Sony BRAVIA 5 TV Review

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has mediocre HDR brightness. It's just bright enough for some highlights to pop in dim and moderately lit scenes, so you still get a somewhat impactful HDR experience. Fortunately, entirely well-lit scenes aren't much dimmer than small highlights, so you don't notice much of a difference in brightness between different scenes. 

Unfortunately, the TV is noticeably dimmer in HDR compared to its predecessor, the Sony X90L/X90CL. You can see comparison shots in the Contrast section. 

Our results above are with the TV set to Professional with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred' since those settings give the most accurate image. We also used the 'Auto Local Dimming: Medium' setting since the difference between the high and medium settings barely affects contrast, but you get brighter highlights with it set to medium. The TV's HDR peak brightness depends on the settings used, and you can see some additional measurements below. 

There's no noticeable difference in HDR brightness when the TV is set to Game Mode. Our results are with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred' and 'Auto Local Dimming: Medium'. The TV's HDR peak brightness in Game Mode depends on the settings used, and you can see some additional measurements below. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has very good SDR brightness. Like most TVs, it's not quite as bright when watching content with large areas of brightness, like sports. However, it's fairly consistent across the board, so the TV overcomes glare in well-lit rooms. Despite being the successor to the 2023 Sony X90L/X90CL, this TV is dimmer than that model.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has okay contrast, resulting in deep blacks during most dark scenes. However, black levels are raised when very bright highlights are on screen. There's barely a difference in black levels between the 'Medium' and 'High' local dimming settings, but you get brighter highlights with the medium setting, so that's what we used during testing. With 'Auto Local Dimming: High', the contrast ratio is 53827:1. Despite having a Mini LED backlight with more dimming zones than the Sony X90L/X90CL, the two TVs have a very similar contrast ratio.

Our testing doesn't show the whole picture, though. Although scenes with pure blacks and large bright elements look almost the same on both TVs, darker elements (near-blacks) are noticeably deeper on the BRAVIA 5 in some real scenes. This is visible in person, but we've included some comparison shots of the BRAVIA 5 positioned above the X90L so you can compare them for yourself. It's easier to spot the differences in the high ISO photos. For example, the woman's dark outfit in the 'High ISO 8' photo is noticeably deeper on the BRAVIA 5. 

The regular ISO photos are a good way to see the difference in brightness between the two TVs. The 'Regular ISO 2' and 'Regular ISO 7' are very good examples. 

The TV has good lighting zone precision overall, but the TV takes a conservative approach to how it controls blooming. Even though it has more dimming zones than the Sony X90L/X90CL, there's a large averaging of zones, so it isn't very precise with small highlights. This means that it often falls back to its native contrast ratio, especially during more challenging scenes. 

For example, if you're looking at a starfield, the stars aren't crushed like they can be on some TVs, but the black areas between stars aren't very deep. This is because it doesn't dim its zones for scenes like this, so you don't see any blooming, but the whole image looks a bit washed out. 

You can see an example of this behavior in this image. The picture is overexposed to more clearly show the dimming behavior, so it doesn't look nearly as bad in person. The small bright dot in the middle of the screen is a mouse cursor, and the blueish area around it are the zones that aren't being dimmed. 

The TV has good lighting zone transitions overall. It does struggle a bit with fast-moving content, so there's some haloing and the leading edge of quick-moving objects is visibly dimmer.

There's no noticeable difference with dark scene performance in Game Mode.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has disappointing black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, the TV is bluish with very apparent cloudiness across the screen. With local dimming enabled, blacks are deep, but there's noticeable blooming and cloudiness around some highlights.

