Sony Bravia 3 65-inch (K65S35BP) review

Cheaper TVs are getting good, and good TVs are getting cheaper.

That’s the trend we’re beginning to see, particularly from TCL, which is now regularly producing five-star and even Award-winning TVs that comfortably sit in the three-figure price range.

But what happens when a long-standing player, such as Sony, attempts to take these manufacturers head-on?

Well, we’re about to find out, as before us today we have the 65-inch Bravia 3 – a TV that’s aimed at the same budget-conscious crowd but has greater brand cachet and a claim to more considered tuning.

So, is the result a dream budget TV? Unfortunately, no.

Price

At £899 / $800 / AU$1645, the 65-inch Bravia 3 looks like a relative bargain compared to the rest of Sony’s 2025 TV lineup. We’ve seen it drop to as low as £749 in the UK recently, but pricing seems to have settled at the £799 mark.

Interestingly, the Bravia 3 launched in the US and Australia last year as part of Sony’s initial Bravia relaunch, but it’s taken until May of this year for it to be released in the UK.

The Bravia 3 comes in the same 43-, 50-, 55-, 65- and 75-inch size options as its X75L predecessor, as well as a new 85-inch option. Prices start at £479 / $240 / AU$999 for the smallest size, and reach £1499 / $1600 / AU$2300 for the 85-inch version.

We expect the performance to differ substantially across sizes, so this review should only be considered as counting for the 65-inch model.

Competition-wise, the 65-inch variant that we have in our testing room today is most closely matched to the Award-winning TCL C7K, which launched at £899 / AU$1595, but can now be found for a more comparable £749 / AU$1200.

We’ll dig into the features shortly, but it must be said that the Bravia 3 looks quite expensive considering its on-paper specification. That said, specifications are never the final word on performance, and we’ve reviewed many TVs that exceed the expectations set by their spec sheet.

Build

The Sony Bravia 3 is a well-built if unremarkable-looking TV. It’s 100 per cent plastic, down to the slightly cheap-looking (and feeling) legs.

Interestingly, Sony does not refer to this TV being constructed of its SORPLAS recycled material, which leads us to believe that this is made of your garden variety plastic rather than the company’s eco-conscious material.

We appreciate that there is an option to fit the feet in a narrow or wide option to suit your media unit, or to leave space for a soundbar. Better still, assembly is super quick and easy, as all you need to do is slot the feet into place; no screws required.

The bezels are fairly slim around three sides of the screen, with a slightly more pronounced chin, giving this TV a fairly minimalistic look from the front.

Furthermore, Sony gives the Bravia 3 a slightly more premium feeling by including the same remote as it does with its more premium models, including the Bravia 8 II.

This remote unfortunately isn’t backlit, though, as Sony seems to have stopped producing the backlit version of its control, which is a shame. Still, this part is made of recycled plastic and features a “find my remote” function.

Features

Sony has clearly made some omissions to reach this price point, and it’s most evident when we look at the feature set. The Bravia 3 uses a direct-lit LED panel, and Sony has opted not to include any sort of local dimming control.

It doesn’t feature Quantum Dots either. However, Sony tries to regain some ground here by including its Triluminous Pro technology, which uses a combination of the available hardware and software smarts to boost colour reproduction, but we’ll reveal how effective this is in the picture section of this review.

Furthermore, this is a 4K/60Hz panel. This will likely be disappointing to gamers hoping to squeeze the maximum performance out of their Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, but it’s worth noting that the majority of console games still max out at 4K/60Hz rather than 4K/120Hz anyway.

The lack of VRR is another shame, but all four of the Bravia 3’s HDMI sockets do at least support ALLM, with one socket doubling as an HDMI eARC port.

Sony does make some headway when we move away from gamers and focus on the features catered towards movie-lovers. Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG are all supported here, and Dolby Atmos audio is also featured via HDMI eARC.

Speaking of audio, the 65-inch version sports a two-channel speaker system with a combined 20W of output (10W per speaker). The speakers use Sony’s X-Balance and Bass Reflex speaker technology.

In layman's terms, this means that the drivers feature an unconventional non-circular diaphragm for a larger surface area, which reportedly produces deeper bass and enhanced vocal clarity.

Much like the rest of Sony’s lineup, Google TV is built in, meaning the Bravia 3 has access to a wide variety of domestic and international streaming apps. We don’t find any noticeable gaps in terms of app compatibility in our testing, and aside from a few hiccups (mostly after we first turn the TV on), we find that the TV handles the operating system fine.

On paper, it’s hard to deny that the specs are quite disappointing, especially when we look at the rival TCL C7K, which features a Mini LED-backlit panel with 1008 dimming zones, Quantum Dots and a 144Hz refresh rate.

We do, however, have to consider Sony’s picture pedigree. The Japanese giant is renowned for creating TVs that are greater than the sum of their parts, thanks to clever processing and careful, considered tuning.

