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Sony Bravia 8 Review

Sony has, for years, produced my overall favorite televisions and they have gotten even easier to recommend in recent years thanks to prices that are more in line with direct competitors. When Sony made the A95K in 2022 and followed it up with the A95L the year after, there was no question: Sony made my favorite OLED.

In 2024, Sony changed its branding and began a shift to using the Bravia name along with sequential numbers, making it far easier to understand where the TV you were looking at sat in the company’s overall lineup. The Bravia 8 is the only Sony television that bears this new branding, however, as the A95 series has not yet switched over (and it might not) – perhaps not quite as confusion-avoiding as I had hoped.

All this is to say that the Bravia 8, while an OLED, isn’t Sony’s nicest television (it’s not even its highest-end Bravia series named television, as the mini-LED Bravia 9 stands above it). What it is, however, is affordable: for $2,000, the 65-inch Bravia 8 comes close to what LG is asking for its lauded C4.

Sony Bravia 8 – Design and Build

Sony bounces around between one of a few different television designs and for the Bravia 8, it went with the dual-foot design it has used in the past. The benefit of this design is that it allows the television to sit nearly flush to the top of a media console, which then hides any of the cables and wires that might be strung behind it. This design works best in a living room with bookshelf-style speakers, but it’s not great if you’re using the far more ubiquitous soundbar.

In order to set a soundbar under the Bravia 8, you’ll have to engage the second level on the feet which elevates the television to allow for several inches of clearance. That’s plenty of room for almost any soundbar but comes at the cost of hiding those aforementioned wires. Sony didn’t put any kind of cable management into this design, so if you do elect to go with the elevated foot, you will see the cables dangling behind it. It’s not my favorite.

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The rest of the television is pretty unremarkable, and that’s likely by design. Sony kept things extremely minimal with the Bravia 8, with basically no bezels on three sides and just the thinnest one along the base to accommodate the IR receiver for the remote control. The entire television is also very slim, although Sony decided to go with a full-body casing on the back, as compared to how LG’s design department elected to go with just the OLED panel in the upper third. The result is that Sony’s Bravia feels easier to move and set up versus LG’s design, which can feel like you’re trying to balance the weight of the whole television into a corner of a shower door.

The Bravia 8 features four HDMI ports but only two of them are capable of accepting 4K at 120HZ, which is the minimum I look for in a gaming television. Compounding this issue is the fact that one of those two ports is the eARC port, which means if you have a PC and PlayStation or a PlayStation and an Xbox, you will have to either get a high-end HDMI switcher to swap between them or you’ll become very familiar with the side of the Bravia 8 since you’ll be over there plugging and unplugging a dangling HDMI cable whenever you want to change consoles.

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For a $2,000 television in the upper tier of Sony’s Bravia line, not providing at least two HDMI ports for high-framerate gaming in addition to eARC is egregious. Sony has been doing this for a while now (I complained about it in the Bravia 7, too) and it is no longer something I can overlook.

Aside from HDMI, the Bravia 8 has one LAN and optical input each, two USB ports, an RF antenna input, and Bluetooth 3.2 as well as WiFi 6.

Sony’s speaker system uses a front-firing main system that is behind the OLED panel as well as two side-firing speakers. The television can also be used as a center channel when paired with a Sony surround sound system, which is one of the company’s unique value propositions across its televisions. It supports both Dolby Audio and Dolby Atmos.

Sony Bravia 8 – The Remote

If you read my review of the Bravia 7, the remote that is included with the Bravia 8 won’t surprise you – it’s identical. It’s a great size, splitting the difference between the hulking behemoths that Sony used to produce and the tiny ones Samsung currently makes. It has all the buttons you need without any extra fluff and the design is accentuated by a blue speckle in the plastic.

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I have complained about this before, but Sony puts some rather harsh raised edges on the four corners of the directional pad which uncomfortably dig into my thumb. If I am doing any sort of multiple-step navigation with these buttons, it quite literally hurts after not a very long time. I like that there is a way to navigate to these buttons by feel, but there has to be a way to do that and also not cause me physical discomfort.

The built-in shortcuts that came included with the my review unit of the Bravia 8 are exactly the same as the ones that came with the Bravia 7: Sony Pictures Core (a rebrand of the prior Bravia Pictures Core), Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, and YouTube.

Sony Bravia 8 – Software and UI

Sony uses Google TV as its operating system and it’s a pretty reliable platform that allows for solid levels of customization and the ability to turn off most recommendations via Apps Only mode should you desire. “Recommendations” is a nice way of saying ads, but it’s nice that there is some option to disable most of them (that’s more than other operating systems deign to offer).

95% of the time, Google TV feels fast and snappy. Sony also builds-in a robust customization system that is as advanced as the best in the industry while putting the likes of Samsung’s offering to shame. In addition to creating a custom picture option or selecting from a set of others, the Bravia 8 supports a range of HDR profiles including HDR 10, HLG, IMAX Enhanced, and Dolby Vision.

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Sony’s televisions can feel like they take a bit of time to warm up, however. When you first turn on the Bravia 8, Google TV can feel like it’s not quite responding to your actions and you can even watch it suddenly calculate all your button presses and activate them at once. If you give the TV a few seconds this goes away, but I have found that over time, the amount of time you have to wait for a Sony TV to “warm up” so to speak takes longer.

