Sony Bravia 5 (K65XR55) review

So far, Sony’s latest TV range has covered nearly every panel technology to great success. Whatever TV tech Sony has touched has turned to gold, basically.

The 65-inch Bravia 5, though, may have its work cut out to keep the imperious run of form going. This TV is, after all, the most affordable model in Sony’s range to still carry Mini LED backlighting – meaning there will inevitably have been compromises somewhere along the way to keep the Mini LED flag flying at a more accessible price.

The Bravia 5 does, though, retain a degree of local dimming, and Sony’s renowned XR processor is still on hand to get the most out of whatever specs the screen supports. So could this actually be the value sweet spot in Sony’s latest TV range? Or are there compromises too far?

Price

At the time of writing, the 65-inch Bravia 5 we’re testing costs just £1299 / $1200 / AU$2695. That’s thanks to some decent discounting – the TV launched for £1699 in the UK, for example.

The current pricing doesn’t seem at all unreasonable for a Sony-branded Mini LED TV with local dimming. Provided, of course, that it still makes those features count rather than just paying lip service to them.

The Bravia 5 range also features 55-, 75-, 85- and even 98-inch models. That 98-incher is the biggest TV anywhere in Sony’s 2025-launched range. A similarly large model from the 2024-launched X90L series can seemingly still be bought, but this uses regular-sized rather than Mini LED lights and features fewer dimming zones.

Challenging the Bravia 5 on the Mini LED with local dimming front are TCL’s excellent C7K, the 65-inch model of which remarkably costs just £799 at the time of writing, and Hisense’s sometimes brilliant if slightly inconsistent 65U8QTUK (£1399).

Design

The Bravia 5 is certainly not a dedicated follower of today’s skinny TV fashion. Its rear sticks out way further than those of most rival mid-range or higher TVs, making it a potentially rather awkward wall-hanging option.

The rear is much less problematic if you’re content to attach the set to its provided feet for desktop mounting, though. In that set-up, you’ll scarcely even be aware of the bulky back unless you’re watching the TV from a very wide angle. Which is not something you’ll probably want to do anyway, for other reasons we’ll get into later.

The feet slot in without needing any screws, and while the 65-inch Bravia 5 doesn’t let you attach the feet at multiple width points like some Sony TVs do, they’re set close enough together to let you put the TV on even quite a narrow piece of furniture.

You can position the screen either low down on the feet or raised up a couple of inches to accommodate a soundbar, too, with some of Sony’s soundbars this year actually shipping with small feet of their own so that they can straddle Sony TV feet.

While the Bravia 5 isn’t the most elegant TV around the back, its screen frame is reasonably slender and sports a tasteful dark grey brushed metal effect finish on its sides that provides a fairly premium feel.

The supplied remote control is a neat and tidy affair that feels quite comfortable to hold, while green speckling on its flush, polyurethane-coated front edge alerts you to the fact that it’s made from around 80 per cent recycled plastic.

Features

The Bravia 5’s main bid to win hearts and wallets comes with its combination of Mini LED lighting, local dimming (over what we count to be 240 separately controlled zones), Sony’s XR processor, and a substantially cheaper price tag than you need for the step-up Sony Bravia 7 and Bravia 9 Mini LED models.

Sony still refers to the panel inside the Bravia 5 as one of its XR Backlight Master Drive screens, in fact, underlining the idea that this is a more premium-grade TV than its price and position in Sony’s range might imply.

There are, of course, premium LCD TVs out there that feature way more than 240 local dimming zones. However, the Bravia 5 seems to manipulate more than just one at a time when we run our test to count the number of zones, raising hopes that its dimming engine will be sophisticated enough to rival or better the performance you might hope to get from a much higher dimming zone count.

Features provided by the XR processor include a continual assessment and subtle refinement of many elements of incoming images to make them look more three-dimensional and in line with the way our eyes perceive the real world. There are various strength options available for Sony’s ever-impressive MotionFlow motion processing, too, and Sony also, uniquely, automatically applies subtle SDR-to-HDR upgrading to some of its picture presets. The Reference preset that’s designed to deliver the most accurate images, though, lets purists pass SDR video to the TV in its original form, without any HDR shenanigans.

