The war for picture quality supremacy in TVs is being waged by two separate technology factions: QD-OLED and Mini LED.
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For several years now, QD-OLED has held the advantage as the technology of choice for the best TVs in the market. A prime example was Sony’s flagship TV from 2023, the 4k QD-OLED A95L, which is widely credited as the best TV released last year.
However, with the announcement of Sony’s flagship TV for 2024, the so-called Bravia 9, the company’s technological allegiances appear to be quickly shifting.
The question on every galaxy-brained display nerd’s mind, though, including yours truly, is why?
Why the new Sony Bravia 9 stands out as one of the most notable consumer TV releases of 2024.
Unlike Sony’s usual flagship TVs and every other major TV manufacturer, the Bravia 9 is a Mini LED TV.
If the term sounds familiar to you, it may be because it’s the same display tech behind the so-called Liquid Retina XDR displays Apple unveiled with tons of fanfare in its redesigned MacBook Pro lineup announced back in 2021, as well as the biggest 12.9-inch iPad Pro and even Apple’s $5000 Pro XDR Display. It’s also been the display technology used by the best LCD TVs in the market for years.
What’s most notable about this technology is that compared to OLED, Mini LED displays are traditionally far brighter, making them excellent displays for HDR content. The same brightness advantage also generally makes Mini LED displays better at providing superb picture quality in rooms where it’s hard to control ambient light sources – a definition that can loosely apply to any room with several or more windows, including my living room.
The downside of Mini LED technology is that it’s also traditionally failed to match the deep blacks of OLED displays, especially in controlled lighting environments. That’s because unlike OLED displays, which can control light output at the individual pixel level to create near-infinite levels of perceived contrast, Mini LED displays create images by controlling larger groups of individual LEDs -so-called local dimming zones – which inherently offer less precise image control over OLEDs pixel-level dimming.
For many years, this critical technological difference made Mini LEDs’ black levels inferior. Over time, though, Mini LEDs have steadily chipped away at the gap. Part of the technology’s black-level gains has come via quasi-brute force, specifically by increasing the number of local dimming zones packed into more advanced Mini LED displays.
But Sony also definitively proved last year with the launch of the X95L – a flagship Mini LED widely viewed as the best non-OLED TV available – that adding more zones wasn’t the only viable path to dramatic Mini LED picture quality improvements.
As long-time and widely respected TV expert Vincent Teoh of HDTVtest articulated after testing the X95L against other Mini LED offerings from different brands, “the Bravia X95L produced the most accurate shadow detailing, the greatest image depth, and the inkiest letterbox bars, despite having the fewest local dimming zones and the lowest native panel contrast.” The takeaway for Teoh was clear. Sony had proved that “the local dimming algorithm is actually the most important factor that determines the picture quality” of Mini LED TVs.
With the launch of the Bravia 9 this year, Sony now seems bent on applying a more-is-more approach to Mini LED in an apparent bid to finally best, or at least match, OLED displays in overall picture quality.
Naturally, the new flagship is poised to keep the algorithmic benefits Sony developed with the X95L. But it’s also increased the panel’s number of dimming zones by 325%, which, as vague as that data point truthfully is, should translate into further black-level refinements. The Bravia 8’s peak brightness is also supposedly 50% higher than the X95L, making the Bravia 9 the brightest consumer TV Sony has ever made.
Combined with nearly every other advanced feature offered in the Sony TV playbook, ranging from support of new adaptive calibration modes from Netflix and Prime Video, which promise to automatically optimize the TV picture quality based on what you’re watching, to specialized anti-reflective and viewing angle improvement coatings, to specialized gaming modes designed for the PS5, to integrated “up firing Beam Tweeters and dual Frame Tweeters,” and even a four-way stand that can adjust between both lower profile positions or raised positions to accommodate a soundbar, the Bravia 8 feels every bit like a flagship Sony TV should be.
Still, for many looking for a new TV in 2024 who don’t have to deal with placing their TV in overly bright rooms, the premium price of the Bravia 8, which starts at $3,299 for a 65″ inch model and goes as high as $5,499.99 for the 85″ inch version, likely won’t be worth paying over other OLEDs from Sony, or its competitors.
“With the launch of the Bravia 9 this year, Sony now seems bent on applying a more-is-more approach to Mini LED in an apparent bid to finally best, or at least match, OLED displays in overall picture quality.”
This brings us back to the original question of why Sony even decided to pivot slightly away from OLED and release a Mini LED flagship in 2024?
A straightforward explanation is that Sony originally planned to launch a flagship OLED TV in 2024 but ultimately decided not to move forward, giving last year’s late launch of A95L more sales breathing room.
Another reasonable explanation is that Sony is worried about its continued ability to distinguish its premium TVs from competitors like Samsung, given that they all share continue to share the same underlying OLED panels supplied by LG Display.
But there’s also at least some reason to suspect that Sony’s reprioritization of Micro LED could be the first of many future bets about what will matter most in home entertainment over the coming years.
As Sony alone is uniquely positioned to see, in the near future, anyone who cares a lot about having exceptional video quality at home should focus on Mini LED’s brightness advantages just as intently as I am.
How Sony uniquely influences the display market from opposing ends of the spectrum.
