness or tank-like hardness and heft. If the latter floats your boat, then the Bravia 9 is very much the TV for you.
Its robust bodywork weighs a ton by modern TV standards, with even the 65-inch model proving a challenge for two people to set up on its stand – never mind wall-hanging it if that’s what you want to do.
The Bravia 9 is deeper round the back than most modern premium TVs, meaning that as well as straining your back if you want to wall hang it, it also sticks out more than most. In truth we’re only talking about an extra centimetre or two.
If you’d rather pop the TV on furniture, the feet it ships with can handily be attached either right under the screen’s corners or much closer together, and with the TV either sat right down low on them, or with the screen raised a couple of inches to accommodate a soundbar.
Connectivity
- Two HDMI inputs
- Sony S-Center port for soundbars
Connections on the Bravia 9 are dominated by four HDMI ports. It’s a little disappointing to find that only two of these inputs are equipped to handle everything today’s AV world can throw at them, including 4K/120Hz gaming feeds and variable refresh rates.
But I guess there won’t be too many people who have three high frame rate gaming devices they want to connect to their TV at once.
There are USB ports for streaming files from USB storage devices, too, as well as a unique-to-Sony S-Center port which can connect to a soundbar so that the TV’s speakers take on centre-channel duties.
Features
- Cutting edge LED backlight system
- 4K/120Hz and Perfect For Playstation Gaming support
Sony has long held the opinion that to do HDR properly, you need brightness. A (highly credible!) opinion that first led the brand’s professional division to develop a new mastering monitor capable of handling 4000 nits of brightness, and then inspired the brand’s consumer television division to find a way to make a set capable of doing these potentially ultra-bright new sources justice. Resulting in the Bravia 9s.
To achieve its TV brightness goals without breaking either global power consumption regulations or the banks of anyone who wanted to buy one, Sony’s engineers designed a whole new backlight configuration and control system for the Bravia 9. I’m not going to detail everything about it here (not least because much of it was above my brain grade), but basically it combines Mini LED lighting with new electrical efficiencies and arguably the most advanced dimming zone driver control system seen in the TV world to date.
So numerous are the dimming zones on the 65-inch Bravia 9 (or perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say ‘so seamlessly and effectively controlled are the Bravia 9’s dimming zones’) that I wasn’t able to count them using any of my usual zone-counting test signals. This is the first time I’ve ever had this problem with an LED TV – but it’s a problem I’m very happy to come up against!
The new backlight system proves capable of hitting peak light outputs of more than 3,000 nits, getting it closer to Sony’s new 4,000-nit mastering standard than any previous Sony TV bar the brand’s ultra-expensive Z9G 8K models from a few years back. And those 8K TVs did not have a power or dimming zone management system as cutting edge as the one in the Bravia 9.
A lighting system as sophisticated as the one inside the Bravia 9 needs an advanced processing system to control it – which in the Bravia 9’s case comes courtesy of Sony’s latest XR processor.
The Bravia 9 supports the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats, but not HDR10+. It has plenty of dynamic tone mapping tricks up its sleeve to optimise HDR10 sources to the screen’s considerable capabilities, though – as well as a series of picture presets that includes a Professional one designed to adhere closely to established industry standards for film enthusiasts.
The Bravia 9’s audio has a Acoustic Multi-Audio+ system that places tweeters around the TV’s bodywork, including its top and side edges, to cast out a larger soundstage – especially when listening to Dolby Atmos or DTS:X soundtracks.
The Bravia 9’s latest processor can also up mix stereo sources to 5.1.2 channels, as well as separating out dialogue tracks using AI to adjust the clarity and volume of dialogue without affecting the rest of the mix.
User Experience
- Google TV interface
- Two remotes
As with all Sony premium TVs, the Bravia 9 adopts Google TV for its smart features, adding separate app support to cover Sony’s blind spot when it comes to the catch up apps of some of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster.
The Google TV system also supports Google Cast right out of the box, and the Google Assistant voice control/recognition system.
The Bravia 9 also ships with two remote controls: one regular button heavy one, and one more streamlined, stylish ‘smart’ option with a built in mic. Most people will favour the smart one for most of the time, I suspect.
