Sony A80J OLED TV Review

The design is similar to the Sony A90J OLED, except for the back panel, which features a grid-like pattern. It's a sleek TV that'll stand out in any living room.

After ten months, the Sony Bravia XR A80J has permanent image retention that is visible with every color, and most visible on a 50% gray screen. You can even make out the CNN horizontal news ticker bar at the bottom.

The stand has three different setup positions. The standard position lets the TV sit closer to the table. There's a narrow position for smaller tables, and finally, a soundbar position that raises the TV to give you space for a soundbar in front.

Footprint of the 55-inch stand:

• Standard position: 41" (W) x 13" (D)
• Soundbar position: 41" (W) x 13" (D) x 2.71" (H)
• Narrow position: 27.3" (W) x 13" (D)

The panel and feet are made of metal, while the rest of the back is textured plastic with diagonal grooves in a grid pattern. It looks good, but aside from the cable tie included in the box, which we didn't use, there's no cable management. Some of the inputs face to the side, and they're easy to access, but most of them face down and aren't easy to reach if you wall-mount the TV.

The Sony Bravia XR A80J feels superbly well-built. The materials feel premium, and it's very sturdy with no wobble. There's a bit of flex to the plastic back, mostly on the sides, but overall, it feels very solidly put together.

Thanks to its self-lit pixels, the Sony A80J has a near-infinite contrast ratio with perfect black levels. It's ideal for watching movies in dark rooms.

Since the TV uses self-emissive OLED technology, there's absolutely no blooming around bright highlights or subtitles in otherwise dark scenes.

The panel doesn't have a backlight, but thanks to its nearly infinite contrast ratio, it has the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature with no zone transitions. We still film the zone transition video on the TV so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a TV that has local dimming.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and Game Mode.

The Sony A80J OLED has decent HDR brightness. As with SDR, there's a lot of variation in brightness across different scenes, partly due to the aggressive ABL. HDR content still pops out well thanks to its near-infinite contrast ratio, but extremely bright highlights and large bright scenes don't stand out as well as they should.

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

• Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred

The HDR peak brightness is drastically different with the Brightness Preferred setting and the Peak Luminance setting:

In Game Mode, the HDR brightness is about the same as outside of Game Mode. For the most part, the difference is hardly noticeable, although real scenes appear slightly dimmer.

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

• Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred

Like most Sony TVs, the Sony Bravia XR A80J has incredible PQ EOTF tracking. The vast majority of content is displayed at the exact brightness level the content creator intended. There's a very smooth roll-off near the TV's peak brightness, preserving fine details in bright areas of the screen.

The SDR brightness is okay and is on par with other OLEDs. It has an aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL), which causes large bright areas to be less dim, which is distracting while watching sports like hockey. Overall, it performs well in moderate lighting conditions but isn't bright enough to fight glare in really bright rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Peak Luminance: High
• Color Temperature: Expert 1

If you find the brightness changes with different scenes, you can set Peak Luminance to off. With it disabled, all scenes are displayed at around 130 cd/m², and there's no noticeable fluctuation in brightness with different scenes. It's a lot dimmer, so most people are better off leaving Peak Luminance enabled.

The Sony A80J has an excellent color gamut. It has full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most HDR content and decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space. It tone maps well in both color spaces, ensuring fine details are preserved in saturated scenes.

The color volume is good. It has trouble with colors at higher luminance levels due to its limited brightness, but it displays dark saturated colors well, thanks to its near-infinite contrast ratio.

With just a few quick settings changes out-of-the-box, the Sony A80J OLED has excellent accuracy. The white balance and color inaccuracies are minor and are hard to spot with the naked eye. Gamma is great, but it doesn't quite follow the 2.2 target, so a few scenes are either over-brightened or too dark. Also, its color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a slightly blue tint.

The Sony A80J has fantastic accuracy after calibration. The white balance, gamma, and color temperature are all nearly perfect, and while there are some slight inaccuracies with a few colors, it's not noticeable at all. The calibration system is effective but sensitive, so it can be tricky to calibrate as changes to one setting may have a more significant impact on other measurements.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The Sony A80J has excellent gray uniformity. The screen is very uniform, with practically no dirty screen effect. Near-dark scenes look fantastic, with no noticeable issues.

Like all OLEDs, the Sony A80J can completely turn off individual pixels to achieve perfect black uniformity, with no cloudiness present at all.

The Sony Bravia XR A80J has a great viewing angle. The image looks consistent when viewed from the sides, which is great for accommodating more people or wide seating arrangements.

