Sony made the very bold decision last year to pivot away from OLED for its flagship TV and instead launch a next-gen Mini LED model. The brand made huge claims about the performance of the Bravia 9 and its borderline revolutionary homegrown backlight, particularly around brightness, and it broadly delivered (here's our Sony Bravia 9 review), yet I was still a little disappointed with it.
For me, while the Bravia 9 is an incredibly impressive technological achievement and one of the very best backlit TVs in existence, it still can’t match the contrast you get from an OLED TV and its self-emissive pixels.
This pixel-level contrast control of OLED has benefits right across the picture, from ‘pop’ to perceived sharpness and three-dimensionality, and the Bravia 9 just isn’t as strong in those areas. Sony will of course point to the Bravia 9 being able to hit peak brightness figures far beyond what any OLED can, but a vanishingly small number of modern movies demand such brightness, so I don’t feel it’s worth the compromises that have been made elsewhere.
None of which is to say that the Bravia 9 is a bad TV. On the contrary, it’s a really good one and, from what I hear, it’s really popular, too. It’s just not the flagship Sony TV for me. The good news, though, is that I think Sony might deliver my ideal flagship TV this year.
Bring on the Bravia 10
Sony no longer sticks strictly to an annual TV model cycle and I don’t expect it to launch a successor to the Bravia 9 this year. Too much development work over several years went into that new model and its progressive backlight tech, so I think Sony will leave it on shelves throughout 2025. Instead, I think it will launch a new Bravia 10 above it, and I think it will be a successor to 2023’s A95L QD-OLED, which is still my favourite TV on sale today.
Assuming I’m right – and it really is an educated guess that I’m making – it will be fascinating to see whether Sony goes with the latest QD-OLED panel tech, which has improved significantly since 2023, or switch to the new Four-Stack (aka Primary RGB Tandem) OLED panel technology from LG Display. Either way, we could be looking at a big, compromise-free brightness upgrade and potential improvements to the A95L’s already stellar reproduction of colours.
While a dedicated sound system is always the best option, the A95L is one of very few TVs that I could just about live with from an audio point of view. Its Acoustic Surface Audio+ tech, which involves actuators that imperceptibly vibrate the screen to make sound, ties the picture and sound together in a way that no non-Sony TV can match, but it also spreads sound out to the sides and above the TV surprisingly effectively. It’s quite bass-light, though, so I would like the Bravia 10 to combine this Acoustic Surface Audio tech with the ability to connect the TV to one of Sony’s wireless subwoofers. This would make for a very discreet but potentially rather potent sound system.
One obvious deficiency of the A95L that will absolutely need to be addressed if the Bravia 10 is going to tick all of the boxes for me, is the number of HDMI 2.1 sockets. The A95L has just two of them, which is a massive pain in the backside for someone who has a PS5, Xbox Series X and gaming PC. In truth, I’m not sure that this is a problem that will be solved this year – while MediaTek, which supplies Sony’s chips, now produces one with four HDMI 2.1 sockets, it’s a less powerful one from a processing point of view, and I can’t see Sony opting for a potential performance downgrade just for the extra HDMI 2.1s. Still, I remain hopeful that Sony has come up with a clever solution to this connection conundrum.
All of which is to say that if Sony does have a Bravia 10 OLED TV up its sleeve, it has the potential to be mind-blowingly good. Of course, I could be wrong about everything – there may not be a Bravia 10, there may never be a successor to the wonderful A95L and Sony may decide to replace the Bravia 9 with another Mini LED TV after all. That would be a great shame, I think. Perhaps Sony would at least consider launching some new 'small' OLED models to replace 2022's 42-inch and 48-inch A90K as a consolation prize...
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