If you're wondering what the best Mini LED TV of 2024 is for bright room viewing I’ll just come right out and say it, as someone who's reviewed countless displays this year nothing can beat the BRAVIA 9. In terms of brightness, accuracy, and user experience it’s the best of the best, and if that's all you want to hear, here’s an affiliate link, but as always there’s more to the story, and this time that story is more of a 9 part mini series. TVs in general have gotten much better this year, and with the 65” BRAVIA 9 I’ll be reviewing today coming in at a very high price of $2,699.99, is it really worth it, or are you better off saving your money to buy more affordable options? Well, let's find out.
The Sony BRAVIA 9 delivers incredible contrast via their new advanced backlight control system and over 1,500 zones creating a picture that's easily the best and closest to OLED I've seen yet out of a Mini LED. The BRAVIA 9 also brings surprisingly good viewing angles, the best accuracy from any Mini LED to date, and an excellent user experience with a lot of advanced controls creating easily the best picture you can get out of a backlit display technology.
However Sony is charging a very high price, which goes against the very reason many reviewers like myself recommend Mini LED displays, and with many great alternatives such as the TCL QM8 coming in at nearly half the price, or OLED TVs like the LG G4 offering a superior picture in most cases, potential buyers will need to think long and hard about whether the extra brightness is worth the price.
Disclaimer: This TV was lent to me by Sony and I will be shipping it back after the review. All opinions are my own.
For this review I’ll be using an X-Rite i1 Pro spectrophotometer, Color Checker Display Plus colorimeter, Calman Ultimate, Portrait Displays Video Forge Pro 8K pattern generator, a Sony RX100 VII 1000fps camera, an SM208 Screen Luminance Meter, & a Sony Cinema Line FX3 mirrorless video camera. All together at least $12,000 worth of testing equipment alone and of course years of experience testing displays.
Specs are similar to other mini LEDs, but Sony has more advanced backlight control.
Above is the Connectivity for this TV. Most importantly it does come with four HDMI ports, two of which are HDMI 2.1, however unfortunately one of them is the eArc port, so if you plug in a sound bar you're effectively left with just one high speed HDMI port, which for a premium TV is a shame. THis means you essentially can plug in just one console or PC for gaming at 120Hz.
The Sony BRAVIA 9 is lightning quick to set up, and it's packaged very well, however there was no screen peel on my model. Hopefully this is not how retail units are shipped as this can lead to damaged screens. Thankfully everything was fine, and their custom version of Google OS was easy to navigate allowing users to opt out of sharing personal information.
Overall the Build quality is excellent with a premium brushed metal appearance to the frame, and no warping or bending was present.
If you want great color, look no further. The BRAVIA 9 produces excellent and vibrant hues when it needs to, but what separates it from others is the accuracy in which it displays gradients at all brightness levels especially in the professional mode which gives a true to life reproduction ensuring the closest possible match to the creators intent. Movie buffs will love this TV. If you want more details click the section below.
Testing Deep Dive - sRGB Gamma 2.2
Out of the Box the BRAVIA 9 follows the Rec.709 BT.1886 EOTF curve fairly well, but has slightly over brightened highlights.
Thankfully adjusting a few settings creates a near perfect image.
Testing Deep Dive - HDR BT.2020
The default HDR Professional mode is very good, but has a few slight inaccuracies.
Testing Deep Dive - Color Volume HDR
The BRAVIA 9 has good HDR color volume out of the box, but it falls short of QD OLED.
Color accuracy is good with an average deltaE of just 1.4.
Overall the Sony BRAVIA 9 has excellent SDR and HDR accuracy ensuring highlights and shadows are faithfully represented and avoiding massively crushed or overbrightened details.
One of the best reasons you would buy a mini-LED TV is because you need a bright TV for a sunlit room. Here the BRAVIA 9 absolutely crushes it creating searing highlights without the compromise of dimming that plagues OLED leading to overall better & more consistent results in a bright room.
Testing Deep Dive - Brightness
The Sony BRAVIA 9 is so far the third brightest OLED I have tested in window measurements.
Surprisingly the Sony BRAVIA 9 is actually the brightest display I have ever measured in a real HDR scene.
The Sony BRAVIA 9 can get incredibly bright, but it does so responsibly. Instead of needlessly flash banging the viewer it stays true to the creator’s intent and delivers maximum HDR impact when possible making this the best bright room HDR TV I have ever used, though to be fair the LG G4 OLED isn’t too far off, so it would be great to see Sony push brightness even higher with future models.
In terms of the overall contrast & shadow detail, it does a pretty good job. It did slightly raise shadows in HDR, but it's easily fixed, and it has some noticeable blooming against really dark backgrounds, so possibly something like subtitles in a movie over a dark scene could be an issue, but for the most part, it's not very noticeable.