Gaming
- Perfect for PlayStation 5 branding
- Fast input lag
Sony has provided a couple of specific gaming features for owners of the brand’s PS5 console, as part of its Perfect For PlayStation 5 system. Auto HDR Tone Mapping tells the console precisely which Sony TV it’s connected to, so that it can automatically output optimal brightness levels, while Auto Genre Picture mode tells the TV when the PS5 is used as a gaming device or a video playback device, so it can adjust its settings accordingly.
While the Bravia 9 excels as an HDR-loving home cinema machine, it’s also for my money Sony’s best TV to date for gaming. Its innate brightness, contrast and colour strengths chime perfectly with the sort of 4K, high frame rate HDR graphics any triple A game released these days can provide.
It also only takes a fraction over 10ms to render images when running in its Game mode – a seriously impressive result for a TV with so much image management going on.
Picture Quality
- Spectacular images
- Impressive 4K upscaling
It’s hard to see how the Bravia 9 TVs could have done a much better job of delivering on Sony’s ‘brightness is good’ message without taking their price into the stratosphere.
The amount of light the 65-inch Bravia 9 pumps out is instant and consistently spectacular, punching HDR pictures off the screen with an intensity I’ve only seen on a handful of TVs before.
In fact, for my money, it can claim to be the most consistently bright 4K picture around, partly because unlike even the most high-end OLED TVs it manages to retain huge amounts of light output – more than 800 nits – with full-screen bright HDR footage, and partly because it doesn’t join rival brands, most notably Samsung, in heavily dimming the intensity of small bright objects if they appear against dark backdrops.
The full talents of the new backlight array are only revealed when you consider how deep and consistent the TV’s black colours look despite the brightness the screen can belt out. Very dark shots are rendered with pretty much OLED-like levels of black level depth, with no hint of the sort of grey wash over pictures that LCD TVs typically exhibit with dark content.
There’s nothing forced about the Bravia 9’s exceptional black levels, either, in that even the darkest corners of the darkest pictures still contain all the subtle shading and colour details they were mastered to show. Nothing gets ‘crushed’ out of the picture. The finesse of power and light management required to handle such near-black image content so effectively is mind-blowing
The remarkable abilities of Sony’s new backlight system don’t end there. They also help the Bravia 9 reveal subtleties of colour and shading in the brightest parts of HDR images beyond anything I’ve seen on any other TV. Which in turn unlocks a gorgeous sense of sharpness, depth and detail.
This is especially true with native 4K HDR images – though actually Sony’s processing also both upscales HD sources to 4K brilliantly, and converts SDR to HDR more insightfully and credibly than any other similar system I’ve seen.
You can retain pretty much all of the image’s clarity and subtlety when there’s motion in the frame, too, courtesy of a combination of a fast-reacting core LCD panel, and the enduring quality of some of Sony’s MotionFlow processing options. These include options that can take the edge off judder when watching 24p sources without turning them into soap operas or throwing up unwanted processing side effects such as lagging, flickering or smudging around the edges of moving objects.
No TV to date has achieved picture perfection, of course, and this is true also of the Sony Bravia 9. Niggles with Sony’s latest TV star chiefly comprise fairly limited viewing angles before backlight blooming starts to become noticeable.
Occasionally being able to see too obviously the workings of the local dimming engine when watching aggressively mastered HDR content; a slightly over-red look to HDR10 skin tones with some of the TV’s presets that you need to try and calibrate away in the TV’s advanced colour setting menus. And a tendency for the reflection-reducing filter the screen carries to cause a sort of rainbowing effect to spread a few inches across the screen around particularly bright light source reflections (so try and avoid having a wall light opposite the screen if at all possible).
These niggles are either minor in the great scheme of things or addressable through the TV’s available picture settings. So don’t let them deter you from seriously considering arguably the most flat-out and all-round spectacular 4K TV ever made.
Sound Quality
- 70W of total audio power
- Acoustic Multi-Audio+ system with Frame and Beam tweeters
- Dolby Atmos playback support
The high power handling and channel count of the Bravia 9’s Acoustic Multi Audio+ system contribute to an integrated audio performance that does the TV’s uncompromising pictures proud.
