Sony’s first RGB TV is a statement piece

The first wave of RGB LED TVs are fighting for their place in the TV segment. They need to outperform OLED TVs in brightness and color (because they will never match OLED brightness), and they need to outperform conventional LED TVs in everything (because their price is too high). Now it’s time for Sony to get involved with the Bravia 7 II, which comes alongside the flagship Bravia 9 II. Both pair RGB LED lighting with Sony’s top-notch processing.

RGB TVs like the Bravia 7 II use red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a field of blue or white LEDs for backlighting. This allows the RGB LED TV to display more colors, and stand out without relying too much on its color filter. Sony drives each LED individually, giving its TV fine control over color mixing.

A major potential side effect of RGB LED technology is color crosstalk, which is when one color bleeds into the color next to it. It happens because the red, blue, and green LEDs provide illumination for an area that covers many pixels. If most of those pixels should be red, the backlight will create a red light and rely on the color filter to display the correct colors for the remaining pixels in that area. But sometimes that red will slightly affect non-red pixels, especially if they are light or white in color.

So far, the examples of color crosstalk are mostly visible in the test patterns, and when I used the Bravia 7 II through a bunch of tests, I saw evidence of it. A green rectangle can subtly create a halo in the space around it – and it happens in a number of colors, not just green.

But test patterns are designed to reveal errors. And aside from those rare instances, I only saw color clashes a few times, none of which were significant. Most notable were the app tiles on my Apple TV. The blue of the Prime Video tile slightly intruded on the white of the text, and on the NASA app tile the sign’s text was red.

In movies and TV shows, there is little dialogue available. I can nitpick and compose a poem about the red of Snoke’s throne room making a slight change in his skin tone in a few frames The Last Jedi when I stop and check the pixels from the foot, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter. When I sat down and watched, there was no point in between The Last Jedior Mad Max: Fury Roador the F1 Canadian Grand Prix where I felt taken out of the action by color crosstalk.

In fact, in professional photo mode, the Bravia 7 II produces a beautiful picture with all the content. With color crosstalk not really being a problem, colors and grayscale on the SDR are remarkably accurate, except for some inaccuracies in the red, which is oversaturated. Light gray in HDR is a little brighter than it should be, but it’s not too noticeable, and colors look vibrant. The Bravia 7 II is also capable of 2,200 nits brightness. It’s not quite the TCL X11L light cannon, or last year’s LG G5 OLED, but it has plenty of light for the average living room. And since most content still works well at 1,000 nits, Sony’s latest still has plenty of headroom.

One of the advantages of RGB lighting is the ability to display many colors, and in the test, Sony measured 88 percent of the BT.2020. There’s a limited amount of content that actually uses those colors, so while the power is amazing, it won’t matter unless you’re watching something like this. Planet Earth II that is well understood. The lush green forests of Ecuador are lush and green, and the brilliant blues and cyans of the hummingbirds appear on the screen. It looks similar to the Hisense UR9 in those scenes, though overall the Sony is more accurate. However, until we get more movies and TV shows mastered on BT.2020 instead of P3, there is little benefit.

If you use the Professional mode on the Sony, there is an interesting menu option available that allows you to change the backlight from using color to white light. If the slight color bleed on the Apple TV app tiles is bothering you, changing it from color to white will fix the problem. But doing so also affects the color gamut coverage, reducing it from 88 percent to 73 percent for BT.2020 and down to 91 percent for P3. The inclusion of the option is interesting, as I’m not sure what the utility of it is other than seeing the difference in performance between color and white LED backlights.

Beyond the graphics performance, the 7 II has some cool design choices, and some not so cool ones. For a cool start is the footrest, which includes a lenticular screen at the front that causes the cables that hang behind them to disappear from view while still presenting a very transparent look. It is a smart and fun solution for cable management.

A cool option was to have only two HDMI inputs that support 4K at 120 Hz, one of which is an eARC port. As other TV manufacturers include support for all four inputs, this is a miss from Sony. It doesn’t make or break the TV, but if you plan to connect a sound bar or AVR to the eARC HDMI port and want to connect more than one game console or PC to get high refresh rate games, it’s not possible.

The Bravia 7 II also has a nice bright screen. The reflected lights don’t cause as much of a rainbow effect as I’ve seen on TCL and Hisense TVs, but the screen doesn’t reduce brightness too much. The Bravia 9 II has a flicker-free, low-reflective panel, so if you have a room with skylights or ceiling lights you’re concerned about, that’s a better choice — at least for $1,000 more.

Which brings us to costs. Sony has always priced its TVs a little lower than other manufacturers, and that trend continues. The 65-inch Bravia 7 II for my review is $2,600. That’s $600 more than Hisense’s flagship RGB LED TV, the UR9 (if Hisense drops the price after release), and $500 more than the Samsung R85H. I haven’t had a chance to take a close look at the R85H yet, but I’d say even for $600 more, the Sony Bravia 7 II’s better accuracy and processing is worth it over the Hisense.

If I could control the daylight in my room, I would again choose an OLED like the LG C6. Despite the RGB backlight technology, the Bravia 7 II (and every other RGB LED TV) is still an LCD TV. It handles bloom well, but can’t compete with the pixel-level control and deep contrast that OLED offers.

As more RGB LED TVs come out and are tested, we’ll have a better idea of ​​how they perform with real content and if the color crosstalk concerns are real or a marketing ploy from competitors. But one or two things are certain: either color crosstalk is not a problem, or Sony has found a way to make it less of a problem with its processing. Even with nitpicks like the bright screen and limited HDMI 2.1, the Bravia 7 II is a great TV with a great picture.

Photos by John Higgins / The Verge