Hands on: Sony Bravia 9 II review

The Sony Bravia 9 II might be the most trailed TV in history. I originally saw it in prototype form – before it even had a name – in Sony’s Tokyo HQ in February last year, and I wrote about how impressive it was a short time later.

I then saw it again in March this year, but I had to sit on that until last month, when Sony announced that its first RGB Mini LED TVs would be arriving this year, under the name ‘True RGB’.

Even then, I was able to talk about the new TV only as a vague ‘True RGB’ model, without a model name or specifications. I was also only able to discuss its performance in Sony-led demos against a couple of RGB Mini LED competitors.

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During the same March visit to Tokyo, though, I was also given an hour to test independently the 75-inch Bravia 9 II against the Bravia 9 and a Sony BVM-HX3110 mastering monitor, with my own content and with full control over the settings. And I can now write about that.

An hour isn’t a long time to test a TV, and the Bravia 9 II was still in development at the time, so this hands-on, of course, doesn’t count as a full review. However, this level of access ahead of launch is extremely rare, and it means I have a good understanding of how Sony’s new flagship TV performs.

Largely, it’s extremely impressive. I think it’s possibly the best backlit TV ever produced, in fact. But is it an OLED killer? That’s where things get complicated…

Price

The Sony Bravia 9 II will be available in 65-, 75-, 85 and 115-inch sizes, with pricing as follows:

• 65 inches: £3499
• 75 inches: £4299
• 85 inches: £5499
• 115 inches: £22,999

So the 65- and 85-inch versions of the Bravia 9 II are each £500 more expensive than their Bravia 9 equivalents, whereas, surprisingly, the 75-inch Bravia 9 II is £200 cheaper than the 75-inch Bravia 9.

The 115-inch model is all-new and, unsurprisingly, very expensive indeed.

Design

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Within the confines of TV design, where the screen element itself is always going to be a 16:9 rectangle, the Bravia 9 II is unusual and rather striking.

Sony refers to the design as “harmonic presence”, with the idea being to create “harmony with the space and between products”.

The “Mirage Stand” is clearly the Bravia II’s most distinctive aesthetic feature. It’s semi-transparent, which gives the impression that the TV is floating, but it still hides the cables that run behind it.

This semi-transparent neck is attached to a usefully narrow metal plate, so the TV will happily stand on furniture much less wide than itself. But the plate also sticks out quite a long way to the front and back in a way that looks slightly ungainly to my eyes. It also means you can’t position the TV particularly close to the wall – unless, of course, you choose to wall mount it.

There's no variable height with this stand, either. It is designed to allow space for a soundbar beneath the TV, but there's no option to lower it if you’re not using a soundbar.

Along the sides and the top, the bezels are extremely thin, and while the bottom bezel is thicker, it’s generally much thinner than that of most TVs.

That gives the screen itself space to shine – except it doesn’t shine, because it has a new anti-reflective treatment that Sony is calling “Immersive Black Screen Pro”.

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Having seen a sample of the Bravia 9 II with a half-coated and half-uncoated screen (see the images above), I can confirm that it’s highly effective at suppressing reflections, and while it is matte, it looked far less grey in bright ambient lighting than is typical of matte-coated displays.

Features

Of course, the headline feature of the Bravia 9 II is its RGB Mini LED backlight.

Sony has taken the next-gen Mini LED backlight that it developed for the Bravia 9 and RGB-ified it. So, rather than white LEDs, the Bravia 9 II’s backlight features independently controllable red, green and blue diodes.

The theoretical advantage of this is the same as it is for all of the other RGB Mini LED TVs that are all the rage right now: better colour accuracy and, because a colour filter isn’t required, higher brightness.

The combination of these two elements should also create greater colour expression – because the TV can go brighter without the use of a colour-sapping white light, an RGB Mini LED TV should be able to deliver super-bright colours that a standard Mini LED TV cannot.

But those are just the overriding claimed advantages of RGB Mini LED technology as a whole. What makes Sony’s True RGB solution different?

The big thing is, as mentioned, the fact that it’s built upon the more or less revolutionary backlight of the Bravia 9. I wrote about that in detail when I first saw the Bravia 9 prototype way back in 2024, but suffice to say here that it involves the sort of granular backlight control that most rival systems can only dream of.

This so-called ‘XR Backlight Master Drive’ system has been upgraded to ‘RGB Backlight Master Drive Pro’, and it’s this combination of the Bravia 9’s backlighting tech with genuine RGB diodes that makes the Bravia 9 II such a tantalising prospect.

Sony’s claims for the Bravia 9 II are, as you can imagine, very bold indeed. “Unbelievable colour gradation” is promised, for example, with the brand stating that the new model has twice the colour volume of the Bravia 9 Mini LED set, and four times the colour volume of the Bravia 8 II QD-OLED model.

Sony goes on to claim that True RGB is a “best of both worlds technology”, and that the Bravia 9 II is designed to match the “intent and peak brightness of the BVM-HX3110” mastering monitor.

