GoKawiilis a senior reviewer covering TVs and audio. He has over 20 years experience in AV, and has previously been on staff at Digital Trends and Reviewed.
The first wave of RGB LED TVs are fighting for their spot 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 their price is so much higher). It’s now time for Sony to take a swing with the Bravia 7 II, which is out alongside the flagship Bravia 9 II. Both pair RGB LED backlighting with Sony’s always top-notch processing.
RGB TVs like the Bravia 7 II use red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a field of all-blue or white LEDs for the backlight. This allows for an RGB LED TV to display more, and brighter, colors without as much reliance on its color filter. Sony drives each LED individually, giving its TV fine control of the color mix.
The biggest potential drawback of RGB LED technology is color crosstalk, which is when one color bleeds into the color next to it. It happens because the red, green, and blue LEDs provide light for a zone that includes multiple pixels. If the majority of those pixels are supposed to be red, then the backlight will create red light and rely on the color filter to carve out the correct colors for the remaining pixels in that zone. But sometimes that red will slightly affect the pixels that aren’t red, especially if they’re a lighter color or white.
Sony Bravia 7 II specs Display type: RGB LED HDR formats: Dolby Vision, HDR10, HLG OS: Google TV HDMI inputs: 2 x HDMI 2.1 (one with eARC); 2 x HDMI 2.0 Audio support: Dolby Atmos, DTS: X Gaming features: 4K/120Hz, ALLM, VRR Sizes available (inches): 50, 55, 65, 75, 85, 98
So far, examples of color crosstalk are most apparent in test patterns, and while running the Bravia 7 II through a barrage of tests, I could see evidence of it. A green rectangle would subtly create a halo into the space around it — and it happened with a bunch of colors, not just green.
But test patterns are designed to bring out flaws. And apart from those unusual conditions, I only saw color crosstalk on a handful of occasions, with none of them being significant. The most noticeable was with the app tiles on my Apple TV. The blue of the Prime Video tile slightly crept into the white of the text, and on the NASA app tile the emblem’s text had a red tint.
In movies and TV shows, there was little crosstalk to be found. I could nitpick and wax poetic about the red of Snoke’s throne room causing a minor shift to his skin tone in a few frames of The Last Jedi when I paused and inspected the pixels from a foot away, but the reality is it doesn’t matter. When I sat back and watched, there wasn’t a point during The Last Jedi, or Mad Max: Fury Road, or the F1 Canadian Grand Prix where I felt pulled out of the action by color crosstalk.
In fact, in Professional picture mode, the Bravia 7 II produces a beautiful picture with all content. Along with color crosstalk essentially being a non-issue, colors and grayscale in SDR are remarkably accurate, apart from some inaccuracies in red, which is oversaturated. Lighter grays in HDR are a bit brighter than they should be as well, but it’s not too noticeable, and colors look vibrant. The Bravia 7 II is also capable of 2,200 nits of brightness. It doesn’t match the TCL X11L light cannon, or even the LG G5 OLED from last year, but it’s 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 headroom.
The Bravia 7 II handles blooming well, but it’s still an LCD display so it doesn’t match OLED. The TV gets bright enough for a lit room with great specular highlights.
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