Review: Sony Bravia 9 Mini LED TV

Sony’s Bravia 9 flagship mini LED TV is a fascinating new addition to the increasingly diverse 2024 TV landscape. As perhaps the most advanced 4K LED TV ever made, it offers a brilliant display of television’s “Three Cs”: colors, contrast, and clarity. It centers, however, on the all-important “B”, for brightness, which stuns even against the backdrop of the brightest year in TVs to date.

It’s also expensive, skimps on HDMI 2.1 gaming inputs, and comes with some of the inevitable limitations of virtually all backlit LED TVs. Even so, as Sony’s most powerful TV you can buy, the Bravia 9 does some things (most things) so phenomenally it’s worthy of high praise even at its high price. If you’re after the ultrabright punch of LED mixed with the poise and elegance of a flagship Sony display, this TV may be difficult to resist.

On Two Feet

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

I’d describe the style of Sony’s current top TVs as “refined utility.” As with the Bravia 7 (7/10, WIRED recommends) and 2023’s A95L OLED (9/10, WIRED Recommends), the Bravia 9 has clean lines and slim bezels up front, and a curved backside lined with checkered plastic squares for a touch of flair. The latest models trade last year’s pedestal stand for rounded feet that click together with ease (and a few screws). They manage some modern chic while allowing four different width and height configurations to fit your needs. They’re also quite light at just 6 pounds—a good thing since the 65-inch model I reviewed weighs 71 pounds alone.

The new remote isn’t as snazzy looking as last year’s metallic wand, but it’s more compact, composed of partially recycled plastic, and now rechargeable. It’s still a step behind Samsung’s ingenious solar-powered remote, but the ability to avoid disposable batteries for the life of the TV is a real bonus.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Setting up with Google TV is easy thanks to the Home app, which takes on the heavy lifting with a few taps. The most arduous parts are allowing permissions (both Google’s and Sony’s) and scanning for local channels, though Sony rewards your efforts with advanced features for some channels, like the ability to watch on-demand local news clips. The system also makes up for lost time for Chrome users by automatically logging in to select apps.

Sony’s latest Google TV skin is otherwise welcoming and pretty snappy, with less lag time than previous generations, but it’s still got a few odd bugs. When I first started testing, the Settings menu wouldn’t open, forcing me to unplug the TV to reset it. Following a long firmware update, things were smoother over several days, with only a few jittery apps like Hulu and Disney+.

Picture Perfecting

Sony offers a metric ton of picture settings, which can make you feel a little lost in the labyrinth. Luckily, the picture looks pretty fantastic out of the box with film-forward modes like Cinema and Professional. The latter is designed to be the most “accurate” but can look dim with the lights on in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range), as the backlight defaults at 4 out of 50. If you want a brighter picture without a settings dive, just go with Cinema (or Standard). I used the Professional mode in both HDR and SDR, but ended up cranking the SDR mode backlight to around 25 after lowering the contrast a few points. If you really want to blast SDR brightness, the Peak Luminance takes things nuclear on the highest setting, but I mainly left it off.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

For Dolby Vision content, the TV defaults to Dolby Vision Bright, which again looks excellent with little adjustment. Here, it’s the HDR Tone Mapping that provides the biggest brightness burst. I mostly preferred the milder Gradation Preferred setting, but you can try Off or Brightness Preferred for extra pop.

The Bravia 9 also offers new “Calibration” modes for Amazon Prime and Netflix. The Amazon version makes some interesting changes for different programming, though the Netflix version seemed to mostly just mirror the dimmer Dolby Vision Dark picture mode in the HDR content I watched.

Mostly Solid Digs

The TV is pretty well stocked on the feature front, starting with audio that rises above the crowd. This is one of the few TVs where I don’t mind cutting my audio system (with the A95L being another prime example). Sound is generally full and clear without getting super tinny. There’s some noticeable soundstage movement, and even effects like explosions come out all right.

I thought Sony’s new Voice Zoom 3 dialog booster was mostly marketing hype, but it works pretty well. At one point, I passively heard the entire story of a Sylvester Stallone anecdote in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 which I’d missed in about 7,000 previous viewings, including with soundbars and speakers. Dialog remained mostly clear and out front over several days, even when things got chaotic.

As expected, you'll get the latest gaming features, including support for ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) and VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) at up to 120 Hz via HDMI 2.1. There’s a dedicated gaming mode for quick adjustments and PS5 optimization features like Auto HDR Tone Mapping and Auto Genre Picture Mode. I’m no competitive gamer, and some have noted that the TV’s input response is relatively high for its price, but I adored playing my favorite RPGs. The shading, the colors, and the overall brightness brought the best out of games like God of War Ragnarok.

