Sony X93L/X93CL TV Review

The Sony X93L has a premium design with a unique checkerboard pattern on the back and thin bezels. It's designed for a clean look, with adjustable feet and removable panels to help with cable management.

The Sony X93L has straight metal feet that hold the TV very well. Along with the narrow position shown, the feet can be attached in a wide position for better stability. There are multiple mounting points for the feet, allowing you to adjust the height of the TV to fit a soundbar in front without blocking the screen (highest position shown here). Footprint of the 65-inch model:

• Narrow position (pictured above): 20.2" x 13.5"
• Wide Position: 56.7" x 13.5"

The distance from the table to the display varies depending on the position of the feet:

• Narrow position: 1.8"
• Wide low position: 1.3"
• Wide high position: 3.7"

The back of the TV is entirely plastic and made of a checkerboard pattern similar to other recent Sony TVs like the Sony X95K. There are covers that can be attached to the back to hide the inputs and for basic cable management.

The Sony X93L has excellent build quality. It's very stable, with minimal wobble in any of the three stand positions. It has a premium look, with metal borders around the screen and metallic feet. The back panels are made of plastic but are well-built overall despite a bit of flex. The only noticeable issue is with the cable management panels, which don't quite clip into the back properly.

The Sony X93L has excellent contrast, resulting in deep blacks and bright highlights in dark scenes. The native contrast with local dimming disabled is lower than usual for this type of TV due to the X-Wide Viewing Angle layer, which improves the viewing angle at the expense of some contrast. As long as you leave Auto Local Dimming enabled, though, dark areas of the screen look excellent. If you'd prefer a Mini LED TV with better contrast, look at the Hisense U8/U8K or the step-up model from this one, the Sony X95L.

The Sony X93L has very good blooming performance. There's some noticeable blooming around bright areas of the screen in otherwise dark scenes, like if you have subtitles enabled, or bright lights in an alley.

The lighting zones have a decent response time to changing scenes. The algorithms can't quite keep up with fast-moving objects, causing the leading edge to appear darker than it should be. For the same reason, the trailing edge leaves a slight bright trail. On the other hand, there's no noticeable flicker as zones toggle on and off. If you're looking for a better local dimming feature, check out the Hisense UX, which has 5000 dimming zones in its 85-inch model.

There's no difference in dark scene performance when in the 'Game' Picture Mode.

The Sony X93L has superb HDR peak brightness. Bright highlights stand out well, and real scenes are bright and vivid. Although bright highlights in test slides are brighter on the Sony X95K, real scenes are brighter on the X93L, and HDR is more vivid overall. The next model down in Sony's lineup, the Sony X90L/X90CL, is about as bright with some highlight details, but most real scenes are brighter on the X93L. On the other end, the step-up Sony X95L is slightly brighter, but it's not a significant difference.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

Switching to the 'Game' HDR Picture Mode results in a slightly dimmer image overall, but it's not a very noticeable difference with real content.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

Like most Sony TVs, the Sony X93L has fantastic PQ EOTF tracking in most HDR picture modes. Most content is slightly too dark, but the difference is minor. In the 'Game' HDR Picture Mode, near-blacks are raised, causing some shadow details to appear washed out.

The Sony X93L has fantastic SDR peak brightness. It's bright enough to easily overcome glare in a bright room. Large bright scenes are considerably dimmer, but they're still bright enough for a well-lit room, so you won't notice this.

These measurements are after calibration, with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 1
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

The Sony X93L has a great HDR color gamut, so colors in HDR are vibrant and life-like. It has nearly perfect coverage of the commonly-used DCI-P3 color space, as well as decent coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space. Tone mapping is good in both color spaces, but saturated greens and blues are noticeably off in the Rec. 2020 color space.

The color volume is excellent. Colors are bright and vibrant, and thanks to its high contrast ratio with local dimming, dark saturated colors are displayed well.

Even without calibrating it, the Sony X93L has impressive accuracy in SDR. Gamma is very close to the 2.2 target for a moderately-lit room, and the white balance is very good. Colors are accurate for the most part, but pure blues are slightly off. The color temperature is a bit cool, giving the image a very slight blue tint.

The Sony X93L is very easy to calibrate, and the results after calibration are fantastic. Blues are still off, but the color temperature is much closer to ideal, and the white balance and color accuracy are nearly perfect.

You can see the full settings used for our calibration here.

The gray uniformity of this TV is very good. The sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, which is distracting if you want to use it as a PC monitor. There's very little dirty screen effect in the center, which is great for watching sports as the playing field looks clean and uniform. In near dark scenes, the uniformity is significantly improved, with no noticeable issues.

The black uniformity, especially with Auto Local Dimming enabled, is great. There's a bit of blooming around bright highlights on a dark background, but it's not very distracting. With local dimming turned off, the black uniformity is worse, but it's not terrible. There are no noticeable bright spots, but the entire screen looks blue due to the relatively low native contrast of the panel.