This comparison with the mastering monitor is crucial to the Bravia 9 II’s very existence. Sony’s claimed aim is to deliver a home viewing experience that matches what the content creators signed off in the studio. And it feels that the brightness offered by Mini LED over OLED is vital to this, and that the RGB element is vital to deliver the colour range and accuracy that neither standard Mini LED nor OLED can match.

As ever, Sony isn’t giving out specific numbers for aspects such as dimming zones, but a demonstration involving a 75-inch sample with an exposed backlight allowed me to do some quick counting, and by my calculations, it had 6120 separate LED clusters, which are controlled in groups of four, resulting in 1530 independent dimming zones.

Interestingly, if that’s accurate (and I’ll need more time with a final review sample to be sure), that means the 75-inch Bravia 9 II has 25 per cent fewer dimming zones than the Bravia 9. Sony has long argued that how dimming zones are controlled is more important than how many of them there are, but it is still surprising that the drop is this large.

Where peak brightness is concerned, Sony again won’t be putting specific figures into its spec sheets. But a demo session involving the super-bright Alpha and a measuring device proved (in so much that a manufacturer-led demo session can ever truly ‘prove’ anything) that the Bravia 9 II was hitting the movie’s full 4000-nit peak. And that was in the TV’s most accurate Professional preset.

How much value is there in that sort of brightness when almost no content is mastered to those levels? Sony appears to be of the opinion that the floodgates will one day open and brighter content will become more common.

I’m less sure about that; but having lots of brightness headroom indeed allows for a TV to deliver a better and more perceptually accurate performance in bright ambient light.

Away from the panel technology, much of the Bravia 9 II’s feature set is what we’ve come to expect from Sony TVs – and that means there’s a glaring issue for gamers. That’s right, Sony’s new flagship TV still has just two HDMI 2.1 sockets.

That we are still having to complain about this in 2026, a full seven years since LG launched its first TVs with four HDMI 2.1 sockets, feels faintly ridiculous, and it may put hardcore gamers off the Bravia 9 II regardless of its qualities elsewhere.

Picture quality

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Part of my time at Sony HQ in March was spent in demos of exposed backlights, with Sony trying to (and succeeding in) convincing me that its True RGB system is more advanced and more consistent than those of its rivals.

I wrote about that experience last month, though, so here I want to talk about how the Bravia 9 II performs with real content, which I got to experience in a Sony-led demo session and an hour-long session of independent testing, in both cases with a Bravia 9 and a BVM-HX3110 for reference.

In the Sony-led session, I was shown various clips from movies, including Avatar, Black Widow, Monster Hunter and Apex, and throughout, I was deeply impressed by how close the Bravia 9 II’s colours looked to those of the mastering monitor. Where the mastering monitor looked bright and rich, so did the Bravia 9 II, whereas the Bravia 9 at times lost vibrancy, particularly in the brightest parts of the picture.

And while the Bravia 9 is remarkably controlled in terms of blooming, the Bravia 9 II is even better. A lot of this is down to the use of RGB diodes rather than white, because this means that any glow around coloured highlights appears in the same colour as the highlight, which looks far more natural and realistic.

A great example is a small red light against a very dark backdrop in Black Widow. On the Bravia 9, there’s a faint white glow around this, particularly when you view the TV off-axis. But on the Bravia 9 II, this glow is red, and because this looks so natural, you don’t even instinctively recognise it as blooming.

In my independent demo session, I played several of our favourite test clips, from movies including 1917, Pan, Blade Runner 2049, and Alien: Romulus. The Bravia 9 and Bravia 9 II were both in their most accurate Professional picture preset.

Kicking off with 1917, I immediately found it interesting that the Bravia 9 II and BVM-HX3110 mastering monitor both delivered essentially perfect black in the image with the bright movie logo, whereas the Bravia 9 looked a touch grey by comparison.

The opening shot over the French fields, meanwhile, provided a nice illustration of the colour improvements offered by the switch to RGB lighting, with the yellow flowers being reproduced with subtly greater vibrancy from the Bravia 9 II than the Bravia 9.

Skin tones looked better from the new model, too, with just a little more life to them, and the tunics of the soldiers’ uniforms had a slightly richer red/brown hue that the mastering monitor confirmed was more accurate.

The starfield in the opening shot of Alien: Romulus is a nightmarish test for any backlit TV, and it’s one that even the Bravia 9 II struggles to pass entirely convincingly. Somewhat surprisingly, the deep-space background is blacker from the Bravia 9, with the Bravia 9 II appearing to raise the black floor just a touch. To compensate, though, the new model delivers brighter stars and more detailed nebulae, and there’s greater insight into the deep shadows of the unmanned spacecraft.

In terms of colour tone, the Bravia 9 II was much closer than its predecessor to the mastering monitor, too. The Bravia 9’s highlights had a blue/green coolness to them that didn’t look quite right, whereas the Bravia 9 II maintained the cinematic richness that the mastering monitor proved was correct.

These bright white highlights also proved that, while it hasn’t been completely eradicated, blooming is indeed much reduced from the Bravia 9 II. From the Bravia 9, there was a noticeable glow around the white light of the search vessel, whereas the Bravia 9 II reduced this to very faint levels, at least when viewing the TV straight-on – at wider angles, it was a little more pronounced.

