Sony Bravia 7 II Review: RGB Mini-LED With OLED Contrast

OLED plays a smaller role in the 2026 model year than you might expect, and the reason is the latest evolution of LCD. What Samsung and LG call micro-RGB, Hisense and Sony call RGB mini-LED. All of these use a three-colour rather than single-colour backlight, and the promise is that separate red, green and blue light sources produce more colours, higher peak brightness and stronger contrast than a conventional LCD. Sony fits that backlight to its two best LCD models for 2026, and the Bravia 7 II is the runner-up of the pair. This assessment covers the 65-inch K-65XR75M2.

Six screws and it is assembled. The frame and back are largely plastic, yet the set still feels high quality thanks to a thin, solid central pedestal and a two-part metal stand. On the back sits a phalanx of speakers, with a trio of bass, mid and treble drivers on each side.

Setup runs through a Sony-modified Google TV interface. Particularly useful is the audio calibration, done through a microphone built into the remote, which aims the sound precisely at where you sit.

The surprise is that although advertising occupies the entire screen area, it intrudes less than on Tizen, webOS or Fire TV. The reason is layering: rather than blocking out sections, Google TV puts the ads in the background with app icons and recommendations on top. The second distinguishing feature is the cross-provider watchlist. Instead of one row per streaming service, you can put favourite series from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ side by side and resume them straight from the home screen.

The challenge for Sony was to surpass its own high-contrast, extremely bright Bravia 7 with technology that is not quite brand new. It partly succeeded.

Brightness in the SDR range that matters for ordinary television viewing is impressive. In the Professional picture mode — the equivalent of Filmmaker Mode — the set reached over 500 candela per square metre, and that at brightness step 35 of 50. Paired with good anti-reflection treatment on the glossy screen, it suits bright living rooms perfectly. One important note: out of the box, Professional mode is set very dark at brightness step 4 of 50, around 90 candela per square metre. Step 35 of 50 is the sensible real-world value for a bright room, and is roughly how the Standard mode ships.

On maximum HDR brightness the Bravia 7 II falls behind its predecessor, at least in the faithful Professional mode. Where the Bravia 7 managed a proud 2,064 candela per square metre on a 10 per cent window, the Bravia 7 II reached only 840.

Why that matters less than it sounds: unlike OLED, where brightness falls as more of the screen turns white, mini-LED sets work the other way round and reach maximum brightness later. The Bravia 7 II hit close to 1,000 candela per square metre on 50 and 75 per cent windows. In practice that means the set is brighter than 840 candela per square metre most of the time, because large bright scenes occur more often than small highlights. An OLED such as the Bravia 8 II still renders headlights and muzzle flashes more brilliantly. If authenticity matters less to you than punch, the Brilliant showroom mode with local dimming on High produces 1,973 candela per square metre on a 25 per cent window.

On contrast the Bravia 7 II gets close to OLED. Thanks to a low black level and high SDR brightness, dynamic contrast of up to 50,000:1 is possible, and with the naked eye you cannot tell its blacks from OLED. Only in stressful test sequences such as Starfield does minimal flickering — blooming — reveal that a backlight is working behind the panel, and the zones dim so precisely that it deserves credit. The panel is also very evenly lit, with only minimal brightness deviation.

Colour is strong too, with complete coverage of sRGB and of the DCI-P3 HDR space, and a solid 80 per cent of the future-facing BT.2020 space. There Sony sits behind LG and Samsung — Samsung's second-best micro-RGB set, the R85H, reached 92.14 per cent.

Since there is still little BT.2020 content, those are largely paper figures for now. What anyone can see is how a television handles colour gradients: ideally colours blend evenly to produce something realistic, such as a cloudy sky, and it looks poor when they step instead, which is called banding.

Decades of experience across cameras, mastering monitors and televisions make Sony a leader in image processing, and it shows. Whether it is a sunset sky or a challenging scene with fog or smoke, the set renders gradients exemplarily. Upscaling non-native content to 4K also succeeded without heavy smoothing or over-sharpening.

The one criticism concerns brightness gradients: in Professional mode the set sometimes rendered HDR content a touch too dark or too bright, which is called clipping. That is complaining at a high level, especially since Sony fits Dolby Vision, which lets the television read compatible content scene by scene — sometimes frame by frame — and adapt it. The clipping then disappears or is strongly reduced, because the metadata tells the set exactly how bright to drive or dim its backlight so detail neither blows out in bright scenes nor sinks in dark ones. HDR10+ is not supported.

Frame interpolation sits under Motionflow in the picture menu. A 100 hertz set like this can insert up to three intermediate frames after each real one, which helps in hectic scenes. Cinema has no such digital assistance, which is why purists usually leave it off.

There are five purist picture options here: Cinema, Professional, IMAX Enhanced, and calibrated modes for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Smoothing can be added in all of them except the Amazon Prime calibrated mode, where it is permanently disabled.

With Professional selected, there are three levels. Smooth (Film) 1 barely smooths at all and essentially keeps the 24p cinema look. Smooth (Film) 2 goes a little further, and Smooth (Film) Max makes everything butter-smooth — at which point Dune and The Batman risk looking like television documentaries, the soap-opera effect. Smooth (Film) 2 is the best compromise, and the two lower levels have the added benefit of producing almost no ghosting or artefacts, because the set has fewer intermediate frames to guess at and so makes fewer wrong predictions.

Interpolation is not an issue for gaming, since a PlayStation 5 Pro, Xbox Series X or gaming PC already delivers up to 120 frames per second. Less good is that only two of the four HDMI sockets handle 120 hertz at 4K, which is a little thin for 2026; the other two top out at 60 hertz. Controller input lag is an uncritical 10.4 milliseconds.

The speakers sit on the back, their centre 25 centimetres below the top of the frame — roughly where actors' and newsreaders' heads appear, so picture and sound line up. Against the Acoustic Surface Audio+ of a Bravia 8 II, where drivers vibrate the screen itself and the sound genuinely appears to come from the picture, these rear-firing speakers come second. Even so, the six drivers produce a clear sound with decent bass.

The Bravia 7 II is a worthy successor to the mini-LED powerhouse that was the Bravia 7. It impresses with strong SDR brightness, natural colours and OLED-like contrast, and Sony again sets the standard with flawless image control and processing — the excellent local dimming and even panel illumination deserve particular mention.

On maximum HDR brightness, though, the new RGB mini-LED technology does not quite match the previous model. And the number of HDMI 2.1 sockets has not changed: there are still only two.

Besides the 65-inch version assessed here, it comes in 50-inch (127 cm, suited to about 2.5 metres viewing distance), 55-inch (140 cm, 3 metres), 75-inch (195 cm, 4 to 4.5 metres), 85-inch (210 cm, 4.5 to 5 metres) and 98-inch (248 cm, from 5 metres).

The 65-inch and 85-inch sizes are both sold on Amazon UK. The current verified price for the 65-inch model reviewed here is shown in the buying panel above.00. Check the price on Amazon UK or search on Amazon US