The positioning of speakers all around the TV’s bodywork, for starters, helps it cast out an impressively wide soundstage. Sound effects can be heard way beyond the TV’s physical extremities in all directions – including upwards, thanks to the TVs’ dedicated up-firing channels. The sound emanates forward with more intensity than you get with most modern TVs too, helping it create a sense of real three dimensional sound space.
I wouldn’t say this three-dimensional soundscape actually wraps around you like a true surround sound speaker or soundbar package does, but the space between you and the onscreen action certainly feels busy, alive and immersive.
Aside from the occasional high-pitched ambient sound effect drawing a little too much attention to itself, the Bravia 9’s sound stage typically sounds balanced and well-constructed, with no lack of cohesion or sense of brittleness at its extremes. Trebles are produced without sounding shrill or hard-edged, while at the other end of the frequency range bass sounds punchy and clean for the vast majority of the time.
A touch of buzzing can creep into the TV’s audio presentation if a film or TV show features a particularly deep and prolonged deep bass rumble, but such distortion-inducing moments will be rare in the great scheme of an average household’s total TV viewing time.
Should you buy it?
It delivers stellar contrast, colour and detail
The new backlight system and drivers Sony has developed for the Bravia 9 TV series delivers unprecedented levels of LCD TV backlight control. With all the knock on advantages you’d hope for
It’s not cheap for a 65-inch TV
While I’d argue the Sony Bravia 9 is worth its money given it’s genuine ground-breaking status, that doesn’t change the fact that its asking price may simply be beyond reach for many AV fans
Final Thoughts
The Bravia 9 is expensive by today’s 65-inch TV standards – but your reward is one of those big leaps forward in picture quality that Sony consistently delivers every few years.
This is a statement product, and by statement product standards, the 65-inch Bravia 9’s price actually looks pretty reasonable. Especially when its ground-breaking pictures are accompanied by powerful sound, content-rich Google TV smarts and a strong gaming performance.
Trusted Score
How we test
The Sony 65-inch Bravia 9 was tested over a period of 17 days, during which time it was used in a variety of settings. These included 10 days where it was a main living room TV, as well as many hours of being fed many of our favourite films and test sequences from a mix of 4K Blu-ray, HD Blu-ray and streaming sources in a darkened test room.
I also put the Bravia 9 TV through its paces with Portrait Studios’ Calman Ultimate display analysis/calibration software, G1 test signal generator and C6 C5000 light/colour meter.
- Tested for more than two weeks
- Tested with real world use
- Peak brightness measured
- Gaming input lag tested
FAQs
Mini LEDs are much smaller light sources than the normal LEDs traditionally used in LCD TVs. This helps TVs deliver more brightness and significantly better light control.
Two of the Bravia 9’s HDMI ports can support 4K/120Hz graphics and variable refresh rates, a game mode gets input lag down to a speedy 10ms or so, and there’s support for screen-specific HDR playback capabilities courtesy of Sony’s ‘ Perfect For PlayStation 5 features.
The Bravia 9 can play HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision. But there’s no support for HDR10+.
Test Data
| Sony Bravia 9 | |
|---|---|
| Input lag (ms) | 10.1 ms |
| Peak brightness (nits) 2% | 2500 nits |
| Peak brightness (nits) 10% | 2700 nits |
| Peak brightness (nits) 100% | 880 nits |
| Set up TV (timed) | 350 Seconds |
Full Specs
| Sony Bravia 9 Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £2999 |
| USA RRP | $3000 |
| Manufacturer | Sony |
| Screen Size | 64.5 inches |
| Size (Dimensions) | 1443 x 349 x 908 MM |
| Size (Dimensions without stand) | 835 x 1443 x 48 MM |
| Weight | 34.8 KG |
| ASIN | B0DJDDR25R |
| Operating System | Google TV |
| Release Date | 2024 |
| Model Number | K-65XR90 |
| Model Variants | Bravia 7, Bravia 8 |
| Resolution | 3840 x 2160 |
| HDR | No |
| Types of HDR | HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision |
| Refresh Rate TVs | 40 – 120 Hz |
| Ports | Four HDMI, digital audio out, two USB ports, Ethernet, two satellite, RF terrestrial |
| HDMI (2.1) | eARC, ALLM, VRR, HFR, SBTM |
| Audio (Power output) | 70 W |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, AirPlay 2, Google Cast |
| Display Technology | LCD, Mini LED, QLED |
