Sony Bravia 8 OLED TV Review | What Did Sony Do?
Ever since Sony announced the Bravia 8 earlier this year—an OLED TV, by the way—sandwiched between two mini LED TVs, the Bravia 7 and Bravia 9, I’ve been really curious about it. This TV’s predecessors, most recently the A8L and the A8K before that, have always had one clear advantage over the competition: Sony’s processing. But competitors like LG have done a lot of catching up on that processing front. So now, the Bravia 8’s leg up on the LG C-Series OLED TV isn’t quite as stark as it has been. Still, Sony’s managed to hold on to a very dedicated enthusiast crowd and,
so far, has maintained a major pull with premium buyers. My question has been: Does the Bravia 8 deliver what those folks want? Who should buy this TV over, say, the LG C4? What’s it got, and what’s it doing better than the competition? That, my friends, is exactly what this video is all about. Let’s get into it. Welcome back, everyone. I’m Caleb Denison, and this here is my review of the Sony Bravia 8 OLED
TV. Now, I know a lot of you out there watching this video already know where the Bravia 8 sits among the other TVs you can buy. But for those of you who don’t, here’s what you need to know. The Bravia 8 uses a standard W-OLED panel, meaning it is not trying to be the most intensely bright OLED on the market. Sony leaves that bragging right for its award-winning A95 QD-OLED—a TV which, by the way, is much more expensive than the Bravia 8. But that doesn’t mean this TV can’t get
impressively bright. It absolutely can. It just means that, well, like I said, it’s not a hot rod. And the good news there is that that means you don’t have to spend hot-rod money to get it. Now, if we take a little tour around this TV, you’ll notice that it doesn’t flaunt its ultra-thin OLED panel quite like other brands’ OLED TVs do. It’s still very thin, but Sony gives the TV a uniformly thin chassis rather than one that’s ultra-thin at the top with a big bump-out toward the bottom, like the LG C4. The TV comes with two feet that can be mounted toward the center, thus reducing the width of its footprint so it can fit on smaller platforms, or out toward the edges, as I have it here. You also have a choice of two different heights for the feet in either of those positions: one that slings the TV low for a very sleek look, and one that elevates the TV, as you see here, which allows a wide array of soundbars to fit just in front of it without blocking the screen.
The Sony remote that comes with this TV is made of a recycled material Sony makes called Sorplas, which is why you see little flecks in the finish. This particular remote uses two AAA batteries. It’s not rechargeable. It’s got a microphone in it for voice control and for calibrating the TV’s sound to sound best in your room.
Speaking of the TV’s sound, the screen on this TV is also a speaker. See, there are a couple of transducers mounted to the back of the panel that allow the screen to act as a speaker, which, paired with some bass drivers on the back of the TV, add up to really impressive and clear sound. On larger models, it’ll even seem like the voices are coming from the actors’ mouths. The TV comes with two HDMI 2.1 inputs, one of which is an eARC connection for feeding a soundbar or AV receiver. The TV also includes an ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV tuner. Comparing that to the LG C4, which has four HDMI 2.1 inputs but no NextGen tuner onboard, the Bravia 8 runs on Google TV,
which is my favorite built-in Smart TV interface and has been customized by Sony. The LG C4, by comparison, runs LG’s WebOS, which is fine but definitely not my preferred Smart TV platform. Now, if you choose to augment the Bravia 8 with a Sony soundbar—or, as I’ve done here, a Bravia Theater Quad Dolby Atmos surround system—the TV speakers can work as a center channel and otherwise expand the sound in concert with either your soundbar or something like the Theater Quad. Sony has a few other little bells and whistles available, but that’s the most notable one. For all the features this TV does pack in, there are some super-nerdy ones that are curiously not available here, as they are in other Sony TVs. Most of you wouldn’t care and absolutely don’t need to worry about them, which is why I’m going to cover them in the super-geeky section of my reviews next, which I call “Numbers for Nit Nerds.”