It's frustrating that Sony continues to offer HDMI 2.1 support across only two of the TV’s four inputs, unlike most TVs at this level (and below)—especially since one of those is for eARC where you’ll likely connect a soundbar or receiver. The TV's great sound means some may not add an audio device, but the potential need to swap cables for multiple consoles is silly at this price.

The Bravia 9 also omits one of the two main dynamic HDR formats, HDR10+, offering only Dolby Vision. If you can only pick one, I’d take the more common DV every time but it’d be nice to get both as you’ll find in midrange models from TCL and Hisense. That’s surprisingly common right now; LG and Panasonic TVs don't support HDR10+, while Samsung won’t pay for Dolby Vision.

Sony is more inclusive on the audio side, offering both DTS:X and Dolby Atmos support. Other notable Bravia 9 features include AirPlay 2 and Chromecast streaming, and Google Voice search via the remote’s built-in microphone.

Sensibly Surreal

The Bravia 9 is an unadulterated brightness powerhouse. Yet, with Sony’s measured hand at the wheel, it doles out its power judiciously, providing subtlety where warranted and dazzlement when the moment strikes. Utilizing a new proprietary system that dims its backlighting with impressive accuracy, this TV is less a blunt force weapon as a mini LED laser beam, striking with white-hot precision. The result is fabulous contrast mixed with next-gen brightness for serious thrills.

Training the Bravia 9’s fire on one of my go-to test films, Moana, felt like proof of concept for a backlighting system some have clocked at nearly 3,000 nits peak brightness (or around double many OLED TVs). I’ve noted before how realistic the film’s Polynesian sun and surf can look with the best TVs, but here things pushed into the surreal. The sun blazed to near eye-squinting levels which, when mixed with the TV’s quantum dot colors and the stark clarity of Sony’s processing, gave me an almost hallucinatory sensation that I was actually at the beach with Moana and Maui. Other scenes like the glittering golden crab or the molten lava monster rose to exhilarating new heights as the light seemed to nearly bore through the panel.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

I found similar spectacle in nature scenes, where the TV pushed sunlit mountains and sparkling coral reefs into near-uncomfortable levels when using the Brightness Preferred HDR Tone Mapping, compelling me to retreat to the more naturalistic Gradation Preferred. The colors revealed subtle variations and gradients that slid into myriad ocean blues, forest greens, and fiery golds. All of it seemed more dramatic with the Bravia 9’s hefty punch. Even older SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) content can go off, especially if you raise Peak Luminance, though things may not always look as accurate that way.

I also love that Sony provides this much power without blasting you with TV menus, a common occurrence in cheaper TVs with eye-busting brightness like the Hisense U8N (8/10, WIRED Recommends). Sony is similarly judicious with motion smoothing, which irons out choppier images and hard camera pans effectively on the lowest settings, without making film content look weird.

When diving into deeper waters, literally and figuratively via Netflix’s Our Planet, I rarely saw noticeable “blooming” around bright objects with dark backgrounds. The TV isn’t on par with OLED displays that light up each pixel individually, but you’ll really have to look to find light spillage. That’s true even in the dark when displaying stark white spaceships or star clusters, though you may occasionally notice some raised black levels around credits or menus.

Moving off to the side—where nearly every LED TV struggles—adds some blooming and color wash. This is where OLED TVs, though dimmer, once again prove superior, but the Bravia 9 is among the best LED TVs I’ve seen in this department. Only the more recent Samsung QN90 TVs look better to my eyes.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

To get there, Sony uses antireflection and wide-angle panel technologies that beg other compromises, namely a “rainbow” effect and some smearing of bright reflections like the little windows above my front door. I've noted the same effect in other TVs, including Samsung's 8K QN900C (8/10, WIRED Recommends). It can make bright room viewing, generally a strong point for LED TVs, less appealing. That said, it's most prevalent when watching very dark videos or with direct overhead lighting, so most folks may not notice it much. When I hosted friends for a day of NFL Redzone, it was barely noticeable.

The only other points of note are some mild panel uniformity issues, including some minor darkening along the side bezels and some center aberrations, sometimes called the “dirty screen” effect. I only saw the latter issue in greyscale test patterns and, funny enough, the Disney+ loading screen. Otherwise, uniformity was essentially a non-factor.

Are these issues enough to make a similarly priced OLED like the LG G4, Samsung S95D, or Sony's own A95L more appealing? For me (and my persnickety viewing sense), probably. If I’m spending around $3,000 or more, I want my screen to be near perfect from any angle, even if that means a fairly significant loss in brightness.

But that’s not true for everyone. Apart from my mostly picky performance cons, this TV is a showpiece in every sense. If you’ve been waiting for the brightness holy grail—and you’re willing to pay for it—Sony’s Bravia 9 is about as close as it gets.