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- Outstanding backlight controls
- Strong audio performance
- Excellent contrast and colour
- 4K/120Hz only works on two HDMIs
- No support for HDR10+
- Viewing angles are limited
The latest entry in Sony’s technology-hopping TV range, the Sony Bravia 7, returns to the LCD technology sported by the brand’s current Bravia 9, rather than the quantum dot OLED technology found inside Sony’s recently released Bravia 8 II. Being two rungs down Sony’s TV ladder, though, doesn’t end up leading to nearly as much of a performance compromise as expected.
Sony Bravia 7 review: Key specifications
| Screen sizes available: | 55in (K55XR70), 65in (K65XR70), 75in (K75XR70) and 85in (K85XR70) |
| Panel type: | Direct LED with local dimming |
| Resolution: | 4K/UHD (3,840 x 2,160) |
| Refresh rate: | Up to 120Hz |
| HDR formats: | HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision |
| Audio enhancements: | 40W Sony Acoustic Multi-Audio system, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X |
| HDMI inputs: | 4 x HDMI (2 x 4K @ 120Hz) |
| Freeview Play compatibility: | No |
| Tuners: | Terrestrial Freeview HD |
| Gaming features: | 4K/120Hz, ALLM, VRR, Auto HDR Tone Mapping, Genre Picture Mode, Game Menu 2 |
| Wireless connectivity: | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, Chromecast, Apple AirPlay |
| Smart assistants: | Google Assistant built in |
| Smart platform: | Google TV |
What you need to know
The Bravia 7 is the second most premium LCD TV in Sony’s current TV range. Like the flagship Bravia 9, it utilises a Sony XR Backlight Master Drive LCD panel, complete with Sony’s latest local dimming system, advanced ‘XR’ image processing, and quantum dot colours. It also carries a multi-channel audio system and Google TV smarts, along with ‘Perfect For PlayStation 5’ gaming features.
The TV isn’t as bright as its stablemate, though, nor does it have as many local dimming zones or as powerful a sound system. It is, however, substantially cheaper.
Price and competition
There are four Bravia 7 screen sizes: 55in, 65in, 75in and 85in, which, at the time of writing, sell for £1,499, £1,799, £2,199 and £2,699. Sony’s flagship Bravia 9 range doesn’t include a 55in size, but the 65in, 75in and 85in options cost £2,499, £3,199 and £3,699 respectively. So the Bravia 7 delivers substantial savings over Sony’s flagship LCD models.
Notable rivals from other brands in the same price bracket as the Bravia 7 would be Samsung’s QN90F flagship 4K LCD TV, while cheaper competition comes from TCL’s C8K series. For OLED competition, you’d have to be looking at entry-level models rather than mid-range sets, such as Philips’ OLED760 range or LG’s B5.
Design, connections and control
The Bravia 7 doesn’t look or feel as opulent and premium as the Bravia 9. That’s hardly surprising, though, and feels like an easy compromise to make in return for its much cheaper pricing. Especially when the Bravia 7 has hardly been beaten with the ugly stick. It wears eye-catchingly slender bezels, and the way its screen and frame are finished on the same single plane gives it a neat little design lift.
I also appreciated the way its supplied feet both slot onto the TV’s bottom edge without the need for any screws, and can be attached both at two separate widths apart (with the narrow position enabling the Bravia 7 to sit on really quite small bits of support furniture if you wish) and with the screen either sat low down on them or raised a couple of inches to make space for a soundbar. The Bravia 7 is a little deeper around the back than some of today’s premium TVs, but not so much that it couldn’t still make an appealing wall-hanging option.
The Bravia 7’s connections comprise four HDMIs, a digital audio output that doubles as an S-Center Speaker input (more on this later), two USB ports, satellite and terrestrial RF inputs, a LAN port, a unique jack for attaching one of Sony’s optional ‘Bravia Cam’ camera accessories, plus the now pretty much inevitable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connections.
Wireless features include Chromecast (built-in), Apple AirPlay 2 and Apple HomeKit support, and the HDMI ports support a good number of HDMI 2.1 features, including some advanced gaming aids and eARC support for shipping both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks losslessly to compatible external audio devices. It is a little disappointing, though, that only two of the four HDMI ports support a wide range of HDMI 2.1 features. The other two are much more limited in their data bandwidth and supported features.
Your main point of interaction with the Bravia 7 will be the included remote control. This features slender shapes and fewer buttons than most TV handsets, making it comfortable to hold and easy to learn your way around. You can also control the TV by talking to it via the included Google Assistant system, an external Apple HomeKit device or an external Alexa device. The Bravia Connect app provides some level of control over the TV, as well as one or two helpful accessibility features.
Smart TV platform
The Bravia 7 continues Sony’s long-running relationship with first Android TV and now its Google TV successor – with a bit of YouView action thrown in on top to work around Google TV’s blind spot when it comes to the UK’s most popular terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps. This adds up to a collection of video streaming apps that covers all the local and global hitters.