Unfortunately, despite Sony's 'X-Wide Angle' technology, the off-angle viewing of this TV is mediocre. As you move off-center, colors appear washed out, and there's a more pronounced red hue.

The Sony X93L has excellent reflection handling. Direct reflections are significantly reduced in intensity, but there's a noticeable rainbow smear when any light source is visible on-screen.

The Sony X93L has great gradient handling in HDR. There's some light banding in bright shades of blue, but everything else looks great.

Like most Sony TVs, the Sony X93L does a great job smoothing out low-quality content. Macro-blocking and pixelization issues are smoothed out well, and there's very little loss of fine details.

The Sony X93L has superb sharpness processing capabilities. Low-resolution content is upscaled well, and lines are sharp with very little over-sharpening. Fine details in busy scenes are easy to make out, and hardcoded text looks great.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Sharpness: 60
• Reality Creation: Auto

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause blurry text in some applications when using it as a PC monitor. You can read more about it here.

The Sony X93L has an excellent response time. There's very little blur behind fast-moving objects, so games and fast action in sports is clear and easy to make out. There's some distracting black smear behind fast-moving dark objects caused by the TV's slower 0-20% response time.

This TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) at all backlight levels. It always flickers at 720Hz, which is high enough that it'll only bother you if you're extremely sensitive to flicker.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, which can be enabled to improve the appearance of motion. This TV can only flicker at 120Hz, which causes image duplication with 60 fps content.

This TV can interpolate lower-frame-rate content up to 120 fps. Like most TVs, it works well with slower scenes, but there are noticeable artifacts with fast-moving scenes.

Due to its relatively fast response time, there's some noticeable stutter when watching movies. It's especially noticeable in slow panning shots.

This TV removes judder automatically from 24p sources, like a Blu-ray player or an external streaming device with a 'Match Frame Rate' feature. For 60Hz sources, like a cable box, or the native apps, Motionflow has to be enabled, with both sliders at 'Min' and CineMotion set to 'High' to remove judder.

The Sony X93L supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. HDMI Forum VRR and G-SYNC compatibility work over the entire refresh rate range. The TV doesn't natively support 1440p, as it upscales it to 4k instead.

This TV has superb low input lag when in the 'Game' Picture Mode, ensuring a smooth and responsive gaming experience. It's a bit higher than competing models from LG and Samsung but still low enough for most gamers.

Most common signals are supported by this TV, up to 4k @ 120Hz with HDMI ports 3 and 4. Chroma 4:4:4 and RGB signals are displayed properly with 1080p and 4k signals, which is essential for clear text when using it as a PC monitor. HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, and they don't support 4k @120Hz inputs.

This TV can support almost everything the PS5 has to offer. Since this TV doesn't support 1440p @ 120Hz signals, it doesn't work with that format from the PS5. The Sony X93L offers unique features when paired with a PS5, including Auto HDR Tone Mapping and Auto Genre Picture Mode.

The Sony X93L can nearly take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X consoles. It only supports Dolby Vision gaming at 60Hz, not at 120Hz, though, and the TV doesn't support 1440p @ 120Hz.

HDMI ports 3 and 4 support the full 48 Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, while HDMI 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. However, because HDMI 3 is an HDMI 2.1 and eARC port, you lose an HDMI 2.1 slot if you connect a receiver, so you can't use HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on multiple devices simultaneously unless the receiver also supports it. Also, the tuner supports ATSC 3.0, allowing you to stream over-the-air channels at up to a 4k resolution.

The Sony X93L supports eARC, which allows you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The frequency response of this TV is good overall. It has a well-balanced sound profile, so dialogue sounds clear, but like most TVs, it doesn't produce much bass. It's loud enough for a fairly noisy environment.

The Sony X93L has good distortion handling. There aren't too many distortion artifacts at moderate listening levels; even if there's more at the max volume, it isn't too bad.

The Sony X93L has the same Google TV smart platform as past Sony models like the Sony X95K. Oddly, it runs the older Google TV 10 version instead of the newer version 11 release that's already been included on some older Sony models like the Sony X85K. The differences between versions 10 and 11 are minor, though.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, there are ads throughout the interface. You can opt out of personalized ads, but this doesn't change the number of ads you'll see; they just won't be personalized to match your search and viewing history.

The Google Play Store has tons of apps available to download, and they run very smoothly. It has Google Chromecast built-in, meaning you can cast content from your phone. You can also connect the Bravia webcam for video calls.

The included remote is small, as it doesn't have a numpad. There are mics in the remote and built into the TV, and they allow you to ask it to search for content, change settings, and open apps.

There's a single button on the back left side to turn it On/Off, change channels, adjust the volume, or switch inputs. There's also a switch to turn off the mic on the TV if you're concerned about privacy. However, these controls are set into the TV and hard to access with it wall-mounted, especially if you have the wall-mounted, and the plastic covers block access to the buttons.

• Remote
• 2x AAA Batteries
• Manuals and user guides