Sony’s first RGB TV is a statement piece

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.

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.

One of the benefits of RGB backlighting is the ability to display more colors, and in testing, the Sony measured 88 percent of BT.2020. There’s a limited amount of content that actually uses those colors, so while the potential is impressive, it won’t matter unless you’re watching something like Planet Earth II that’s specifically mastered for it. The green jungles of Ecuador are lush and verdant, and the shimmery blues and cyans of hummingbirds pop off the screen. It looks similar to the Hisense UR9 on those scenes, although overall the Sony is far more accurate. Still, until we get a lot more movies and TV shows that are mastered in BT.2020 instead of P3, there’s little benefit.

When using Professional mode on the Sony, there’s 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 bothers you, switching it from color to white will remove the problem. But doing so also affects the color gamut coverage, decreasing it from 88 percent to 73 percent of BT.2020 and down to 91 percent of P3. The inclusion of the option is curious, as I’m not sure what a useful application for it is apart from the novelty of seeing the performance difference between color and white backlight LEDs.

Beyond picture performance, the 7 II has some cool, and some not so cool, design choices. Starting with the cool is the pedestal stand, which incorporates a lenticular screen on its front that causes cables hanging behind it to disappear from view while still presenting a mostly transparent look. It’s a nerdy and fun solution to cable management.

A not so cool choice was to still only have two HDMI inputs support 4K at 120 Hz, one of which is the eARC port. As other TV manufacturers are including support across all four inputs, this is a miss from Sony. It doesn’t make or break a TV, but if you’re planning to connect a soundbar or AVR to the eARC HDMI port and want to connect more than one game console or PC for high refresh rate gaming, it’s not possible.

The Bravia 7 II also has a pretty reflective screen. Reflected lights don’t cause as dramatic a rainbow effect as I’ve seen on TCL and Hisense TVs, but the screen doesn’t mitigate the light much. The Bravia 9 II has a non-glare, low-reflection panel, so if you have a room with lamps or ceiling lights you’re concerned about, that’s the better choice — for at least an extra $1,000.

Which brings us to the cost. Sony has always priced its TVs a bit more than other manufacturers, and that trend continues. The 65-inch Bravia 7 II for my review is $2,600. That’s $600 more than the Hisense’s top-end RGB LED TV, the UR9 (once Hisense slashed the price after release), and $500 more than the Samsung R85H. I haven’t had a chance to closely look at the R85H yet, but I can say even for $600 more, the accuracy and far better processing of the Sony Bravia 7 II is worth it over the Hisense.

If I could control the daytime light in my room, I’d probably still opt for an OLED like the LG C6. Regardless of the RGB backlight tech, the Bravia 7 II (and every other RGB LED TV) is still an LCD TV. It handles blooming well, but can’t compete with the pixel-level control and deep contrast an OLED provides.

As more RGB LED TVs come out and get evaluated, we’ll have a better idea of how they perform with actual content and if the color crosstalk concerns are real or marketing subterfuge from competitors. But one or two things is certain: either color crosstalk isn’t an issue, or Sony has figured out a way to make it a non-issue with its processing. Even though there are nitpicks like the reflective screen and limited HDMI 2.1, the Bravia 7 II is an excellent TV with a beautiful picture.

Photography by John Higgins / The Verge