Google TV is more user-friendly, stable, fast-responding and easy on the eye than its Android TV predecessor, and the Google Assistant voice control system is effective. I still don’t think Google TV is as intuitive, sophisticated or as good at learning viewing habits and recommending content accordingly as some of the best rival smart systems, though.
Image quality
The Sony Bravia 7’s handling of SDR images follows the brand’s claimed TV strategy of trying to provide something for everyone perfectly. In other words, its range of picture presets includes options unusually well designed to cater for pretty much every room setup, picture taste and AV enthusiast’s desire to see films and TV shows as their creators intended them to look.
Tests using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 light meter show the Bravia 7’s Professional picture preset delivers great accuracy right out of the box, without having to engage in any calibration adjustments. Two-point and multi-point greyscale tests both score Delta E 2000 average errors of 3.1, which are essentially right on the 3 (or less) level at which any deviations from established standards are considered imperceptible to the human eye.
The Bravia 7 restrains itself to a 114cd/m2 white level in SDR Professional mode, which helps it achieve an essentially perfect SDR EOTF curve and extremely accurate RGB balance and luminance tracking. It’s no surprise, therefore, to find the Bravia 7 scoring Delta E 2000 average errors of 3.0, 2.9, 2.5 and just 2.1 with Calman’s in-depth Colour Gamut, Colour Checker, Saturation Sweep and Luminance Sweep tests. It was hardly a shock, either, to find the Bravia 7 able to cover 99.7% of the full Rec 709 colour spectrum.
The Bravia 7’s SDR Professional mode pictures don’t just ‘hit the numbers’, either. The screen’s pictures are so good at delivering subtleties of light and colour, even at the relatively dim luminance levels deliberately selected for the Professional preset, that they still look rich in contrast, three-dimensional and vibrant. Nothing feels flat or distractingly compromised as can happen with actually quite a lot of TVs – especially LCD models – when they try to do SDR accurately.
If you prefer your day-to-day SDR picture viewing to be much punchier or want an SDR picture that holds up better in a bright room, the Bravia 7’s Standard picture preset is a great option, upping the baseline brightness to 515cd/m2, and injecting that brightness into the TV’s wide colour palette to deliver much more tonal volume and vibrancy. It does all this without causing any significant common local dimming LED TV pain points, such as general clouding/greyness or heavy backlight blooming.
In fact, under the watchful eye of Sony’s eternally brilliant XR processor, the Standard mode looks as beautiful, balanced and nuanced in its own way as the Professional mode, despite all the extra brightness, contrast and colour it’s adding to the source images.
Inevitably, the Standard mode’s attempts to ‘pump up the volume’ of the Bravia 7’s SDR performance don’t maintain the accuracy of the Professional mode. While the SDR EOTF curve is still tracked quite nicely, Calman Ultimate multi-point greyscale tests now record a Delta E 2000 average error of 8.3, while Gamut, ColorChecker, Saturation Sweep and Luminance Sweep tests score Delta E 2000 average errors of 6.9, 6.3, 6.5 and 5.3. These Bravia 7 Standard Mode error numbers aren’t nearly as far off as those we normally see with equivalent TV picture presets on other sets, though, despite the lovely controlled punchiness of Bravia 7’s results.
One last very positive point about the Bravia 7’s SDR performance is that the TV does a brilliant job of upscaling sub-4K native content to the screen’s native 4K resolution, adding excellent clarity and pixel density without a pixel shade or light level ever feeling out of place.
HDR image quality
Unleashing the Bravia 7’s full potential on HDR sources with its Standard preset yields much more spectacular results than you’ve any right to expect from a mid-range TV. Peak brightness gets as high as 2,450cd/m2 measured in Calman Ultimate on a 5% HDR window, and is still 1800cd/m2 on both 2% and 10% windows. These are spectacularly high numbers, and you feel every ounce of their impact and intensity in every HDR frame.
The brightness holds up as high as 800cd/m2 even with a full white HDR window, which is around twice as bright as any OLED TV will get in the same full-screen HDR situation. The Bravia 7 pushes the boat out with HDR Standard mode colour, too, covering almost 97% of the DCI-P3 HDR spectrum and even just over 80% of the much wider BT.2020 spectrum. Usually, only high-end TVs would be able to post those sorts of numbers, and for the avoidance of doubt, you really do feel the impact of all these numbers when you’re actually watching rather than measuring the screen.
Yes, the stunning Bravia 9 take things even further, especially when it comes to contrast (both local and general) and its unique talent of bringing out light and shade subtleties in the very brightest parts of the picture. But the Bravia 7 reaches picture parts that many other similarly priced TVs cannot.
Predictably, the Bravia 7s’ most spectacular presentations of HDR sources aren’t especially accurate. Calman Ultimate’s ColorMatch and Colorchecker HDR average Delta E scores of 12.9 and 9 are clearly beyond the visible threshold of three. As with its SDR Standard preset, though, the genius of the Bravia 7 comes from the way it makes its Standard Mode HDR pictures work within their own context. By which I mean that no colours actually feel unnatural or stand out too strongly against any others, and no amount of colour or brightness costs the image even a hint of the refinement and tonal/textural finesse that Sony’s processing engine is so deliriously good at delivering.