The TV's SDR color volume is good overall. It has great coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, only struggling a bit with some lighter shades of color. Its coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space is noticeably worse, and it struggles a lot more with all colors. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has good HDR color volume. Most dark, saturated colors are displayed well, but it struggles a bit with bright whites and most bright colors. It's still good enough for a vibrant viewing experience, but very bright colors don't pop off the screen as much as they do on similar TVs such as this one's predecessor, the Sony X90L/X90CL. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has very good SDR pre-calibration accuracy. Gamma is pretty close to 2.2, but most scenes are displayed darker than intended. Its white balance is very good overall, but reds and greens are a bit underrepresented, while blues are a bit overrepresented. This contributes to the TV's overly cool color temperature. Still, colors have great accuracy overall, with only minor errors that most people won't notice. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has outstanding SDR accuracy after calibration, and any inaccuracies with white balance, color temperature, and gamma are gone. The greyscale is easy to calibrate, but there's no color calibration option, so color accuracy remains mostly unchanged. 

See our full calibration settings. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has unremarkable HDR color accuracy before calibration. Blues are very overrepresented in lighter shades of gray, while reds are very underrepresented, making the TV's color temperature significantly too cool. Overall, colors have okay accuracy, but there are mapping errors throughout, most notably in warmer colors. 

After calibration, the TV has fantastic HDR color accuracy. Its white balance is much better now, and the color temperature is much closer to the industry standard 6,500K. Color accuracy is significantly improved, with only minor mapping errors that most people won't notice. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has fantastic PQ EOTF tracking. Near-blacks and highlights are a bit darker than intended, but it follows the curve very closely overall. There's a sharp roll-off near the TV's peak brightness, so most details in specular highlights are lost. 

The TV does a great job of smoothing out low-quality content. Compression issues like macro-blocking are smoothed out well without causing any significant loss of fine details. Unlike some other higher-end Sony models, there's no 'Smooth Gradation' setting, so you must use the 'Digital Noise Reduction' setting to clean up low-bitrate content. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has superb sharpness processing capabilities. Low-resolution content is upscaled well, and lines are sharp enough that the image doesn't look too soft. Fine details in busy scenes are easy to make out, and hardcoded text looks great.

It's worth noting that Sony changed the 'Reality Creation' menu on this model. Unlike previous Sony TVs, it's best to set 'Sharpness' to '50,' 'Reality Creation' to 'Manual,' 'Type' to 'Detailed Preferred,' and the 'Intensity' slider to '4.'

This TV has great gradient handling in HDR. There's some noticeable banding in dark shades of blue and green, but everything else has minimal banding or none at all. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has excellent input lag while using its dedicated gaming mode. Unlike most other Sony models, the TV's input lag is on par with what you see from competing brands, so you get a very responsive gaming experience, especially at 120Hz. Its input lag is a lot higher outside of its gaming mode, so you do feel a delay when scrolling through menus or pausing content. 

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly with all supported resolutions when the TV's 'Content Type' is set to Game or PC, which is important for text clarity.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. HDMI Forum VRR and G-SYNC compatibility work over the entire refresh rate range, but it doesn't support FreeSync. However, as long as you have an AMD Radeon card from the past four years or so, you can use HDMI Forum VRR instead of FreeSync. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has poor pixel transitions at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. Its response time in Game Mode is very slow across the board, so fast motion is blurry and lacks clarity. 

The TV has poor pixel transitions at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. Its response time in Game Mode is very slow across the board, so fast motion is blurry and lacks clarity. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has poor pixel transitions at 60Hz. Like at 120Hz, its response time in Game Mode is very slow across the board, and there's also more noticeable persistence blur at lower refresh rates, so fast motion is very blurry. 

With the exception of 1440p, the TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

With the exception of 1440p and FreeSync Premium Pro, the TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

Since the TV's response time is slow, it has good stutter performance. There's some minor stutter in 24fps movies and shows that's most noticeable during slow panning shots, but it's subtle and not everyone will notice it. 

This TV removes 24p judder from any source, including those that output content in 60Hz, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies and shows.