Now, those of you not interested in hearing about peak HDR nits and EOTF tracking, please skip ahead to the next section. We’ve got time code links down in the description. Don’t worry—I’m going to tell you all about this TV’s picture quality and whether you might want to buy it next. Skip ahead if you like, but for you nit nerds out there, we have a few things to talk about. Okay, my nit nerd friends, I’m going to run down the measurements in a moment, but before I do, let’s talk about some curiosities you may have already heard about. If you happen to follow Vincent Teoh’s HDTVTest channel, then you already know where I’m going. If you don’t,
no worries—I’m going to spell it all out for you. So, in Vincent’s video, he noted that this TV was missing some deeper picture settings and adjustment options, and he wondered if those missing bits were restricted just for his region or if it was a global thing. And while he confirmed that the Bravia 8s they sell in Japan were also missing some setting stuff, let me confirm for you that this is also true for the North American versions of this TV.
First, let me spell all of that out, and then I’ll tell you what Sony told me about this. Then I’m going to tell you what I think about all this. The Bravia 8 does not have a smooth gradation slider, which on other Sony TVs allows you to alter the strength of the algorithm that aims to smooth out jarring transitions in color shades. Smooth gradation is still at work in this TV—you just can’t make adjustments to it. This TV has a 10-point white balance calibration menu, as opposed to the more granular 20-point white balance that you’ll find in TVs like the Bravia 9 and A95L. And there is no color management system at all. Now, if you’re a professional calibrator, you might worry that you need all the controls if you want to calibrate a display to as close to perfection as possible. But for most people,
this is not an issue—not in practical terms. Now, I asked Sony why the Bravia 8 is missing these controls that we’ve come to expect in its TVs, and a spokesperson pointed out that, with the controls available, this TV can be adjusted to have both white balance and color errors with a Delta E of less than three, which is considered to be below the threshold of human perception. And they are correct. As I’ll soon show you, I got Delta E errors of less than three for white balance and most colors after I did a calibration.
Sony did not tell me this—this is just my read on the situation—but I think Sony probably feels that its super-enthusiast audience or those in professional circles probably aren’t looking at getting a Bravia 8. They’re likely to get a Bravia 9 or an A95L. So yeah, again, I don’t think anything meaningful has been lost by not including these controls. I feel comfortable acknowledging this is not a disadvantage to Sony’s customers. But here’s the thing, though: What advantage does Sony gain by not including these things? I asked Sony, and they politely declined to answer. So, I’m left to speculate. And left to speculate, I have to think that somehow it must reduce the cost of production. What else
could it be? Because if it doesn’t save them money, then why not just leave those things in? So, presuming it does save Sony money in some way… how? I mean, frankly, I don’t know. Vincent speculates it’s possible a co-processor chip was omitted. However, it appears that Sony’s processing is as effective here as it is in other Sony TVs, at least in most meaningful areas. And along those lines, Sony did have a comment. I’m going to paraphrase,
but Sony essentially said that their picture processing engine—the XR processor—evolves year by year, and that the user interface and specifications are optimized for each model and panel type insofar as customer usability and convenience are concerned. Therefore, certain features differ between years and between models. If that sounds like PR and marketing speak, it’s because it is. Now, if I read between the lines a little bit, that sounds like processing demands for the Bravia 8 are lower than they are for the Bravia 9, which has a new backlight system that Sony has likely tweaked the XR processor for, and for the A95L, which is a QD-OLED panel that behaves differently and needs its own special treatment. So I suppose that if the Bravia 8 had an MLA OLED panel, it might need its own special treatment as well. Well, anyway, I don't sense that Sony is up to anything nefarious here,
but I do think that the fully transparent answer would probably get deep, deep, deep in the weeds and would probably get misconstrued by less savvy media. And it's probably not worth risking the PR nightmare of a misguided discussion out on the forums. Again, that is purely speculation. I could be dead wrong, but I've been in
this business a while, and that's just what it feels like to me. In the end, though, does any of that really matter? I'm going to say no—it doesn't matter to 99.999% of humans on this planet. What does matter is how the TV performs, so let's move on to that bit of business.
