Have spent about a day with the 75” Bravia 9. Dolby Vision looks fantastic on the set with content that supports it, whereas Dolby Vision looked like shit on my X950H. Been messing around with games that have higher nit value support, such as Division 2 which despite being made back in 2019, surprisingly has content that goes up to 3000 nits! Spotlights and explosions are... quite the spectacle. Massive Entertainment deserves a lot more praise for their attention to detail than gamers gave them credit for.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 was already a light show before at night, but on the Bravia 9? Whew! While using the in-game HDR calibration setting, the first setting can be pumped all the way to maximum as the TV is fully capable of handling 3000+ nit content. The nights are still as dark as ever, but as you watch the sparks and bolts fly everywhere when a mage uses Levin, you maintain incredible clarity for the surrounding elements without heavy tone mapping and ABL kicking in as it would on existing OLEDs.
Even Elden Ring looks noticably better. I bumped up the in-game setting to the maximum 2000 nits and it is an obvious improvement. I noticed details in the Erdtree that I didn’t see before when it’s in the burning state. Liurnia was always my favorite area, but now it looks even better.
Sony’s local dimming algorithm combined with their incremental backlighting zone management meets the hype. There is still some blooming in moments where say, you have a white logo in the bottom right on an otherwise black screen while a game is loading. In most typical content, you don’t see blooming. The Bravia 9 will fail a starfield test pattern that OLED will easily laugh at, but in an episode of Star Trek TNG, the stars look alright. Not as good as an OLED though.
The Bravia 9 will prefer to give you some minor blooming rather than sacrificing shadow detail. You can technically override this preference by switching local dimming settings, but medium is the default and recommended by Sony’s engineers. As the tech evolves and more dimming zones increase, what little blooming there is will continue to decline in future sets, bridging the path towards microLED. QD-OLED is still king of dark scenes, but the Bravia 9 is the closest a consumer grade LED has gotten to date.
Essentially, if you have content that goes up to 4000 nits, the Bravia 9 will let you see details at an accurate level that you can’t experience on other sets. Incredible TV.
