The Bravia 9 II hands on in action. Bravia 9 II on the right, original Bravia 9 on the left, and BVM-HX3110 mastering monitor in the middle.

Photo: John Archer

When Sony first unveiled its new “independent drive RGB LED TV” to a few lucky journalists (including myself) in Tokyo way back in March 2025, it was so early a prototype that it still had hundreds of bare wires sticking out of its back. Even then, though, more than six months before any rival brands (basically Hisense and Samsung) were able to rush their own ultra-expensive, super-sized takes on the technology to market, Sony’s RGB LED screen looked like it had the potential to be something special.

For starters, it was clear, despite its unfinished appearance, that Sony had already been working on this set for a long time by today’s rapid TV development standards. This meant that beyond the simple fact that it was the first modern consumer TV I’d seen by March 2025 to use actual separate red, green and blue LEDs to produce color (rather than shining white or blue backlights through red, green and blue filters or Quantum Dot layers), even from its first public appearance Sony’s RGB LED debutante boasted advanced picture enhancement features that other brands that have since boarded the RGB LED train still don’t have. Including, most impressively, a system that constantly monitors the condition of different parts of the screen so that it can compensate for the impact that panel condition factors, especially heat, can have on colour reproduction.

The demonstrations then and others since using ever more ‘finished’ Sony RGB LED screens have only continued to reveal strengths of Sony’s unrushed take on the technology vs rival takes, including startling power efficiencies, advanced colour crosstalk countermeasures, and excellent local dimming controls.

With all this in mind, when I got the chance to spend an hour alone in a dark room in Tokyo with what had by then been named Sony True RGB technology running on an actual Bravia 9 II consumer model my hopes for what I was about to see were sky high. And aside from wishing I had more than an hour with it, pretty much nothing I saw let me down.

For the hands on session, Sony had boldly placed a Bravia 9 II True RGB TV side by side with its original Bravia 9 LCD TV – a set that itself achieved very positive reviews when it came out in early 2025 – and one of Sony’s latest BVM-HX3110 professional mastering monitors. I was allowed to play any content into the TVs that I liked with an HDMI splitter sharing signals from a 4K Blu-ray player between the two TVs and the mastering monitor. With time so limited, I stuck with 4K Blu-rays of Pan, It Chapter One, Blade Runner 2049, and Sinners.

It was instantly obvious with every disc that in Standard preset the Bravia 9 II was significantly brighter than its predecessor. Sony has hinted that its new screen gets very close indeed to the 4000 nits of peak brightness achieved by the HX3110 mastering monitor, and the intensity with which the Bravia 9 II produces the brightest highlights of HDR content, especially with the 4,000-nit mastered Pan 4K Blu-ray transfer, makes the TV’s 4,000 nit claim look very believable indeed.

In Standard mode, though, the brightness increase isn’t only evident in HDR highlights. All bright HDR images, including full-screen sunlit daytime vistas, look markedly brighter than they do on the original Bravia 9.

It’s clear in Standard mode, too, that this increased brightness really is accompanied by a significant rise in color volumes. Whether it’s a deliberately exaggerated rich blue sky in It or a bold neon sign in Blade Runner 2049, the Bravia 9 II’s RGB LED backlighting has the color range to keep up with every bit of the new TV’s extreme brightness, ensuring that things always look spectacularly vibrant and fully saturated with no hint of colors fading away when light levels are at their highest. The original Bravia 9 colors look cooler and more muted than they do on the Bravia 9 II, meaning the True RGB set instantly makes what were once considered more or less state of the art LCD pictures look suddenly a little unnatural and ‘off’.

The color advantage of the Bravia 9 II even extends to skin tones, which look consistently more natural and nuanced than they do on the original Bravia 9. This is actually a very important point, as it shows that unlike some RGB LED images we’ve seen from other brands, Sony’s True RGB set is capable of controlling its new TV’s expanded color gamut to deliver better rather than just richer colors, even in relatively subtle areas.

Close comparison of skin tones in Blade Runner 2049 where they share screen space with the film’s ultra-vibrant neon signage shows, too, that Sony’s algorithms for combatting RGB LED’s biggest potential hurdle, color crosstalk, is working very well indeed.

In the Bravia 9 II’s most accurate Professional Mode, the classic clipping test of the sun next to a floating island in Pan reveals less clipping on the Bravia 9 II than you get with the original Bravia 9, even though the Bravia 9 II’s Professional Mode’s picture looks slightly brighter.

