Hisense A6Q vs Sony BRAVIA 7 II

The Hisense A6Q is unfortunately difficult to recommend for watching HDR content. The main issues are low brightness and rather modest coverage of a wide colour gamut. The measured brightness of around 300 nits simply isn't sufficient for HDR materials to look impressive. In practice, the picture often resembles standard SDR instead of true HDR with clear differences in brightness and dynamics. Additionally, the colours in such materials do not appear as they should. The television does not utilise additional filters such as QLED or PFS LED, and the coverage of the DCI-P3 colour space at around 80% means that some colours look rather washed out. Consequently, some scenes in HDR materials lose intensity and spectacle, making it difficult to speak of a full HDR experience.

The Sony Bravia 7 II handles HDR very well and, above all, is simply a bright television. In the correct viewing mode, Professional, we measured around 2,000 nits of peak brightness, so the panel’s capabilities are truly significant. Of course, with Mini-LEDs a test pattern result is only part of the story, because a lot still depends on how the TV controls the backlight in real scenes. Here Sony’s algorithms perform very well. Depending on the scene, the brightness we measured in films ranged from roughly 1,100 to as much as 1,700 nits. That’s already a level at which HDR has proper punch and bright highlights can be genuinely impressive. It isn’t perfect in every situation, though. With small bright elements on a very dark background the Bravia 7 II clearly favours maintaining good blacks, which can cause their brightness to drop to around 500 nits. It still looks good, but you can see the TV does not always manage this without compromise.

Colours

The second thing that has a huge impact on HDR is, of course, colour. And this is precisely where True RGB technology was meant to bring one of the biggest changes. Looking at the panel’s capabilities alone, the Bravia 7 II performs very well. We measured about 98% DCI-P3 coverage and 88% BT.2020, so the potential to show strongly saturated colours is really large. In RGB TVs, however, the situation is a bit more complex. When we repeated the same measurements with a film background applied, palette coverage fell to around 92% DCI-P3 and 78% BT.2020. Those are still good figures, especially for an RGB Mini-LED TV, but they clearly show that the final result largely depends on how the algorithms control the three backlight colours. In most scenes the Bravia 7 II handles this well and colours retain high saturation. The biggest differences are visible in shades of blue, where samples begin to deviate more noticeably from reference values and coverage is weaker than for the other primary colours. True RGB therefore offers genuinely greater potential here, but, as with brightness, much depends on what is happening on screen.

We conducted the tests in the best available mode, namely Filmmaker, however – as is often the case – this does not mean an ideal image straight out of the box. In the case of Hisense A6Q, this mode clearly "swallowed" too much blue in everyday SDR content. In practice, this led to an image with a yellowed white, particularly noticeable on large, bright surfaces. This is not due to poor assumptions of the Filmmaker mode itself or the vision of filmmakers, but rather the factory settings requiring adjustment.
Furthermore, looking at the saturation characteristics and the gamma curve in SDR, as well as EOTF in HDR content, there is a slight tendency to brighten most scenes. As a result, the image often appears brighter than it should, losing a bit of its naturalness. For this reason, we decided to perform a professional calibration to restore the proper colour balance and a more accurate brightness characteristic.

To evaluate the factory colours we chose the Professional mode, because it performs best among the available settings. However, it is not perfect. In SDR the white balance drifts slightly towards magenta, making some scenes look a little warmer and less neutral than they should. A bigger problem is the gamma, which sits closer to 2.5 than to 2.4. This makes the image a bit too dark in places, particularly in the midtones. In HDR the situation is better. As brightness increases a little too much red appears, but this is not an issue that is highly noticeable during viewing. Overall the Professional mode is a good starting point, although you can get a bit more out of it after calibration.

The colours after calibration in the Hisense A6Q should be assessed in two ways, as everything depends on the type of content. In the case of SDR material, the effect is truly very good. In everyday programmes, series, and films, it is difficult to spot any serious problems with colours. The yellow tint has been effectively removed, and the television no longer brightens the entire image. As a result, the ColorChecker test showed errors below Delta 2 values, which are already outstanding results, allowing us to speak of very high image quality in standard content. Unfortunately, the situation looks significantly worse in the case of HDR material. Yes, the white balance has been corrected and the EOTF curve has been improved, but the limitations of the panel itself remain insurmountable. The lack of support for a wide colour gamut means the television still generates quite significant colour errors. Certain colours simply cannot be displayed by the screen, making them appear less saturated than they should be. It's a shame because even a simple PFS or QLED filter would significantly improve the final effect. The conclusion is therefore simple – the A6Q is really very well suited for SDR content after calibration, while watching HDR content on it should still be approached with caution.