Sticking to the subject of HDR, as usual with Sony TVs, the Bravia 5’s format support extends to HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision, but doesn’t include the HDR10+ rival for Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision-mastered content is more widely available than HDR10+, and Sony will always say that it believes its TVs’ own tone mapping and other technologies can achieve at least comparable results to what HDR10+’s extra scene-by-scene image data can do. But the fact remains that Sony can’t join the likes of Panasonic, Philips, TCL and Hisense in saying that its TVs can simply play the best version available of every single source they may receive.

The Dolby Vision HDR is joined by support for Dolby Atmos sound, delivered through a ‘Multi-Audio’ sound system that generates 40W of power feeding into four separate speakers: two full-range drivers plus two tweeters placed to make audio sound more accurately positioned.

There’s even support, very unusually, for DTS:X, which enables the Bravia 5 to deliver a fulsome version of the IMAX Enhanced experience. As well as deploying a ‘special sauce’ version of DTS:X, IMAX Enhanced content (which is available on a few 4K Blu-rays, Disney+ and, especially, Sony’s own Sony Pictures Core streaming service) is mastered using a proprietary IMAX system designed to minimise image noise and optimise clarity – and the IMAX Enhanced certification shows that IMAX considers the Bravia 5 good enough to do this mastering system justice.

The Bravia 5 also carries ‘Calibrated’ picture modes for Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sony Pictures Core that have been designed to replicate as closely as the TV can manage the mastering conditions favoured by all three streaming services.

Sony Pictures Core additionally deploys a unique wide bandwidth (up to 80Mbps) streaming option for people with sufficiently speedy broadband, so that users can enjoy cleaner, less compressed and therefore sharper and more detailed picture quality. Buying a 65-inch Bravia 5 entitles you to 10 free movies from the Sony Pictures Core library.

The Sony Pictures Core streaming service isn’t the only Sony-exclusive feature in the Bravia 5’s locker. In keeping with all of Sony’s Bravia-monikered TVs, it’s designated as ‘Perfect For PlayStation 5’, meaning it provides a couple of extra convenience features when connected to Sony’s latest games consoles. The best of these is an Auto HDR Tone Mapping feature, where the console can tell which Sony TV it’s connected to and automatically optimise its HDR output accordingly – but it is worth double-checking the optimisation as it tends to be close to, rather than entirely, perfect.

The Bravia 5 can take in 4K/120Hz gaming feeds via two of its four HDMI ports, and there’s support on both those ports for VRR, too. Quite a few TVs this year also extend their frame rate support beyond 120Hz, but only high-end PCs and a handful of titles are currently able to go beyond the Bravia 5’s 120Hz level.

The Bravia 5 provides a dedicated Game Menu 2 screen that includes a decent array of video gaming aids/tools as well as key information on the incoming graphics feed, while a Dolby Vision game mode allows you to enjoy low-latency gaming even when your game source is running in the Dolby Vision HDR format.

Finally on the gaming front, there’s support even on the relatively low-level Bravia 5 both for Gaming Multi-view, where you can play a game in split screen mode alongside a YouTube game guide video, and Sony’s PS Remote Play feature, where you can control your PS5, PS5 Pro or PS4 console from another room or even another house.

Smart features and streaming services on the Bravia 5 are provided by Google TV. This grants access to a huge range of streaming apps, game apps and infotainment sources, and Sony has helpfully added YouView to provide access to the UK catch-up services that Google TV doesn’t provide itself.

The smart features also include built-in Google Cast and Google Assistant support, AirPlay 2 compatibility, and the ability to add one of Sony’s Bravia Cam accessories.

Bravia Cam opens up the potential to control the TV by gesture, get the TV to issue a proximity alert if a child or pet wanders too close, and, more usefully, adjust the sound balance and picture brightness based on where the camera detects you’re sitting. We’re not at all convinced the Bravia Cam’s extra tricks really justify its £199 / $200 / AU$149 asking price, but hey, it’s out there if you want it.

Picture

Happily, the Bravia 5’s pictures are much more ‘chip off the old Sony block’ than ‘price-compromised disappointments’.

For starters, the XR Backlight Master Drive panel showcases once again Sony’s remarkable talent for getting the maximum results from whatever backlight set-up one of its LCD TVs has to work with.

So, on the one hand, the Bravia 5’s pictures are impressively bright for a 65-inch TV in its price category, while on the other, this brightness can share screen space – as in, literally in the same shot – with even and consistent blacks that seldom betray any blatant blooming or flickering issues.