When it comes to contrast and black level performance, the Bravia 9 II’s extra brightness hasn’t led to an increase in dark scene greyness or backlight blooming around stand-out bright objects. On the contrary, the Bravia 9 II significantly improves over the original Bravia 9 in both these areas, delivering some of the deepest black tones the LCD world has ever seen (while still retaining excellent shadow detailing) alongside some of the brightest highlights the LCD world has ever seen. All while keeping the spread and intensity of backlight blooming so low that you scarcely ever notice it. Especially as a key advantage of RGB LED backlighting means that even where a small amount of blooming may appear around a bright colourful object, that blooming takes on the main color characteristic of the object causing it, making it much less distracting than the greyish bloom associated with regular LED TVs. Including the original Bravia 9.

The combination of the Bravia 9 II’s advanced local dimming system and the extra light control made possible by RGB LED lighting essentially means that the set needs to compromise far less between black tones and peak highlights in a single image than the original Bravia 9 did. So even though blooming is far better controlled, the Bravia 9 II is also able to populate mostly dark shots with much more intense brightness for stand-out bright dark scene highlights like the light reflecting off the glasses in Georgie’s dark basement in the opening sequence of It.

Dark scenes also reveal that the Bravia 9 II retains richer colors and slightly more color definition in such shots than even the already impressive original Bravia 9 does. And wandering round the room with a brightly coloured shot paused on the screen reveals that the Bravia 9 II retains its spectacular color saturations better when viewed from an angle than the original Bravia 9 did.

The Bravia 9 II delivers its high brightness and phenomenal contrast without exhibiting any signs of instability, too. So there are no obvious floating brightness levels during hard cuts between dark and bright shots, and I saw no distracting evidence of lighting zones handovers as bright objects pass across a dark backdrop.

In its most accurate Professional picture preset, Sony’s new True RGB set got far closer to the look of the HX3110 monitor in pretty much every way and with almost every shot than the original Bravia 9 did. Even the simple white text that introduces the story of Blade Runner 2049 looks more natural and cinematically ‘warm’ than it does on the first Bravia 9.

This Professional mode experience confirms that the Bravia 9 II seems ready to both show off what its panel can do without pictures looking overblown and unbalanced, and cater for enthusiasts who like to see content looking as it was designed to look by its creators.

The Bravia 9 II’s images look beautifully sharp and detailed without looking forced or gritty, too, while the finesse Sony’s processing is able to get out of its True RGB lighting arrangement means there’s no color banding to take anything away from the purity and directness of the Bravia 9 II’s 4K experience. This is another area of significant improvement over the original Bravia 9.

What’s more, as I’ve come to expect with Sony TVs, this sharpness holds up brilliantly even when the screen is having to show motion, thanks to Sony’s True Cinema motion processing option.

I did note a couple of niggles during my limited time with the Bravia 9 II. The strangest glitch was the way the supposedly reddish color of the opening and closing words of Blade Runner 2049’s opening explanatory text took on a distinctly brown tone. This was literally the only color error I saw throughout my hands on with the TV, but it was quite pronounced and its uniqueness in some ways made it more startling. I pointed this little glitch out to a Sony engineer who seemed untroubled by it, though, so I’m hopeful this issue may have been tuned out by the time production models start to ship.

There was also, again strangely, slightly more clipping on show in very bright areas in the Bravia 9 II’s Standard and Movie presets than there was on the original Bravia 9, even though the Bravia 9 II actually displayed less clipping than its predecessor in Professional mode.

The Bravia 9 II’s audio system was declared not quite production-ready enough to be tested during my hands-on hour. Formal demonstrations of the radically revamped sound system, though, suggest that we can expect a bigger soundstage, more power, cleaner and more “rolling” bass and better positioned dialogue from the Bravia 9 II than we got from its already good-sounding predecessor.

One final thing worth noting here is the Bravia 9 II’s bold new design. The frame around the screen is remarkably thin, thanks in part to Sony managing to fit all the sensors modern TVs need into the superslim frame rather than below it. The screen seems to be floating, too, thanks to the way the so-called Mirage Stand design sports a unique neck design that uses lenticular lens sheets and optical refraction techniques to make it appear as if you’re seeing right through it without being able to see any of the cables you might have running into the TV’s monolithic and strikingly trim rear.

The Bravia 9 II sees Sony applying a true anti-glare filter on the screen for the first time, too. This suppresses reflections extremely well, but it was also noticeable that unlike some rival anti-glare filters, it achieves its reflection controls while retaining a deep black finish to the screen that looks attractive regardless of whether the TV is switched on or off.

Needless to say I’m looking forward now to being able to spend much more time with a fully finished Bravia 9 II sample in the comfort of my own test and living room. With so many other brands also going big on variations of the RGB LED theme in 2026, Sony’s set will have to do something special to stand out from the crowd. But the signs so far are very promising indeed.

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