After calibration the Bravia 7 II can look decidedly better. Above all, we managed to set the white balance very well, both in SDR and HDR. Gamma can also be improved, which after correction runs very close to the reference value. And in fact, for most users these changes will have the greatest impact on the picture. There is, however, a limitation when it comes to the colours themselves. In the Bravia 7 II Sony does not provide access to a classic CMS that would allow us to correct individual hues separately. A lot is therefore left in the hands of the algorithms controlling the True RGB backlight. If the TV misrepresents a particular colour, we are not always able to do anything about it. In our measurements this is most visible in certain reds and blues, where errors can still be quite large. This does not, however, undermine the point of calibration itself. Correctly setting the white point and gamma strongly affects the whole picture, so even without the ability to precisely correct every colour the difference compared with the factory settings is noticeable.

Upscaling on the Hisense A6Q works quite decently for a television in this price range. Materials of lower resolution are correctly "upscaled" to a higher one, and the image remains clear without artificial edge enhancement or the typical "over-sharpening" found in cheap models. Unfortunately, the digital processing is significantly worse. In practice, it is difficult to speak of any advanced artifact smoothing or problematic tonal transition masking. In heavily compressed films – especially those from YouTube – the television practically struggles with reducing compression blocks and unwanted banding, making the imperfections in the material clearly visible. The A6Q scales the image well, but when it comes to digital processing, it leaves the user alone with the quality of the source.

Scaling and digital processing are among the strongest points of the Bravia 7 II and one of the bigger reasons to choose Sony over the competition. The manufacturer has been handling digital image processing well for years, and it shows here too. First and foremost, the 'Smooth Gradation' function works very well and can smooth out weak tonal transitions in lower-quality material. The safest setting is Low, but we would comfortably recommend Medium as well. The effect is stronger then, yet the TV still treats details very gently. Some fine details may be slightly smoothed, but Sony does this much more subtly than many other brands. The upscaling itself also performs very well. Lower-resolution material is well upscaled to 4K, the image looks clean and retains a lot of detail. Of course the TV will not magically turn native HD material into true 4K, but what can be extracted from such a source is handled really well by the Bravia 7 II.

The motion fluidity of the Hisense A6Q is… well — quite mediocre. It’s a television with a native refresh rate of 60 Hz in 4K, which means that the motion of objects on the screen doesn’t always look perfectly smooth. In dynamic scenes in movies or sports, it’s clear that this isn’t the strongest feature of this model. The situation improves significantly with 1080p content when connecting a console or computer, as the A6Q can operate even at 120 Hz then. This is a big plus, especially for gamers. Nevertheless, the clarity of motion still leaves much to be desired; blurring is noticeable, and the response time of the panel indicates that it is not one of this television’s strong points.

The Bravia 7 II uses a 120 Hz panel, so in terms of motion handling it delivers everything you would expect from a TV of this class. With sport or games at 120 fps, the picture is suitably smooth, and for films Sony provides an extensive motion interpolation system. You can therefore adjust the interpolation level separately and decide whether you want to preserve a more cinematic character to the motion or obtain noticeably smoother movement. The issue of motion blur itself is a little worse. The VA panel used is not among the fastest, and you can notice a slight trail behind moving objects, particularly on darker backgrounds. It is not at a level that greatly bothers during normal viewing, but last year’s Bravia 7 fared better in this respect and had a noticeably faster panel.

For such an inexpensive television, the Hisense A6Q can truly surprise with what it offers to gamers. It operates in 4K only at 60 Hz, but when a game switches to performance mode and drops to 1080p, the panel can work even at 120 Hz. This is a significant advantage in this price range, as most titles on consoles don't achieve stable 4K at 120 frames per second anyway. In practice, we are realistically playing at 1080p, and here the A6Q provides very enjoyable gaming experiences. On top of that, there are several features usually found in more expensive models: ALLM, VRR, and Dolby Vision Gaming for Xbox Series X/S. Everything is gathered in one place, in a simple and convenient Game Bar, so there's no need to dig through the entire menu. For such an affordable piece of equipment, it's a really solid set for gamers — perhaps not for the most demanding, but certainly spot on for occasional gaming.

Bravia 7 II has basically everything you’d expect today from a good console TV. It supports 4K at 120 Hz, VRR from 48 to 120 Hz and ALLM, so when you start a game the TV automatically switches to a low-latency mode. It also has properly working HGiG, which means that after configuring HDR on the console the TV won’t try to brighten the image further on its own. You just need to remember to turn off tone mapping in the TV’s menu. Dolby Vision in game mode is also a plus, especially useful for Xbox owners. Sony adds its own Game Menu. From it you can quickly check key signal information, verify VRR operation or change gaming-related settings without digging through the whole TV menu. The only thing missing from the feature list is support for 1440p at 120 Hz.

Our biggest reservation is not really about the functions themselves, but about the connectors. The Bravia 7 II has four HDMI ports, but only two of them support full HDMI 2.1 at 48 Gbps. One of those is also an eARC port. So if you connect a soundbar or AV receiver to the TV via HDMI, in practice you’re left with only one full HDMI 2.1 for a console or PC. With a single console that’s no problem, but with a PS5, an Xbox and an audio setup it starts to get tight. And this is hard to excuse for Sony. In cheaper TVs two HDMI 2.1 ports can still be acceptable, but in a model of this class, especially in 2026, we would expect a full set of four such ports.