To conduct my measuring, I placed the Bravia 8 in Professional Mode for both SDR and HDR. When I subjectively evaluated the TV with Dolby Vision content, I used Dolby Vision Dark. In Professional SDR Mode, with the default settings—which importantly has the brightness set to 40 and, more importantly, the peak brightness setting set to off—here's what I got: Peak luminance was 100 nits, so a very strict adherence to SDR standards, which is what I would expect for a Professional Mode. The two-point white balance—well, this is a little odd. I know Sony doesn't always target exact D65,
but the blue channel at just 100 nits seems really off here. That is easily calibrated out using the white balance controls, but still, I kind of find this odd. 20-point grayscale: we see that the blue channel is hot all the way up the chain, which is really interesting. Color balance is okay, but not what I expect from Sony. You know what? Now I want to check the Cinema Mode. So, in the default Cinema Mode, brightness is maxed out, and the peak luminance setting is on Medium. What have we here? Well, better in some ways and worse in others. I'm seeing a lower error at the very brightest white,
but it's more off through the top half of the grayscale, which again seems kind of weird. Let's go to Professional Mode and just max everything out. Actually, this is how I had the TV set up most of the time that I was watching SDR content: Professional Mode, brightness maxed out, and peak luminance setting at High. And in some ways, it's better, but in others, more of the same. The factory tuning just leans way cooler than I would have expected. I presume this was intentional. Overall, though, it's a pretty marginal difference from everything else. Now,
let's mess with the color temperature. Wait—this is supposed to be Warm? No, this cannot be right. Warm is way colder than the Expert 1 and Expert 2 settings. Now, this will be much more relevant in just a second, but in just 10 minutes, I was able to make adjustments to the white balance to get everything below a Delta E of 2. Let's move on. Once again, credit goes to Vincent for making this next part much easier for me. As you can see here, the EOTF tracking with the peak brightness setting at High—which is default for the HDR Professional Mode—we can see that the tracking is off in a couple of places: not bright enough in most of the low end and a little too bright right up in the top end. But still, this is very un-Sony-like, honestly.
Now, if we bump the peak brightness setting down to Medium, the EOTF tracking is spot-on. However, look at what happened to peak HDR brightness as a result: it went down significantly—like half as many nits, 480 versus 960. Now, I'm okay if a TV brand wants to offer an over-brightened HDR setting. Frankly, most people find that approach easier to watch. But that's not what I think most folks are expecting out of Sony's Professional Mode, and I don't think that folks should have to decide between having accurate HDR tracking and having full HDR brightness capability. It's just not a compromise that Sony has asked anyone to make in the past, and I don't understand why we'd be asked to accept it now. Unless, again, Sony is reading
its audience and knows this is not going to bother the vast majority of the folks who buy this TV. Okay, but again, what advantage does Sony gain by going this way? It's got to be cost savings, right? I don't know. I think that this might just have to remain a mystery. Look, that was a lot, so let me break it down to my key takeaway. This is just really
not an enthusiast TV. Not only is it missing those typical granular calibration controls, but the white balance and grayscale are further afield than I'd expect. As I've shown you, it can be corrected very well, but if you're looking for Sony's historically excellent out-of-the-box accuracy, my unit, at least, didn't have it. Also, seeing it track so low on the EOTF with the peak brightness set to High is just really odd.
For those of you who skipped ahead, here's the TL;DR from the nit nerd section: With the peak brightness setting at High and the brightness maxed out, you will get a very enjoyable—if not technically dead-on-balls (that's an industry term)—accurate one. If you do want very accurate HDR tracking, the trade-off is a fair amount of brightness. Most of you are going to be thrilled with this TV's HDR performance, though, as it can get very punchy in bright highlights, and it generally makes all the content that you play on it look amazing.
The Bravia 8 is a great OLED TV. It has excellent upscaling and image cleanup capabilities, making it an ideal choice for folks who watch a lot of cable or live TV streaming services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, or Fubo TV. It's just got a super clean picture like 95% of the time. The color isn't just accurate—it's gorgeous. I mean, folks, it's an OLED TV, which starts you at a baseline of awesome, and it also happens to be an excellent example of an OLED TV, thanks to Sony's outstanding processing. Actually, you know what? I've got it. Let me share a quick personal story. So,
I have a friend—we'll call him Pete, because that's his actual name. Pete's a sax player I work with a lot, and he's also a golf buddy. So, Pete asks me for advice on what TV to buy. And, folks, when I give people advice on buying a specific TV, it involves a lot of me asking a lot of questions because what I would recommend depends entirely on a long list of someone's specific needs and priorities. Anyway, we end up whittling it down to the LG C3 OLED. I wanted him to get the Sony A8L, but the C3 was just a better deal at the time.
