SONY XH9505
A brilliant 4K LED TV, delivering dazzling HDR and superb motion for sports
he cheapest TV in our test, the Sony X95H is eminently affordable, with the 65-inch set coming in a cool $1,700 less than the LG CX.
That price starts to look better and better as you run down this TV’s feature list. For starters, its LCD panel is direct lit, and separate zones of its LEDs can output different levels of light during any given shot, which always contributes to superior contrast. And while 60 separate dimming zones isn’t a huge amount, it’s not just the number that counts; it’s what you do with them.
In most ways, the pictures produced are pretty glorious. They’re extremely bright: its peaks of just over 1,000 nits in Standard mode and around 980 nits in Cinema mode sit at the higher end of the LCD TV spectrum. These brightness levels are very consistent, too, which plays into its colours; they retain as much punch and naturalism during dark scenes as bright ones.
However, things get complicated with HDR shots that contain a strident mix of very bright and very dark areas. You can at times see quite extended areas of light around the bright objects – though crucially, thanks to Sony’s impressive backlight controls, the blooming is both faint and undefined at its edges.
In terms of audio, the new features Sony has introduced work wonders. The Multi-Audio system, for
TThe audio features work wonders, creating a prodigious soundstage
starters, helps to create a prodigiously large soundstage that casts sound far to the left and right of the screen.
From here on in, things get more mixed. So, for instance, while it supports the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats, it doesn’t support the HDR10+ format. To be fair, there’s much more Dolby Vision content around than HDR10+ content, but there are TVs out there now that support both formats.
There’s also no support for such (potentially) key next-gen gaming features as for 4K 120Hz HDR playback, Automatic Low Latency Mode switching and Variable Refresh Rate support. Provided you remember to activate the Game mode manually when you’re gaming, though, it reduces input lag to a pretty respectable 18.5ms.
The Sony X95H isn’t perfect. It lacks a few features now starting to appear pretty routinely on rival flagship 4K TVs, and its backlighting occasionally makes its presence felt a little too strongly. But it still combines barnstorming sound with pictures which, for the vast majority of the time, are truly things of beauty.