LG QNED80A6A (IPS) vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

When it comes to image dynamics and brightness, the QNED80A keeps its feet firmly on the ground. It’s not a "light beast" – during our measurements, peak luminance hovered around 350-400 nits. To put it bluntly: these are values that won't fully unleash the potential of HDR formats. So don’t expect the glare of the sun or car headlights in films to blind you. However, this television has a powerful ace up its sleeve that saves the overall image quality – it's the colours. LG engineers have employed an advanced filtration system (technically based on phosphor PFS, marketed as QNED/NanoCell), which does a fantastic job. Thanks to this, despite average brightness, the screen can generate exceptionally saturated and pure colours. Our instruments showed coverage of the wide cinematic DCI-P3 colour gamut at around 93-94%. This is a result that outclasses most standard LCD televisions. In practice, this means that when watching 4K HDR content, the image – although not very bright – is very vivid, lively, and delights the eye with its depth of colours.

The Bravia 3 II isn't exactly a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached around 450 nits, so it's well short of the brightest models on the market. That doesn't mean HDR is just a paper feature here. Compared with standard SDR material, the brightest parts of the image can already punch through noticeably, and highlights, light sources and stronger exposures have a bit more energy and stand out better from the rest of the scene. You can see this best in simpler shots where the screen contains lots of bright elements. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a taste of a higher-dynamic-range picture. The problem only starts with more demanding content, where much greater brightness headroom is needed. There the TV quickly shows its limits and instead of bold, spectacular HDR we’re left with a merely competent picture.

Colours

The Bravia 3 II uses a QLED panel, although technically it doesn't employ a traditional quantum-dot layer. Instead Sony has used a PFS phosphor-based solution, which performs a very similar role: it allows for more saturated reds and greens, and thus reproduces a much wider colour gamut. In our measurements coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut was about 94%, and of the very wide BT.2020 around 74.4%. Those are good results for this class of hardware, which means the Bravia 3 II has no problem showing suitably saturated colours in HDR material. Colours don't look washed out, and the more intense hues can look really attractive.

Here, regardless of whether you come across the VA or IPS version, the situation looks identical. LG engineers have once again served us their vision of a "gaming look," which unfortunately has little to do with accuracy. When switching to a console, the white balance automatically shifts to very cold regions. The image is dominated by blue, making it seem artificially sharpened, and the white is so aggressive that it almost burns out. This creates an effect we associate with garish retail modes – everything is meant to shine and scream "I’m digital." While some may like this, we must say it bluntly: it is not an accurate image. If you care about naturalness, we suggest you immediately check the settings and change the colour temperature to a warmer one.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II delivers a fairly good level of colour reproduction straight out of the box. In SDR the most noticeable issue is a slightly low gamma, which makes the midtones a little brighter. The white balance isn't perfect either; as brightness increases a bit of blue and red drops away, so whites can sometimes appear a touch warmer with a faint greenish tint. These aren't mistakes that immediately jump out when watching a film. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory setup can be considered quite good. The situation in HDR is similar. Here too there's a slight lack of blue, so the picture is marginally warmer than the reference, but the difference isn't large enough to be distracting during normal viewing.

After professional calibration, the QNED80A in the IPS version has changed beyond recognition, especially with "ordinary" content (SDR). We managed to eliminate the greenish tint and calm down the overly bright gamma. In classic television or older games, colour errors (DeltaE) have fallen below the threshold of perception (value < 2). The image is now coherent, natural, and truly pleasing to the eye. The situation is somewhat more complicated in HDR mode. Although the colours are now in place, the TV struggles with perfect brightness control (EOTF curve). Due to the limitations of edge lighting and the rather poor adjustment options provided by LG in this area, the TV's software at times "does what it wants" just to mask the imperfections of black and contrast. However, this is not a cause for concern – despite these technical limitations, the image after calibration is a class above what you saw out of the box.

After calibration you can get a lot out of SDR material. The white balance was set almost perfectly, gamma practically matches the reference value, and average colour errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That’s already the level at which differences from the reference image are very hard to spot in practice. The Bravia 3 II therefore shows that despite its place in Sony’s range it has quite a bit of potential for precise picture tuning. Improvement is also visible in HDR, although here you can’t avoid all the limitations of the TV itself. Once the colours are evened out it’s easier to notice that the EOTF curve in film material runs slightly below the reference value in places, meaning the Bravia 3 II gently darkens parts of the image. That isn’t ideal from a reference point of view, but in this particular TV it also has an advantage. With no local dimming and average black levels this behaviour slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps preserve a stronger sense of contrast. You could say Sony is partly masking the limitations of the panel this way, rather than trying at all costs to stick to the reference brightness.