The TV's response time is just okay. You don't notice any significant blur in movies and shows, but motion in fast paced sports is a bit blurry. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to control the backlight intensity. It flickers at 720Hz in all picture modes, which is high enough that it isn't noticeable, but it can still bother those sensitive to flicker.

With local dimming disabled, the TV is flicker-free at backlight settings between 15 and 50.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), which you can enable to improve the appearance of motion. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. With the 'Clearness' slider set to '1,' the TV flickers at 120Hz, which causes image duplication with 60 fps content. With the 'Clearness' slider set to '2,' the backlight flicker pattern is very unusual, flickering at both 120Hz and an underlying 720Hz pattern, similar to the Sony X90L/X90CL.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. It works well with smoothing out motion in slower-moving scenes when you use the settings conservativity. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with more aggressive settings, and there are very noticeable artifacts, haloing, and the TV periodically stops interpolating altogether. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has inadequate direct reflection handling. Direct light sources like a lamp or window opposite your screen are very noticeable since the TV barely reduces the intensity of those reflections.

There's only some minor black level raise in a room with ambient lighting, so you still get deep blacks with your lights turned on.

The total reflected light of this TV is sub-par. You easily see reflections on your screen during dark scenes when viewed in a bright room, and there's some obvious light banding present, which is distracting.

The TV's perceived color volume in a bright room is very good. Colors barely lose any saturation when they're exposed to light, so you still get punchy colors in a well-lit room.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has an alright viewing angle. The image looks mostly consistent from a slight angle, but there's significant gamma shifting, black level raise, and color washout that worsens the further you move off-center. Since image quality is noticeably degraded at an aggressive angle, the TV isn't a very good choice for wide seating arrangements. 

Unfortunately, the TV has poor gray uniformity. There's dirty screen effect towards the center, the corners are much darker than the rest of the screen, and there's vertical columns across most of the panel. All of this is most noticeable during brighter scenes and is distracting. The uniformity in darker scenes is much better, but the sides of the screen are a bit lighter than the rest of the image. 

The uniformity of a panel can vary between different units of the same TV, so it's very possible that other units aren't as bad as ours.

This TV uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause issues with text clarity in some applications when using it as a PC monitor.

It uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light and has high peaks on reds and blues. This model does have good separation between colors, giving it solid color purity and a wide color gamut.

HDMI ports 3 and 4 support the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, while HDMI 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. HDMI 3 is also the eARC port.

This TV 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 Sony BRAVIA 5 looks very similar to the Sony X90L/X90CL. It has a premium design with thin bezels, so it has a clean and modern look.

Like the Sony X90L/X90CL, the TV comes with two feet, but these ones are flat on the bottom. However, you can't widen the position of the feet like you can on the X90L and some other Sony models. You can adjust the height of the feet, though. The lower position (pictured above) gives you the best stability, but you can also raise the feet if you need to fit a soundbar underneath the TV. 

Like any modern Sony TV, the back has a checkerboard pattern. The inputs are on the left side of the TV in a recessed cutout, so even though they're still reachable when you have it wall-mounted, they're a bit hard to access. Unfortunately, there are no clips or grooves to help with cable management. 

The TV leans back a bit. It's not very noticeable from the front in the lower stand position, but the slant is more apparent in the raised stand position. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has good build quality overall, but there's a concerning amount of wobble and a noticeable slant when using the high stand position. These things are so bad that we suspect that this is an issue with quality control on our unit. 

Unfortunately, like most TVs, the interface contains ads. 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 remote has voice control and the typical buttons for popular streaming services. The remote that comes with the TV isn't backlit, but if you get the Costco variant of this TV, it comes with a backlit remote. 

• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• VESA adapters/screws
• Manuals and user guides

The Sony BRAVIA 5 has a good frequency response. Like most TVs, there's not much bass, so it's best to pair it with a soundbar if you want immersive audio. Fortunately, the TV's sound profile remains mostly balanced across all volume levels, so dialogue is clear enough to understand regardless of how loud you have the speakers.