Sony’s first RGB TV is a statement piece

The first wave of RGB LED TVs are fighting for their place in the TV hierarchy. They need to outperform OLED TVs in brightness and color (because they’ll never match OLED’s contrast), and they need to outperform regular LED TVs in everything (because they’re much more expensive). It’s now time for Sony to take a swing with the Bravia 7 II, which was launched alongside the flagship Bravia 9 II. Both are RGB LED backlit with always top notch processing from Sony.

RGB TVs like the Bravia 7 II use red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a field of blue or white LEDs for backlighting. This allows your RGB LED TV to display more and brighter colors without relying on its color filter. Sony turns on each LED individually, giving its TV precise control over the color mix.

The biggest potential drawback of RGB LED technology is Color crosstalkIt is when one color bleeds into the color next to it. This happens because red, green, and blue LEDs provide light to an area that includes multiple pixels. If the majority of those pixels were supposed to be red, the backlight would create red light and rely on the color filter to crop out the correct colors for the remaining pixels in that area. But sometimes this red color will slightly affect non-red pixels, especially if they are lighter in color or white.

So far, examples of color fringing appear more clearly in test patterns, and while running the Bravia 7 II through a barrage of tests, I was able to see evidence of this. A green rectangle would subtly create a halo in the space around it – and this happened with a range of colours, not just green.

But test patterns are designed to show defects. Aside from those unusual circumstances, I have only seen color overlaps on a handful of occasions, none of which were significant. Most noticeable were the app tiles on my Apple TV. The blue of the Prime Video tile crept slightly into the white of the text, and on the NASA app tile the logo text had a red tint.

In the movies and TV shows, there was very little crosstalk. I can spot the red color of Snoke’s throne room causing a slight shift in his skin tone in a few frames of The last jedi When I paused and examined the pixels from a foot away, the truth is, it doesn’t matter. When I sat and watched, there was no point through The last jedior Mad Max: Fury Roador the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix where I felt pulled out of the event due to color interference.

In fact, in Pro Photo mode, the Bravia 7 II produces a beautiful image with all the content. Besides color crosstalk being essentially non-issue, colors and grayscale in the SDR are remarkably accurate, apart from a few errors in red, which is over-saturated. Light grays in HDR are a little brighter than they should be too, but they’re not too noticeable, and colors look vibrant. The Bravia 7 II is also capable of delivering 2,200 nits of brightness. It doesn’t match TCL X11L Light cannon, or even LG G5 The OLED is from last year, but it offers plenty of brightness for an average living room. And since the majority of content is still mastered at 1,000 nits, Sony’s latest still has plenty of brightness.

One benefit of RGB backlighting is the ability to display more colors, and in testing, Sony measured 88 percent of BT.2020. There’s a limited amount of content that actually uses these colors, so although the potential is impressive, it won’t matter unless you’re watching something like Planet Earth II This is specially mastered for that. Ecuador’s forests are lush and green, and the shimmering blues and cyan colors of hummingbirds appear on screen. It looks similar to Hisense UR9 In those scenes, though, the Sony is generally more accurate. However, until we get more movies and TV shows mastered in BT.2020 instead of P3, there will be little point.

When using Pro mode on a Sony phone, there is an interesting menu option that allows you to change the backlight from using color to white light. If the slight color bleed onto the Apple TV app tiles bothers you, switching it from color to white will eliminate the issue. But doing so also affects color gamut coverage, reducing it from 88 percent to 73 percent in BT.2020 and to 91 percent in P3. The inclusion of the option is curious, as I’m not sure what useful application it has aside from the novelty of seeing the performance difference between color and white backlit LEDs.

Beyond image performance, the 7 II has some great design choices, and some not so great. Starting off with great mode is the pedestal stand, which has a lenticular display on its front that causes the cables hanging behind it to disappear from view while still offering a mostly transparent appearance. It’s a fun and enjoyable cable management solution.

A not-so-great choice was to only have two HDMI inputs that support 4K at 120Hz, one of which is an eARC port. Since other TV manufacturers include support across all four inputs, this is a mistake on Sony’s part. This doesn’t make or break a TV, but if you plan to connect a soundbar or AVR to the eARC HDMI port and want to connect more than one gaming console or PC to play high refresh rate games, it’s not possible.

The Bravia 7 II also has a beautiful transflective screen. The reflected lights don’t cause a dramatic rainbow effect like I’ve seen on TCL and Hisense TVs, but the screen doesn’t dampen the light much. The Bravia 9 II has a non-glare, low-reflection panel, so if you have a room with lamps or ceiling lights that worry you, this is the best option — for at least $1,000 more.

Which brings us to cost. Sony has always priced its TVs a bit higher than other manufacturers, and that trend continues. The 65-inch Bravia 7 II for my review is $2,600. That’s $600 more than Hisense’s high-end RGB LED TV, the UR9 (once Hisense Prices reduced after release), and $500 more than the Samsung R85H. I haven’t had a chance to take a close look at the R85H yet, but I can say that even for an extra $600, the Sony Bravia 7 II’s much better resolution and handling are worth it over the Hisense.

If I could control daylight in my room, I’d probably choose an OLED like the LG C6. Regardless of the RGB backlight technology, the Bravia 7 II (and every other RGB LED TV) is still an LCD TV. It handles blooming well, but it can’t compete with the pixel-level control and deep contrast that an OLED display offers.

As more RGB LED TVs come out and are evaluated, we’ll have a better idea of ​​how they perform with actual content and whether color fringing concerns are real or a marketing ploy from competitors. But one or two things are certain: either color fringing isn’t an issue, or Sony has figured out a way to make it a non-issue to address. Despite drawbacks like a reflective screen and limited HDMI 2.1 port, the Bravia 7 II is an excellent TV with a beautiful picture.

Photography by John Higgins/The Verge