It often happens that cheap 4K TVs mercilessly expose the flaws of low-resolution materials. Here, it's different. The QNED80A is great equipment for watching content that isn’t perfect. The processor does a great job of scaling the image, making even older recordings look quite decent on the 4K screen – they are consistent and free of digital noise. Interestingly, there’s a gradation reduction feature available in the settings. It’s particularly effective in combating what is known as banding in low-bitrate materials. Of course, you need to approach it with some caution. Due to the lower processing power of the chip (in comparison to the premium series), turning on this option can sometimes result in unwanted artifacts or blurring. Despite this risk, we encourage experimentation, as in many cases this feature can save a viewing of low quality.

Bravia 3 II is Sony's first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chip, and you can see a few changes in the image processing. Starting with the basics: the upscaling itself is decent. The TV can sensibly upscale lower-resolution material and doesn't have a strong tendency to over‑emphasise jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or lower-quality streaming material the picture therefore remains quite attractive.

We have more reservations about the digital image processing. In this model Sony has replaced the well-known "Smooth Gradation" function with a new setting called "Digital Noise Reduction". Its job is basically the same: to smooth out ugly tonal transitions and artifacts caused by heavy compression. Unfortunately, this function performs noticeably worse than before. At the "Large" setting (the only one that had any visible effect) the TV can smooth away too many image elements at once, which causes film grain to disappear and object textures or even skin to start looking unnatural. Worse still, the effect is not particularly stable. When there's more motion in a scene, the function's effect noticeably weakens and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the image altogether. So for everyday viewing we wouldn't recommend using it at a high level. It can help on static shots, but the trade-off is often too much loss of detail.

When it comes to motion reproduction, the QNED80 unfortunately has a bit of a disadvantage. The TV is built on a 60Hz refresh rate panel, which is quite disappointing for the QNED series in 2025. If you're looking for perfect sharpness in dynamic football matches, you might feel a bit let down. The solution in this situation is the TruMotion system. It allows for artificially adding frames, which smooths out the picture in movies and TV shows. In the menu, you'll find a De-Judder slider – we recommend setting it to a value of 2, 3, or 4. This is the "golden mean" that improves fluidity without turning the film into a soap opera.

Motion handling is definitely one of the Bravia 3 II's strongest points. The TV uses a 120 Hz VA panel, a solution that by nature, despite the high refresh rate, doesn't always cope well with motion blur. Sony has, however, managed that issue very well here. Fast-moving objects remain sharp, and the characteristic motion trails and blur are reduced to a very low level, if not to zero. It's one of the least motion-blur-prone LCD TVs we've had the chance to test. Interestingly, in this respect the Bravia 3 II can even outperform the much more expensive flagship True RGB series, the Bravia 9 II.

In the gaming section, we won't be pulling the wool over your eyes – the QNED80A is not e-sports equipment. The lack of 120Hz signal support is a fact to accept. However, LG's engineers have done everything to squeeze the maximum potential out of this 60Hz panel, providing gamers with a desirable set of features. Above all, the TV supports VRR (in the range of 48-60Hz) and ALLM. This means the image is smooth and doesn't stutter, and the TV automatically switches to low latency mode as soon as you grab the controller. Accessing these options is ridiculously easy thanks to the dedicated system overlay – Game Dashboard. It's also worth appreciating the support for the HGiG format. This is a nod to owners of modern consoles. Even though the screen doesn't support gaming Dolby Vision, HGiG ensures that the TV "understands" how to display games in HDR. This helps avoid the effect of blown-out clouds, which is unfortunately a plague on cheaper LCD TVs.

The Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been solved the way we’d like. The biggest change concerns the connectors. For the first time in a Sony TV we get four full HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset. That removes one of the problems that has hung over this manufacturer’s TVs for years. You can connect several devices at once and on each input use the device’s full capabilities, including VRR and ALLM. There’s also a simple Game Bar that lets you check the key signal parameters and change a few useful settings, such as black level, when you want to improve visibility in darker parts of a game.

There are, however, two limitations worth knowing. The first is the lack of support for 1440p at 120 Hz. That won’t be an issue for everyone, but people using that resolution on a console or PC—for example to get higher frame rates in certain games—will have to choose 1080p. We have more reservations about HGiG support. Sony doesn’t let you disable tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the TV keeps processing HDR even when you’d prefer to leave that task to the console. It’s easiest to spot during HDR setup—the checkerboard test pattern doesn’t disappear at the point where it should based on the TV’s actual capabilities. That doesn’t mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to set up a little differently and, rather than relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to about 450 nits. So the issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start configuring your console.