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 Sony Bravia 9 II is the most anticipated new TV in years. It’s an amazing RGB LED TV. I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on the new Bravia with my son, who has been getting into the roleplaying game but had never seen the movie. The landscapes of Faerûn looked natural and real, while the magic cast by the Red Wizards of Thay was vibrant and colorful. Specular highlights in HDR really pop. I saw it with Xenk’s glowing sword as he fought in the Underdark in Honor Among Thieves, but also in the explosions as Furiosa flees across the desert in Mad Max: Fury Road and the sun reflecting off the waves in The Meg.
The Bravia 7 II I reviewed in May was already an impressive RGB LED TV. The Bravia 9 II has more dimming zones and an anti-reflective screen, and it gets brighter than the 7 II, but the 65-inch 9 II is also $1,000 more expensive, and the price difference increases as screen size goes up. So, is Sony’s flagship Bravia 9 II worth the extra money?
Sony showed off an early prototype of its RGB LED backlight technology at its Tokyo headquarters back in early 2025, and even at that stage, it was impressive. Every time there’s a new display technology, Sony’s flagship TVs tend to be the best, thanks in part to the company’s industry-leading processing and upscaling. The Bravia 8 II is the latest in a string of top-tier Sony QD-OLED TVs, and the original Bravia 9 was the best mini-LED when it launched in 2024. So with RGB LED TVs the big TV story of 2026, expectations are high for the Bravia 9 II.
Only two of the HDMI ports are 2.1, but at least there’s an ATSC 3.0 tuner.
Like the Bravia 7 II (and a lot of the new high-end TVs out this year), the Bravia 9 II uses RGB LEDs for its backlight. Instead of the blue backlight that LED TVs have been using for years, it has clusters of individual red, green, and blue LEDs that blend their light to create a wider range of colors than those blue LED TVs were capable of.
The Bravia 9 II has the same processor as the 7 II. They both have the same awesome lenticular stand — the coolest TV stands I’ve seen in a long time — and both have HDMI 2.1 on just two of their four ports. Maybe next year Sony will catch up with the rest of the high end and finally offer four HDMI 2.1 ports.
The Bravia 9 II is also as good as or better than the 7 II in grayscale and color performance (although it has the same issue in SDR mode with reds being oversaturated and not as bright as they should be). In Professional mode, the TV’s gamma and EOTF tracking is even better than the 7 II, so shadows are suitably detailed and images have proper depth. Colors like sky blue, foliage, and especially skin tones all look wonderful. And while grayscale measures (and looks) a little blue, I wasn’t bothered by it in anything I watched.
Its great color accuracy, high light output, and anti-reflective screen make it the best bright-room TV available
The Bravia 9 II can get bright: I measured highlights in HDR at 3,800 nits, and a full-field white screen at 885. The Bravia 7 II maxed out at 2,200 nits for highlights, although it has nearly the same full-field brightness at 848 nits. So for everything but the brightest of specular highlights, the two Sony RGB LED TVs have similar real-world brightness. There are TVs that get brighter — such as the TCL X11L — but with the vast majority of content out there, the 9 II is plenty bright with both HDR and SDR (if you turn it up from its default in Professional mode, which is set for dark-room viewing, or change to the slightly less accurate Cinema mode).
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