The Sony A80J has a slightly matte finish, unlike the Sony A90J OLED. The reflections are duller but more widely diffused than on a typical glossy screen. The reflection handling is still superb overall, meaning glare is not an issue in most rooms, but placing it directly opposite a window or light source isn't a good idea because it doesn't get bright enough to fight off intense light. The 77-inch version has a glossy finish, which handles light differently, resulting in less indirect reflections as bright lights aren't diffused across the screen as much.

Gradients look disappointing on the Sony A80J. There is a great deal of banding with greens and grays, and although other colors perform a bit better, there is noticeable banding across the board. When we originally tested the TV, it performed much better. The banding could be more prevalent because of general panel degradation, but we don't know for sure.

The Smooth Gradation feature can help even out gradients in low-quality content.

Look at the 2024 Samsung S85D OLED if you want an OLED TV with much less banding.

The Sony A80J has excellent low-quality content processing. It's very effective at smoothing out macro-blocking and pixelization when streaming content, with very little loss of fine details.

The TV has excellent sharpness processing and upscaling overall. Fine details in low-resolution content are upscaled well, and text is clear and easy to read.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Sharpness: 60
• Reality Creation: Auto

The Sony Bravia XR A80J uses a WRGB sub-pixel layout, where all four subpixels are never lit simultaneously. You can see some of the blue sub-pixels lit up in this photo.

The Sony A80J has a near-instantaneous response time, so motion looks exceptionally clear with minimal blur trail behind fast-moving objects. Unfortunately, due to the sample-and-hold nature of OLED technology, there's still some noticeable persistence blur.

The Sony A80J isn't completely flicker-free; the slight dip in brightness you see in the chart every 8ms is due to the TV's 120Hz refresh rate, which isn't noticeable.

The Sony A80CJ has a black frame insertion feature to try to improve the appearance of motion. It can flicker at 60Hz or 120Hz; the photo above is with the 60Hz flicker, and you can see the 120Hz flicker here.

The TV can interpolate lower frame rate content up to 120fps to make motion look smoother, which is also known as the 'Soap Opera Effect'. It performs fine during slower scenes, but there's a fair number of artifacts in busier scenes or panning shots.

As the TV has a near-instantaneous response time, lower-frame-rate content appears to stutter because each frame is static on the screen for a long period.

The Sony A80CJ removes 24p judder from any source, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies. There are different settings needed for native apps and 60p/i sources, which you can learn about here.

The Sony A80J supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. It works without issue on the Xbox Series X and PS5 for a tear-free gaming experience. It's also G-SYNC compatible, but there are some issues with it. It's tear-free with 4k @ 120Hz signals from the NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics card, but the screen flickered black at times like the Sony A90J OLED. Still, there wasn't any screen tearing in Destiny 2 with a 4k @ 120Hz signal, so it does its job at reducing screen tearing when it works properly.

The Sony A80J has a low input lag, although it's slightly higher than competing high-end models, and it's much higher at 60Hz than it is at 120Hz.

The Sony A80CJ supports most resolutions, including proper 4k @ 120Hz. Unfortunately, the TV can't do 1440p @ 120Hz. Chroma 4:4:4 is displayed properly with 1080p and 4k resolutions, which is important for clear text from a PC.

The Sony A80J OLED has good compatibility with the PS5. 1440p doesn't work, but other than that, it's a great choice for PS5 gamers.

The Sony A80J supports most resolutions on the Xbox Series X. It can't do 4k @ 120Hz on the Xbox while 'Enhanced Format (Dolby Vision)' is enabled, so you either have to choose between 4k @ 120Hz games without Dolby Vision or 4k @ 60Hz with it.

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 also the 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.

This Sony A80J supports enhanced audio return, or eARC, which allows you to pass high quality, lossless audio formats from connected devices through to your home theater receiver or soundbar.

The Sony A80J has good built-in speakers, noticeably better than the Sony A90J OLED, especially concerning bass, which sounds significantly punchier. Overall, the sound profile is well-balanced at moderate volume levels. At max volume, the sound loses its balance because bass and midrange frequencies overpower treble, which makes dialogue difficult to understand

There's a lot of distortion at the TV's max volume, but it's much better at moderate volume levels.

Like the Sony A90J OLED and other 2021 Sony TVs, the A80J runs on Google TV, which replaces Android TV. It's a little more streamlined than Android and runs smoothly.

Google TV includes ads on the home page and app store. While you can opt out of ad personalization, you can't opt out of getting ads or suggested content.

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.

The Sony A80J comes with a similar remote to the Sony A90J OLED, but it doesn't have backlighting and comes in a black finish instead of silver. It has shortcut keys, and you can use it as a universal remote.

There's a single button on the back left side of the TV, which you can use to change channels and inputs, adjust volume, and power the TV On/Off.

• Remote control
• 2x AAA batteries
• Cable tie
• User guides