In fact, of all the Mini LED TVs I’ve tested, despite the fact that the BRAVIA 9 has less overall zones than some competitors it offered the best contrast and least blooming. This is incredibly impressive and goes to show how far ahead Sony is with their backlight system. I can’t wait to see what future models with more zones could look like, or even a 98” model as that by the sheer size of the panel would have 50% more than this 65” model and likely significantly higher contrast.
All in all, it's certainly no OLED, there will be noticeable imperfections, but it's about as close as Mini LED can get to OLED these days, and it's very, very impressive.
The 24p judder handling on this TV is the best I’ve seen from any TV. You have a lot of different options to choose from when it comes to smoothing out films shot at 24FPS, and even in the worst case scenario, if you max it out, it can get rid of the absolute worst judder without too much soap opera effect, but most impressively it has an auto setting which can adjust the de-judder on the fly. Something that I could see some folks making their buying decision over. Seriously, the auto de-judder is no joke, and I'll be keeping that in mind when buying my next TV.
If you're looking for a gaming display The Sony BRAVIA 9 will certainly get the job done, but when compared to OLED it definitely falls short. Not only is it locked to just 120Hz on PC, but even for console gaming it's a bit slower in terms of latency than the best gaming TVs, but it has way slower response times. This means that fast moving objects will look quite blurry when compared to OLEDs, which is to be expected of Mini LED, but I think there is definitely room for improvement. That said it still looks excellent and is fast enough for console gaming, so while it’s not the best I wouldn’t skip it over the gaming performance.
Testing Deep Dive - Latency
39ms of total system latency is certainly acceptable. Using the game mode and disabling processing settings may improve the responsiveness.
Sony BRAVIA 9 motion performance.
Sony needs to improve their motion performance, refresh rate, and response times if they want to compete closer with OLEDs, but for most buyers this will certainly be good enough.
Now in terms of the text clarity and the subpixel layout, overall, it's pretty good. It is blue, green, & red which is unusual, but it’s definitely better than OLED.
Speaking of clarity, let's talk about the finish. Sony has chosen to use a plastic like glossy finish with some sort of anti reflective treatment. It's certainly not perfectly clear, and it's not as good as LG's glossy coating, but it is what I would consider good enough, and far better than something like a semi-matte or matte coating, which can produce significant blurring to the image.
Sony BRAVIA 9: Reflection & Ambient Light Handling
Unfortunately the anti reflection treatment can lead to a bizarre rainbow like reflection when bright lights hit the screen, and it has me wondering if it would be better if it had no reflection treatment if it's going to make such large distracting artifacts on the screen. If Sony wants to fight reflections I think they should upgrade to a glossy coating similar to something like what the LG C series or G series OLEDs use.
Mini-LEDs greatest weakness is definitely its viewing angles, but here Sony has crushed it. Whatever they’ve done has worked very well. The viewing angles on the BRAVIA 9 are FAR better than almost any other Mini LED I’ve seen to the point where it's really a non issue for the vast majority of users and use cases. It’s still not as good as QD OLED, but it's good enough for me.
Sony BRAVIA 9 Viewing Angles
The sound on the BRAVIA 9 is actually quite good for a TV. It has a pretty natural timbre, and it can get fairly loud without introducing significant distortion, however it just doesn’t have the clarity or presence of a good dedicated setup. Don’t get me wrong, it's solid, and even the bass does have some rumble, but it just doesn’t fill the room enough, and it sounds slightly muffled to me.
I did have a bit of trouble getting 120Hz working on a PC, but after restarting both the TV and PC it started working flawlessly. That’s it. This TV has near flawless firmware in my testing for everything else I tried.
Overall, the Sony BRAVIA 9 is seriously impressive and easily the best Mini LED TV of 2024. It crushes it with brightness while maintaining excellent accuracy, has surprisingly good viewing angles, and brings some genuinely innovative features like that auto de-judder system that actually works. Plus, Sony's advanced backlight control system gives us contrast that's getting remarkably close to OLED territory, even with fewer dimming zones than some competitors.
The BRAVIA 9 is definitely playing in premium territory at $2,699.99 for the 65" model, putting it up against the LG G4 OLED which does offer better contrast, faster response times, and superior gaming performance for a bit less money. Price-conscious buyers would be smart to check out the BRAVIA 7, which packs a lot of the same tech at a much friendlier price point.
That said, if you've got a bright room, want the most refined Mini LED implementation out there, or you're specifically after that premium Sony picture quality, the BRAVIA 9 makes a strong case for itself - especially in larger sizes where OLED prices really start to climb. With hopefully more size options coming in 2025 (including potentially a 98" model), Sony's Mini LED tech is showing huge promise. They've absolutely nailed the fundamentals here - now they just need to nail the pricing.