Something else worth pointing out is that often, but not always, the Bravia 8 will flicker rapidly for a few seconds when switching between high frame rates 120Hz (such as in Apex Legends or Marvel Rivals on PlayStation 5) and when quitting an application and returning to the main screen, which operates at a lower 60Hz or 30Hz. This flicker is severe and hurts my eyes if I look at it. It does not happen every time, but in a week, I would say it happens four of the seven days. It also only happens when a connected HDMI device switches between high frame rate and standard, lower frame rates, so it has never occurred while using a connected PC and is only repeatable when using a PlayStation since how that console manages framerate differs depending on the application. I have never seen this phenomenon happen before on any other television.

Sony Bravia 8 – Picture Quality

As is usually the case with Sony televisions, the Bravia 8 has outstanding color accuracy and presents a gorgeous picture in both HDR and SDR formats. In testing, the Bravia 8 covered 99.9% of sRGB, 83.5% of Adobe RGB, and 96.1% of the DCI P3 color gamuts with a delta E of 0.57 while never exceeding 1.18 – an outstanding result. The Bravia 8 also doesn’t lean particularly hard in any of the three major colors, instead offering a very balanced set of tones straight out of the box.

The OLED panel Sony is using here isn’t the QD-OLED found in its A95L, but rather the WOLED panel seen in televisions like the LG G4 and C4. However, while LG has recently found ways to juice the brightness of its WOLED panels to match the output of Samsung’s QD-OLED panels without sacrificing color accuracy, Sony’s Bravia 8 isn’t using this technology, so it’s more in line with what you would expect to see from a very good, previous-generation WOLED.

It doesn’t get as bright as LG or Samsung’s most recent offerings – it comes in at sub-1,000 nits peak – and it also doesn’t support 144Hz, although 120Hz is probably enough for most gamers who prefer the couch over the desk. For setups like my testing area in my basement, the Bravia 8 is plenty bright. However, you may be disappointed with its output if you plan to put it in a well-lit living room or across from a bright window.

On that note, while the Bravia 8 does a good job for the most part with suppressing reflections, it’s not the best I’ve seen and bright sources will reflect without much diffusion.

Panel Uniformity

I was left pretty disappointed by the Bravia 8’s panel uniformity, too. I’ve come to expect nearly perfect panel uniformity from Sony but was let down this time by all four corners dipping substantially in delta E performance and measuring five to eight times worse than the performance near the center of the display. The good news is that most of the time, this won’t result in a worse viewing experience and I didn’t see any issues with the movies, televisions, or games I tested on the Bravia 8. This result is something I’ve come to expect from other brands, I’m just used to Sony performing better here.

All this said, the main benefits of OLED are on full display here: no halo around bright objects, fantastic off-angle viewing, and deep, rich, colors are paired with instantaneous pixel response time. While television enthusiasts will find places to complain and nitpick, actually using the Bravia 8 is an enjoyable experience.

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Additionally, Sony’s processing is still top-tier and unbeatable, so upscaled or low bitrate content is cleaned up better and just looks nicer on the Bravia 8 than on competing OLEDs. When NFL games are still largely broadcast in artifact-riddled 720p, that might be important to you.

Sony Bravia 8 – Gaming Performance

Sony’s Bravia 8 is a very good gaming television, outside of the flickering issue I noted earlier. It is especially excellent when paired with a PlayStation 5 since it recognizes when one is connected and optimizes the console’s HDR tone mapping and picture mode to provide the best possible viewing experience. The Bravia 8 also features VRR and ALLM as well as source-based tone mapping, which is an HDMI technology that allows a source, such as a PC or PlayStation, to adjust its output to take best advantage of the display’s HDR capability.

Games look fantastic on the Bravia 8. I tested the television with Marvel Rivals, Apex Legends, Risk of Rain 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with the PS5, as well as Metaphor: ReFantazio and Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. In all cases, I was very happy with the results. Sharp, crystal-clear images and excellently-rendered scenes are pretty much to be expected with OLED, and the Bravia 8 did not disappoint.

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Shadows and highlights are rendered very well and when a game’s dynamic range is exceeded, such as when looking from a bright area quickly into a dark area, results in instantaneous exposure adjustment with no flash or flicker.

Sony’s game menu isn’t flashy, but it gets the job done and gives you easy access to all of the settings gamers care about most, from the option to bump the blacks so it is easier to see in FPS games to turning VRR and motion blur on and off. Sony provides a few built-in presets like FPS and RTS which adjust colors and black levels to what it thinks are the best for those types of game (FPS raises the shadow value up, for example).

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Sony PlayStation owners are also able to treat the Bravia 8 like a giant PlayStation Portal thanks to built-in remote play. It’s not quite as useful as being able to tote around a mini display anywhere in your house, but if your gaming room doubles as a place for guests, you can fire up your PlayStation on the Bravia 8 in your living room thanks to this included feature.

I do wish that the Bravia 8 achieved higher peak brightness so that the lighting effects in games like Cyberpunk were more dramatic, but that’s a minor complaint.

Sony Bravia 8 – Audio Quality

Sony has done a pretty good job with built-in audio in its most recent televisions and the Bravia 8 is best when tasked with dialogue, as the limits of physics prevent the mids and lows from being as complete as they should be due to the small chassis of the television. That said, I’ve certainly heard worse and even though I always recommend some kind of external sound system with a flatscreen television, Sony’s built-in audio is pretty fair.

Sony Bravia 8 – The Competition

In a vacuum, the Sony Bravia 8 is very good. It has great picture quality, excellent color reproduction, decent sound, supports gamers in a variety of ways, and is well-priced. However, its prime competition comes in the form of the LG C4 and there, the C4 is better because it gets brighter and it offers more 4K 120Hz ports – and it’s a few hundred dollars less expensive. The LG G4 and Samsung S90D are also superior thanks to better OLED technology. Although Sony is still king of processing and upscaled content just looks better on a Sony display versus the competition, that might not be enough.


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