As broadly impressive as Sony’s Bravia 9 II backlight controls appeared to be, though, they weren’t completely infallible, and the opening text of Blade Runner 2049 wasn’t handled well.

The first word, which should be bright red, and was from the Bravia 9 and mastering monitor, was pale and grey from the Bravia 9 II. When this was joined by the first paragraph of white text, the Bravia 9 II introduced a pink tint that was quite vivid at the edges and pale towards the middle.

As yet more text was added, the colour became more consistent, but it was still pink where it should have been white, and when the final word, ‘Replicants’, was left on the screen, it was pale and grey where it should have been bright red.

This clip is uniquely challenging for backlit TVs, which is why we use it so frequently, but you would still expect the Bravia 9 II to handle it at least as well as the preceding Bravia 9. That decidedly wasn’t the case. Here’s hoping this is something Sony can remedy before the launch of the new TV.

One other slight surprise was that the super-bright Pan didn’t look markedly better from the Bravia 9 II than it did from the Bravia 9. There was a little more warmth to the haze around the bright sun and a little more highlight detail, but the upgrade wasn’t as pronounced as I had expected.

This is quite possibly a reflection on how well the Bravia 9 already handles this movie than it is a slight on the new model, but it will be interesting to do some more testing with this, and hopefully one or two other 4000-nit movies, once we get a final Bravia 9 II sample in for review.

One final thing to note is that while I didn’t have an OLED for comparison with the Bravia 9 II, we have generally found that even the very best backlit TVs struggle to match the general density, solidity and perceptual three-dimensionality of their OLED equivalents. And nothing I saw during my time with the Bravia 9 II suggested it will overcome this deficit.

That’s not really surprising: this solidity seems to be a result of OLED’s pixel-level contrast control, which no amount of backlight dimming zones will ever be able to match. Still, it’s something to bear in mind if you’re weighing up a backlit TV such as the Bravia 9 II against an OLED set.

Sound quality

While we always encourage the buyer of a new TV also to budget for a dedicated sound system of some sort, not everyone does that. In fact, Sony’s own research suggests that more than 80 per cent of its customers use their TV’s built-in speakers.

It’s little wonder, then, that serious effort has been put into the Bravia 9 II’s sound system as well as its picture quality.

The up-firing beam tweeters of the Bravia 9 remain, but every other element has been redesigned. There are no longer any drivers built into the bottom edge of the set. Instead, everything has been relocated to the same level around two-thirds up the TV, with some firing out and towards the listener, and others (primarily the subwoofers) firing backwards.

Sony has also upgraded the processing from 5.1.2 channels to 5.1.4, and the brand claims the Bravia 9 II has a more accurate Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) for better sound positioning, as well as a new crosstalk canceller to help prevent either ear hearing sound intended for the other.

The overall idea is that the sound is more accurately placed and is all more spatially connected to the on-screen action, and in demos, this seemed to work very well. With the Bravia 9, my ears were rather drawn to the trebly sounds coming from the drivers built into the bottom edge, but with the Bravia 9 II, there was much greater overall cohesion.

Playing a clip from Venom, the new model clearly sounded crisper and more dynamic, too, and the audio manifested further up the screen, where the action was taking place. Sony has a reputation for combining this sort of directness with spaciousness, and it seems that the Bravia 9 II will reinforce that, with surround and Atmos effects stretching a fair way around the TV.

One slight flaw that I did notice was that occasionally voices could sound as if they were coming from the sides of the screen. This may be related to me not sitting dead centre during the demo, but it will be interesting to test this further when we get a final production sample in for review.

It’s also true that, as with many previous Sony TVs, the Bravia 9 II sounded a bit bass-light. Sony tends to tune its TVs to be as clean and controlled as possible, which generally means not stretching for the deep bass that can cause distortion. On balance, that’s a good approach; but it does mean that some rival TVs can sound a bit weightier.

One final note to make here is that, while the Bravia 9 II sounded good during demos, that’s by the standards of TVs. I do not doubt that even a moderately accomplished soundbar will smash it for audio quality.

Early verdict

While we will, of course, need to get a final sample in for full testing before we deliver our review verdict on the Bravia 9 II, this excellent level of early access has given me a really good idea of how it performs – and, generally speaking, it’s very impressive indeed.

I think there’s every chance this will prove to be the best backlit TV ever produced, with a combination of 4000-nit brightness, contrast control and colour accuracy that few, if any, rivals can match.

Whether that makes the Bravia 9 II an OLED-beater is harder to judge – not least because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to do that side-by-side testing – but what I’ve seen so far suggests that OLED will still have advantages in several regards, most notably no blooming whatsoever, essentially perfect viewing angles, and a degree of solidity and three-dimensionality that seemingly only self-emissive pixels can provide.

The question, then, will be whether the Bravia 9 II’s advantages, such as higher brightness, more vivid colours, durability and greater size availability, outweigh those of OLED.

We’ll be answering that question just as soon as we get our review sample in for extensive, comparative testing.

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