Philips PUS8359 (VA) vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

Philips PUS8359 didn't impress us with its performance in HDR materials. This model is capable of generating a maximum brightness of 320 nits, and often even less. Such results, combined with the lack of support for HDR Dolby Vision, mean that the image will be significantly darker compared to the source material. Therefore, it would be more beneficial for this television to play SDR content. This is also suggested by the quite low coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut at 83%, resulting in significant colour deficiencies. The fact remains that the television supports an HDR format based on dynamic metadata; however, HDR10+ is such a niche format that it doesn't offer any major advantages.

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.

The best factory mode in terms of fidelity to the source material was "Film". This is what we used during our tests. Just like every other factory mode in televisions, it had its drawbacks. So we'll check what exactly was wrong with both SDR and HDR materials. In both cases, the white balance exhibited an excessive dominance of the green and red colour combination. This created a yellow tint spreading across the entire image, causing issues such as yellowed whites and problems with skin tones. This state of affairs was perfectly illustrated on the "ColourChecker" palette, where each of the tested samples was pushed towards its warmer counterparts. The foundation of the image is primarily contrast and black. These are represented by gamma charts and the EOTF curve. Looking at the first one, we can see a true rollercoaster, as both elevated and lowered gamma can be observed. The heavily elevated gamma caused visibility issues in black levels, whereas the lowered gamma resulted in a dramatic reduction in contrast. In this context, the EOTF curve performed significantly better, as it only slightly brightened the image.

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.

Philips provides a wide range of image calibration tools in both its higher-end and budget models. We utilised these tools and got to work, which wasn’t as easy as many of you might think. While we managed to model the white balance, significantly improve the gamma, and refine the EOTF curve in both cases, the deltaE errors remained exceptionally high. There are several reasons for this situation, which are directly related to the low coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and the maximum brightness of the unit in HDR material.

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.

In this paragraph, we will look at two functionalities. We will once again take a look at the feature responsible for tonal transitions, but we will also check how the television handles image scaling. The option responsible for smooth gradation is called "Distortion Reduction." As we have established, it quite effectively smooths out inconsistencies. However, we must point out two things: we cannot enable it for HDR material, and it blurs details in films.

The tested television does not boast the best image scaling. The overall blurriness of the image is quite noticeable, but what’s worse, it blurs details. This is particularly evident on the branches and hair of the model. There is also a characteristic white halo around the character.

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.

Philips PUS8359 will not be the best television for sports. The reason for this is the lack of implementation of even the basic motion smoothing feature, which was to be expected given the price of the device. We also note that we are dealing with a VA panel, whose sharpness does not stand at the highest level by itself. This type of panel is mainly associated with high contrast, which comes with a rather slow response time, as we can clearly read from the matrix analysis results. As you can see, from the pictures captured in fast motion, the image is blurred typically for this type of panel. While it may not be the ideal option, it can conditionally be used for watching sports; however, one must keep in mind the less-than-sharp motion. It is worth mentioning that movies will be characterised by judder since the television does not possess any, not even the simplest, motion smoother.

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.

It won’t be a surprise if we say that Philips PUS8359/12 only has the most basic support for consoles. Once we connect the console, we can expect features like VRR and ALLM. This is quite pleasing for the former, as life has shown that even in more expensive units, there can be issues with this. A nice touch is the implementation of a special GameBar that allows changing settings on the "fly", so we won't have to exit the gameplay and become unnecessarily distracted. This feature also allows for adapting the gameplay to the needs of individuals with disabilities, which will certainly be extremely beneficial.

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.