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

OLED plays a smaller role in 2026, and the reason is the latest generation of LCD televisions. What Samsung and LG call "Micro-RGB", Hisense and Sony call "RGB Mini-LED"; all use a three-colour rather than single-colour backlight, with separate red, green and blue light sources. The promise is more colours, higher peak brightness and stronger contrast than a conventional LCD. Sony fits this backlight to its two best 2026 LCDs — the flagship Bravia 9 II and the second-place Bravia 7 II reviewed here, in its 65-inch form (model K-65XR75M2).

It takes six screws to assemble, and while the frame and rear are largely plastic, the set still feels premium thanks to a slim, solid central foot and a two-part metal stand. A phalanx of speakers sits on the back, each side carrying a trio of bass, mid-range and treble drivers. The interface is Sony's take on Google TV, built on Android; setup includes a genuinely useful sound calibration that uses a microphone built into the remote to steer the audio to your seat. On Google TV the advertising is less intrusive than on Tizen, webOS or Fire TV — ads sit in the background with app icons and recommendations on top — and a cross-provider watchlist lets you line up favourites from Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ side by side and resume them straight from the home screen.

Picture quality is the main event, and the challenge was to beat the bright, high-contrast previous Bravia 7 — which it manages in part. SDR brightness is impressive: in the accurate Professional mode the set exceeded 500 candela per square metre at brightness level 35 of 50, which, with the glossy screen's good anti-reflection, makes it ideal for bright living rooms (note that Professional ships very dark at level 4 of 50, around 90 cd/m², so level 35 is the sensible setting).

Maximum HDR brightness is where it trails its predecessor in Professional mode: where the old Bravia 7 hit 2,064 cd/m² on a 10% window, the 7 II reached 840. That matters less than it sounds, because Mini-LED sets reach peak brightness on larger bright areas rather than small ones — here nearly 1,000 cd/m² on 50% and 75% windows — so in practice the panel is usually brighter than 840, though an OLED still renders small highlights like spotlights more brilliantly. The showroom "Brilliant" mode with Local Dimming set high pushes HDR to nearly 2,000 nits (1,973 cd/m²) on a 25% window. Contrast, meanwhile, gets close to OLED: a low black level and high SDR brightness allow dynamic contrast of up to 50,000:1, and by eye the blacks are indistinguishable from OLED. Only in stressful test scenes does minimal blooming reveal the backlight, but the dimming zones are controlled so precisely, and the panel lit so evenly, that it earns real respect.

Colour coverage is strong — full sRGB and DCI-P3 — with a solid 80% of the future-facing BT.2020 space, behind LG and Samsung (whose R85H managed 92%), though with little BT.2020 content available this is mostly a paper figure for now. Sony's decades of experience across film cameras, mastering monitors and televisions show in the processing: colour gradients such as sunset skies and smoke are reproduced cleanly with no banding, and upscaling of non-native content to 4K arrives without over-smoothing or over-sharpening. The only slight criticism is occasional clipping of brightness gradients in Professional HDR, and even that is largely tamed by Dolby Vision, which the set supports (HDR10+ is not) and which adapts compatible Netflix, Apple TV+ and HBO Max content scene by scene.

For motion, this 100 Hz panel offers Motionflow interpolation and five cinephile picture modes — Cinema, Professional, IMAX Enhanced and calibrated Netflix and Prime Video presets; the "Smoothness (Film) 2" setting is a good compromise between a cinematic look and judder reduction, with few ghosting artefacts.

Gamers get a low input lag of 10.4 milliseconds, but only two of the four HDMI ports handle 4K at 120 Hz — a little stingy for 2026 — with the other two limited to 60 Hz. The rear-firing speakers place their centre about 25 cm below the top of the frame, roughly at the height of actors' and presenters' heads so picture and sound line up. They cannot match the screen-vibrating Acoustic Surface Audio+ of the pricier Bravia 8 II, but the six drivers still deliver clear sound with decent bass.

At the time of writing the 65-inch Sony Bravia 7 II sells for £2,299.00 at Amazon UK (with 50- and 55-inch models at £1,899 and £1,999). It is a worthy successor to the Mini-LED Bravia 7, impressing with strong SDR brightness, natural colours and OLED-like contrast, and setting the standard once again for image processing, local dimming and even backlighting. The compromises are a maximum HDR brightness that does not quite reach the old model and, still, only two HDMI 2.1 ports. For a bright room and mixed SDR-and-HDR viewing, though, it is one of the most accomplished LCD televisions of the year. The range runs from 50 to 98 inches, with Sony suggesting viewing distances from about 2.50 metres for the 50-inch through roughly 3.00 metres, 4.00 metres and 4.50 metres for the mid-sizes up to 5.00 metres for the 98-inch.