Sony Launches Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II with 'True RGB'

On my PC, the site displays a weird "Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason" banner on the top... not sure if it's my ad blocker that messes up some CSS styles that makes this appear, but the message is weird in any case.

EDIT: no, it's not the ad blocker. The <noscript> tag is empty, and that string floats in the source near the <title> tag.

Are these "pure" Sony or from new JV with TCL?

What's with the recent trend of putting matte coatings on the most "premium" devices?

This TV does it, the Steam Deck's done it, and it almost always looks terrible (the nano-etching on recent MBPs is _fine_; but still makes the text noticeably fuzzier).

The market for top-end TVs is the people who _really_ care about image quality, why would you jeopardize that with a coating that makes it _worse_?

I'm fine with this being an option for those who want it, but associating "top-end" with matte is bizarre to me. I regularly regret buying the OG 512 GB Steam Deck because the matte coating on it is just so bad.

As some commenters pointed out, this is basically slowly adding a real RGB led panel behind the LCD, or an OLED with extra steps. I could not see prices but I would expect this to be significantly cheaper, or maybe the refresh rate is much better than OLED.

You mean TCL owned "Sony" Launches Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II with 'True RGB'

why go extra steps and not buy directly from TCL or LG (though they are shutting down soon as well and their system is crap comparable to Samsung's Tizen)

In every store demo people go to the TV with the most vibrant colors even if they're unrealistic. You can't even tell which is the color you're expected to see sometimes.

I have the movie "Once Upon a Time in America" in 2 different editions and the colors were remastered, they look very different between the 2 copies, yellowish vs. reddish. If the source material is already like this, having super color fidelity in the panel is a paper checkmark but not super useful in practice. Maybe the 2000nits brightness in case I mount the TV in direct sunlight.

This will attract a few people who are very focused on these details, and a lot of people who are very focused on the spec sheet.

I have a 2024 Bravia (K-77XR80) because I wanted an OLED TV with Android TV, to avoid yet another vendor spying on me (Google already does). I also hoped that a "premium" brand like Sony would offer a better UX than other brands.

Well, I was wrong. Watching movies on OLED (or at least on this particular OLED) looks crap, because if you turn motion interpolation OFF, the image looks stuttery, apparently due to OLEDs ultra-low response time, which produces zero fading between adjacent frames. (By the way, why didn't this happen with 35mm movie projectors? They couldn't blend adjacent frames either, because they are just shining light through individual pictures on a sheet of celluloid, yet I don't remember seeing this kind of stutter in movie theatres back in the day!) And turning motion interpolation up a notch already produces the well-known soap opera effect. No, thanks.

The UI is laggy. It's as if Sony used a chipset that couldn't handle Android TV driving a 4k display or something. And to make things worse, the UI had to be filled with all kinds of animated transitions, which of course make lagging even more noticeable. If there was one thing to learn from Apple in the past 20 years, it's that a consistent UI framerate must be prioritized over everything (except maybe realtime audio). Dropped frames = cheap, trash UX.

Also, apparently all OLED TVs must periodically do these "pixel refresh" cycles, to lengthen the lifespan of the panel. Fair. But in Sony TVs this is scheduled a few hours after the TV was turned off, and the schedule cannot be configured. The operation itself is invisible, but when the TV comes alive to do this panel maintenance it produces AN AUDIBLE RELAY CLICK like a fucking CRT TV from the 90s. You watch some TV before going to bed, then in a few hours wake up to the sound of a solenoid switch. Then after about 5-10 minutes, the relay clicks again to power off the device, so if you didn't wake up to the first click, now there's a second chance! Yay! And I can confirm this relay sound isn't unique to this particular Bravia model, because I have a smaller one in the bedroom, and it's the same. (See also on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/vx2efk/sony_a80j_i_...)

Premium brand, my ass.

TL;DR: don't buy Sony TVs.