This helps the Bravia 5 achieve a strong sense of contrast and stability, which joins forces with pretty much perfectly judged shadow detail to ensure that dark scenes typically look as three-dimensional and natural as bright ones. You never find yourself dreading the next dark scene turning up as you do with some LCD TVs.

The Bravia 5 remains impressively free of obvious backlight manipulation as bright objects move around or drop in and out of otherwise dark shots, too, and the impeccable judgment of just how much light each dimming zone should put out to optimise contrast and HDR impact with every frame also means that colours never look uneven or unnatural. Provided you avoid the over-the-top Vivid picture preset, anyway.

Colours in the Standard preset manage a beautiful mix of punchiness, shading subtlety and balance, with no tone standing out unnaturally against the rest. The success of this preset makes it an excellent option for regular living room use, while the Cinema and Professional presets provide good punchy dark room movie and ultra-accurate picture options respectively. Colours also do what some rival TVs can’t by retaining high levels of saturation in very dark scenes, even when using the relatively dark Professional preset.

The Bravia 5 retains with native 4K sources most of that sense of density, texture and clarity that’s so gorgeously evident with Sony’s more expensive TVs, without tipping the sharpness over into grittiness or artificiality. The XR processor, even on this relatively affordable set, still does a fantastic job of turning HD sources into 4K without the results looking even slightly soft, noisy or coarse.

The XR processor also maintains Sony’s long-running talent for providing one of the TV world’s best motion processing settings for 24p movie sources in the shape of the MotionFlow True Cinema mode. This gently massages away the ‘hard’ edge that judder can cause with all motion processing turned off, without generating unwanted processing artefacts or smoothing films to the point where they lose their cinematic magic and start to feel like soap operas.

While the Bravia 5’s pictures are overall remarkably good for its price, there are inevitably a few little flaws and limitations. The most noticeable limitation is that, while the backlight controls do a mostly terrific job of going about their business consistently and evenly enough to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves, they don’t typically manage to eliminate quite as much greyness from very dark shots or picture areas as the Bravia 7 and Bravia 9 do. Extremely complex HDR shots containing a strident mix of bright and dark elements can even look vaguely cloudy – though only in a general fog/mist kind of way rather than suffering with the more distracting overt pools/halos of light some rival local dimming TVs exhibit.

Such distracting pools and halos actually can start to become visible, though, if you have to watch the Bravia 5 from much of an angle, while other gremlins include occasional overcooked red tones in dark scenes, a general faint green undertone to dark scenes, and sporadic subtle detail or colour shade clipping in the brightest highlights of HDR pictures when using Sony’s Dynamic Tone Mapping feature.

Most of these ‘niggles’ wouldn’t even warrant comment on plenty of other TVs in the Bravia 5’s price class, though; they’re only notable here because everything else about this Sony set’s pictures is just so darned good.

Sound

The Bravia 5’s speakers immediately set about creating a premium feeling that is well-suited to the TV’s pictures by delivering exceptional amounts of detail by TV standards. No elements in a mix pass the Bravia 5 by – yet at the same time the drivers are sensitive enough and Sony’s understanding of soundtrack mixes is deep enough to ensure that no detail takes on more significance in the overall mix than it should.

Add to this some unusually accurate placement of specific effects both on and slightly off the screen, and you’ve got a level of precision and world-building that feels impressively immersive.

The focus on detail doesn’t stop the Bravia 5 from conjuring up a fairly large and spacious soundstage that even has a mild sense of height to it, while dialogue is elevated to screen level rather than sounding like it’s coming from underneath the image.

There’s enough power behind the precision to let the Bravia 5 get loud without the speakers descending into distortion or collapsing in on themselves, too.

Our only niggle with the Bravia 5’s sound is a little lightness on the bass front, in both relative volume and frequency depth terms. Though at least what bass there is doesn’t readily succumb to nasty breakdowns or phutting.

Verdict

Far from finally revealing a chink in Sony’s formidable current TV armour, the third tier of the brand’s latest LCD range is actually yet another star turn.

In fact, while it may inevitably not hit quite the same performance heights as its more premium siblings, when it comes to value, it’s the Sony set to beat.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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Read our review of the Sony Bravia 7

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Read our Hisense U8Q review

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