Understandably, the Bravia 3 does not feature Sony’s flagship Bravia XR processor, but the 4K HDR Processor X1 can handle a few of the same features, including the aforementioned Triluminous Pro colour processing, as well as versions of the Live Colour and MotionFlow features found on the pricier Bravia models.

Picture

We always go into a TV review hoping for the best, and considering Sony’s recent five-star run, which includes the Bravia 7, Bravia 8 and Bravia 8 II, it’s fair to say that we have high hopes for the Bravia 3’s picture performance.

As you can probably tell from the star rating, these hopes are unfortunately not met, but that doesn’t mean the Bravia 3 is a complete write-off by any means.

We start in the TV’s out-of-the-box settings, and find that (as expected) the picture isn’t particularly subtle. Colours are punchy and rich, and there’s a solid sense of three dimensionality, but motion is oversmoothed.

Switching to the Professional picture mode, which is the Sony TV equivalent of Filmmaker Mode, we find that the Bravia 3 looks a lot more balanced and natural. Colours retain their richness, but look warm and more balanced in Civil War, with foliage in particular looking lush and verdant without veering into overblown.

Motion is also greatly improved in this setting, as evidenced by the jets flying overhead at the Western Forces military base in Charlottesville, Virginia. There is minimal judder here, and yet the oversmoothed out-of-the-box mode is also avoided.

Generally speaking, Sony’s picture-tuning DNA can be spotted in various aspects of the picture, but that’s not enough to make up for its various shortcomings.

What strikes us most is how the entire picture is covered in a grey wash, which robs it of some solidity and makes dark sequences borderline unwatchable. The panel seems to glow in sequences that demand blacks, which results in an overwhelming amount of detail being lost in darker scenes.

Take, for instance, the scene in Civil War in which the journalists drive through a burning forest at night. There is decent intensity and richness to the flames, but the rest of the image is robbed of detail, making the car and the occupants inside very difficult to see.

Even in scenes with plenty of light, we find that the image lacks contrast, meaning that Sony’s usually excellent presentation of three-dimensionality is compromised.

Switching to Oppenheimer, there are a few redeeming qualities to the Sony, especially when compared to the TCL C7K, which we have on hand for reference.

The black and white sections of the movie appear considerably better on the Sony, with a richer, more cinematic warmth to the whites that makes the TCL look a bit blue in comparison.

Furthermore, the sweeping panning shots throughout the introduction to the Los Alamos scene are handled admirably by the Sony, once again demonstrating how capable its motion processing is.

Unfortunately, though, we encounter similar issues when it comes to dark details. Characters with dark hair or clothing suffer from a lack of defined details, resulting in parts of the picture that look a bit rudimentary.

Finishing our picture testing with Gravity on Blu-ray, we can assess how this Sony TV handles SDR content. Overall, it doesn’t do a terrible job here, as the picture has a degree of naturalness that helps boost immersion.

The film grain featured in this film also looks more intentional on the Sony, whereas the TCL seems to present it in a way that makes it look like picture noise.

However, the lack of black depth ultimately makes the expansive void of space look less convincing from the Sony, and we find that highlights, such as the sun reflecting off the horizon of Earth below or stars in the background, look a tad dull.

The TCL features more convincing blacks and brighter highlights. It’s both a technically more impressive and better-performing TV for the money.

Dark details are preserved with much more finesse here, and while it is not an OLED, we find that the TCL’s handling of black and control of blooming make the C7K a much better option for watching anything with dark sequences.

Sound

While the Bravia 3 doesn’t nail the picture performance test, it does a much better job when it comes to sound.

Despite its fairly modest built-in speakers, the Sony manages to provide impressively clear dialogue that is underpinned by a decent sense of low-level dynamics.

This gives voices a much-needed injection of emotion – we once again revert to Civil War, where we find that softer heart-to-heart discussions and more volatile emotional outbursts are presented with genuine impact.

We also find that the sound has a decent semblance of height to it, meaning that larger effects, such as explosions or the jets flying overhead, sound surprisingly spacious.

It’s not perfect by any means – the bass is a bit light, which hinders the building of tension in the Gravity soundtrack – but we find it preferable to the TCL’s speakers.

In comparison, the TCL sounds slightly thin, and we have to crank the volume up quite high for it to match the Sony in terms of loudness, which leaves us with a fairly forced and shouty sound from the C7K.

As expected, a soundbar will still be a huge improvement to the Bravia 3’s built-in speakers, but the integrated sound system is better than we have come to expect from TVs at this price.

Verdict

The budget TV market is a whole different board game from Sony’s usual stomping ground of high-end OLEDs and Mini LEDs. While the Bravia 3 makes an attempt to challenge the likes of TCL and Hisense using Sony’s existing picture-tuning pedigree, its shortcomings are simply too obvious to overlook.

SCORES

• Picture 3
• Sound 4
• Features 3

MORE:

Read our review of the TCL C7K

Also consider the TCL C6KS

Read our Hisense U7Q Pro review

Best TVs: flagship OLEDs and budget Mini LED sets tried and tested