Back in 2019, Game of Thrones fans took to social media per usual during an episode, except in this case, it was to complain that they actually couldn’t see shit. The episode, appropriately titled The Long Night, took place mostly, well, at night, and was so dark that many viewers struggled to see what was happening on the screen.
According to episode director Miguel Sapochnik, during an interview on Indie Wire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, some of the difficulty audiences had discerning details through the shadows was intended by the Game of Thrones creative team. But in the same interview, he also acknowledged that another, more practical reason could have been responsible for the episode’s visual struggles.
“I can’t control what people watch it on,” he acknowledged during the podcast. “I’ve never made anything to be seen on an iPhone, it’s not intentional. everything I make, I’ve made to be seen on the largest format possible.”
Sapochnik’s comments, like those of many other famous directors before him, suggested that the screens he judges his work on aren’t the same as those used by audiences and, as a result, implied that some details can get lost in translation.
And while his words may have appeared to be about differences in screen size, it’s more likely that The Long Night was the most prominent evidence of another rapidly growing divide between pro and consumer-grade displays, i.e., peak brightness capabilities.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the monitors movie and TV-making professionals use to judge and evaluate the footage they capture, edit, and manipulate are far different than the typical TV, phone, and tablet displays we all watch their work on. Many may not realize, though, that it’s not because the screens pros rely on are massive in size.
Most are smaller than the typical flat-screen TVs in plenty of living rooms. Instead, these professional-grade displays are extremely expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars, because they’re designed to be exceptionally accurate in all areas that impact video image quality.
Sony has long been a leader in producing these advanced professional reference monitors and the company’s BVM-HX310, which was originally launched in 2018, is now widely viewed as the industry standard for mastering high-dynamic range content (HDR).
One of it’s biggest distinctions from a typical TV is its brightness capabilities. As the monitor’s own marketing materials state, “the BVM-HX310 features 1,000 nits full-screen brightness with 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, making it ideal for displaying High Dynamic Range (HDR) content with rich, deep black areas and accurate reproduction of bright peak highlights.”
For comparison sake, the brightness levels of consumer TVs are usually measured in two common ways. So-called peak brightness – often the most gaudy stat cited prominently by TV makers – looks at the maximum brightness a smaller area of TVs display can achieve. The exact area measured can range widely depending on the testing outlet, but stays usually between 2% to 10% of the screen’s total area. Full-screen brightness on the other hand, is essentially exactly what it sounds like, measuring how bright the entire screen can get.
Nearly six years after the launch of the first BVM-HX310 Professional Master Monitor, now newer TVs are now finally boasting peak brightness figures that are capable of hitting the 1,000 nit threshold a growing amount of modern HDR content is mastered at. But plenty of TVs, especially high-end OLEDS produced as recently as a few years back, were still incapable of matching the standard.
Practically speaking, this means that even the best TVs most of us at home have now can’t precisely reproduce content mastered at 1,000 nits the way its creators would like. Instead, our home TVs engage in a process known as tone mapping, which recalibrates the maximum brightness of HDR video content to match the maximum brightness of the TV it’s being shown on.
And despite recent leaps in peak and sustained brightness measures from consumer TVs, the gap in display technological capabilities between professionals and consumers could soon widen again. Sony launched an updated version of its professional mastering monitor, the BVM-HX3100, late in 2023, which supports an even higher peak luminance of up to 4,000 nits.
Though it’s technically not the first professional monitor to achieve such incredible brightness peaks, given Sony’s esteem and wide adoption within the film and TV industry, its decision to support 4,000 nits could have a more significant impact in the long run on making mastering at 4,000 nits a new industry standard some day.
What does Sony’s bet on Mini LED mean for the future of home entertainment?
OLED displays have always had one notable downside in daily use compared to other popular LCD technologies. You’ve probably heard the term burn-in before mentioned alongside OLED displays. The term stems from the fact that the organic material layers within OLEDs can be damaged by overheating, which can happen when the display pixels are pushed to maintain consistently high brightness levels for extended periods. To help prevent this burn-in from happening, all OLED displays run software-based algorithms that limit the brightness levels the display’s pixels are exposed.
This balancing act has always made OLED TVs, pragmatically speaking, a bad fit for bright room viewing compared to LCD TVs because LCD TVs can produce and sustain much brighter images than OLEDs without risking damage, making them far better at fighting through glare.
Until very recently, even the most expensive OLEDs couldn’t also match the peak brightest levels demanded by certain forms of HDR content and instead leaned on tone mapping to approximate a creator’s original intent.
Due to its deep ties to the film and TV production industry, Sony is uniquely positioned to understand that the peak brightness demands of content from major studios in the future are only likely to increase as 1,000 nit mastering and eventually even 4,000 nit mastering is adopted as industry standards.
This insight puts one fundamental question at the forefront of Sony’s future TV roadmap: Which technology is likely more likely to solve its biggest weakness? Can QD-OLED continue to make brightness improvements that align with the future of HDR content production? Or can the image quality and black levels of Mini LED displays improve enough to match or surpass OLED’s most significant strengths?
Based on the performance of last year’s X95L Mini LED TV, the Bravia 9 should wind up being an early answer, as well as an omen for an industry-wide shift away from OLED in the years ahead.