Of course, any premium TV needs to cater for AV fans who like to watch things in something approaching their original mastering look on dark-room movie nights. The Bravia 7 caters for such circumstances exceptionally well right out of the box, with its Professional HDR preset, achieving Delta E 2000 average error results of just 2.21 and 1.57 with Calman’s ColorTest and ColorChecker analysis.
As you would expect, the Professional mode doesn’t deliver as much brightness and dynamism as the Standard mode. It does, however, still manage 2,000cd/m2 peaks on a 5% HDR window, which is a premium TV number rather than the sort of number you’d expect from a TV with an upper mid-range price attached. Calman 2% and 10% HDR windows with the Professional preset still hold on to well above 1,500cd/m2, while even the 100% HDR test window still hits almost 700cd/m2.
It’s also great to see Sony’s second-tier LCD TV retain excellent black levels in Professional mode without feeling the need to dim bright highlights of dark scenes down, or reining in the local dimming controls to a point where blooming or clouding becomes a significant problem.
It’s worth adding that while I’ve focused on the default Standard and most accurate Professional presets, the Bravia 7 provides other genre-specific presets, almost all of which are excellently balanced. The only exception is the Vivid mode, which pushes colour so hard that it loses the refined and balanced look Sony’s TVs usually specialise in.
Gaming
From a performance perspective, the Bravia 7 is an excellent gaming display. Its bold colours, excellent black level, remarkable consistency and penchant for subtle details transpose pretty much immaculately to today’s 4K HDR games, bringing game worlds to three-dimensional life beautifully. What’s more, if you’re gaming on a PlayStation 5, you can enjoy the Bravia 7’s gaming glories with minimal setup effort thanks to the Auto HDR Tone Mapping part of Sony’s Perfect for PlayStation 5 feature, where the console auto detects which Sony TV it is connected to and automatically adjusts its HDR output accordingly.
The Perfect For PlayStation feature also includes an Auto Genre Picture Mode feature that turns out to be basically another name for the Auto Low Latency Mode feature associated with the HDMI 2.1 specification, where a compatible TV knows whether it’s receiving a game or video source from a games console or PC and adjusts its picture settings accordingly.
The Bravia 7 can support 4K resolutions at up to 120Hz refresh rates, variable refresh rates and a Game mode that works for Dolby Vision. This Game mode gets the time the screen takes to render pictures down to a respectable (rather than spectacular) low of 17.9ms with 60Hz content.
You can call up the second generation of Sony’s Game Menu with game sources, providing access to gaming aids including a virtual crosshair, a black equaliser for raising the brightness of just dark areas of the picture, options for increasing input lag in return for smoother motion with games not totally dependent on reaction times, and the option to change the size of the gaming image.
The are a few areas where Sony’s gaming capabilities come up a little short, though. Only two of its HDMI ports support key gaming features such as 4K at 120Hz. Its VRR support only covers the HDMI-specific format, too, rather than also handling the AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync options, and its frame rate handling tops out at 120Hz, whereas we’re seeing support for 144Hz and even 165Hz on some rivals this year.
Sound quality
The Bravia 7’s excellent pictures are accompanied by one of the TV world’s better audio efforts. Key to the success of its “Acoustic Multi-Audio” sound system is the way its 40W of power feeds two full-range bass reflex speakers and two separate tweeters. These are positioned around its bodywork and create a large, detailed sound stage with excellent clarity and refinement.
The rounded, crisp tone the Bravia 7 applies to even the faintest, slightest effects in a mix creates an almost hi-fi feel, and the soundstage created and populated by these effects includes a forward-firing element as well as the more typical height and width factors. This helps the TV deliver key movie moments with more impact and directness, joining the 3D effect created by Sony’s picture processing in immersing you more in the onscreen action.
Dialogue is well-positioned and clean, and you can helpfully enhance it courtesy of Sony’s Voice Zoom feature, which uses AI to separate dialogue so that it can be tweaked independently of the rest of a mix. Or you can take advantage of the TV’s unusual S-Centre input to make its speakers the centre channel in a wider external Sony audio system.
In a perfect world, the Bravia 7 would deliver deeper, more emphatic bass. Sony appears to have opted to ensure that the bass it produces doesn’t succumb to distortions or coarseness rather than pushing its speakers beyond their comfort zone, which feels like a pretty sensible decision overall.
Verdict
If you’re feeling flush, then by all means pick up Sony’s Bravia 9 flagship LCD TV. It delivers an even brighter, better HDR performance and more audio power than the Bravia 7 does, after all.
However, if you’re looking for the all-round best value across Sony’s current TV range, the Bravia 7 gets closer to the Bravia 9 on both the picture and sound fronts than you’ve any right to expect for such relatively little money.