The C3 was at a price right at the max of his budget, so if he was going to get an OLED, it was going to be the LG C3. Anyway, Pete got it, and, folks, he loves it. The only thing he doesn't like is LG's incessant app updates, which I warned him would be a thing. But he is just in love with the picture quality. Why? Well, he's never had an OLED before, and his feedback reminded me that OLED TVs are a mind-blowing treat for the eyes.
The Bravia 8 is going to be a mind-blowing treat for your eyes. Yes, there are brighter hot rod OLED TVs, and mini LED TVs can get a lot brighter, but when you start from perfect black and there are no backlight anomalies, you are going to be dazzled. I enjoyed watching the Bravia 8 a lot. And I have the world's best TVs right here. I could choose to watch any of them, but I never felt the need to take the Bravia 8 down and, say, put the Z95 A up because the Bravia 8 is lovely. If you're looking at getting your first OLED or even replacing an OLED that's, like, four or five years or older, the Bravia 8 is absolutely worth considering. Honestly,
I think the question is not a matter of whether this TV is worth buying—it absolutely is. The question is whether you should spend more to buy this TV as opposed to an LG C4 OLED. So, let's talk about that. At the 65-inch size, the Sony Bravia 8 here is about $200 more than the LG C4. So, what's the difference between the two? Does the Bravia 8 earn that extra 200 bucks? Well, as I said earlier, the LG C4 has four HDMI 2.1 inputs, while the Bravia 8 has just two,
and one of them is taken up with the eARC functionality. So, I suppose if you have both the Xbox Series X and one of the PlayStation 5s, or a gaming PC, and you want to use your eARC to get audio to your soundbar or receiver as well—that’s your particular setup—well, then the LG C4 is probably the better choice for you. Most folks aren't running that kind of system, though. Anyway, the Sony has an ATSC 3.0 tuner, whereas the LG C4 does not. Does that sway you? I suspect it is not going to sway a lot of you. The Bravia 8 has a standard remote as opposed to LG's Magic Motion remote, and the Sony runs Google TV as opposed to LG's WebOS. I know which I prefer. What about you? I mean, I'm a fan of the LG C4, and I'd be quite thrilled to own one. But if I'm
spending my own money, would I spend an extra $200 for a 65-inch Bravia 8? Yeah, I would because of the better sound, the Google TV, and a remote that doesn't drive me crazy. I think that extra 200 bucks is going to break down to maybe an extra four bucks per month over the course of four years, which is about as long as I can keep a TV before upgrade-itis is going to set in. I mean, transparently, I'm a top-tier OLED kind of person when it comes to my living room. Anyway, if I'm buying an OLED TV, I'm probably going to save up a little longer to get the Sony A95L, the LG G4, the Samsung S905D, or, frankly, the Panasonic Z95A.
The Panasonic Z95A has really captured my heart, even though I hate Amazon Fire TV. That TV is just... it's so great. Or, if I'm going big, I'm going for a huge mini LED TV. The Bravia 8 is a solid and, frankly, lovely OLED TV. It gets a full recommendation from me for most viewers but not for enthusiasts.
I already told you it's a great TV. The question is: Is it the right TV for you? Hopefully, I've helped you arrive at that decision in this review. Thanks so much for watching, everyone! This is probably going to be the last TV review that I publish in 2024, so with that, I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year.
Be sure to subscribe if you aren't subscribed because the CES content I'm going to put out soon is going to be awesome. You do not want to miss it. Slap a thumbs-up on this video if you liked it so more folks can see it. I'll see you all on the next one, and until then, here are two other videos I think you might like.
2025-01-02 23:00
