Philips PUS8500 vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

When it comes to the HDR effect on the PUS8560, it can fairly confidently be stated that it is very average. The panel brightness is around 350 nits, which we consider to be the absolute minimum for watching content in this format. However, this is not a result that will astonish a viewer searching for the best possible picture.

On the plus side, it is worth noting that the PUS8500 series – including the PUS8560/12 we tested – is advertised as a QLED television. And indeed, we can expect a wider colour spectrum here. This model is equipped with an additional filter (PFS), and a DCI-P3 colour coverage of around 90% should suffice for the majority of users. This filter works very similarly to quantum dots. As a result, the colours are quite well saturated. It is not an outstanding result, but it is entirely sufficient for watching films and series from streaming platforms.

Bravia 3 II is certainly not a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached about 450 nits, so it falls well short of the brightest models on the market. That does not mean HDR is just a paper feature. Compared with ordinary SDR material, the brightest elements of the image can already come through noticeably, and reflections, highlights and stronger exposures have a bit more energy and stand out better from the rest of the scene. This is most obvious in simpler shots where the screen displays many bright elements. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a hint of a higher dynamic-range picture. The problem only begins with more demanding content, where much greater brightness headroom is required. There the TV quickly shows its limitations and instead of powerful, striking HDR we get only a competently rendered picture.

Colours

Bravia 3 II uses a QLED-type panel, although technically it does not use a classic quantum dot layer. Instead Sony has used a solution based on PFS phosphor, which performs a very similar role: it allows more saturated reds and greens and thus enables a much wider colour gamut. In measurements DCI-P3 coverage was around 94%, and the very wide BT.2020 around 74.4%. These are good results for this class of hardware, which mean the Bravia 3 II has no problem reproducing sufficiently saturated colours in HDR content. Colours do not look washed out, and more intense hues can look genuinely attractive.

We tested the television with the best available factory settings, namely in Film/Filmmaker mode – this is the mode we recommend for everyday viewing. Unfortunately, it is not without its flaws. Both in HD and HDR content, the image had a noticeable tendency to a pink tint, caused by an excessive amount of red and blue in the white balance. Another issue turned out to be excessive brightness in the image, which was confirmed by both the gamma chart and the EOTF curve. This feature was responsible for loss of detail and washed-out colours in more challenging HDR scenes that we mentioned earlier. The overall result led to significant colour reproduction errors – in extreme cases, the delta E value exceeded 7, while the threshold for visible errors for the human eye is around 3. This situation can be improved with calibration, and you can read about its effects below.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II already 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. White balance isn't perfect either; as brightness increases the blue and red components become slightly lacking, so whites can at times take on a marginally warmer, faintly greenish tint. These are not faults that immediately catch the eye when watching a film. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory setting can be regarded as quite good. The situation is similar in HDR. Here too there is a slight lack of the blue component, so the image is marginally warmer than the reference, but the difference is not large enough to significantly interfere with normal viewing.

The Dutch manufacturer offers quite a sizable amount of settings in its products, so as usual, we decided to tinker with them a bit. The effects are immediately noticeable – we managed to correct the white balance, which made the image stop appearing excessively pink. The brightness characteristic has also been partially evened out, of course, within the limits set by the television itself. The image is no longer overly exaggerated, and the overall reception after calibration is definitely better than in the factory settings of the Filmmaker mode.

One could only critique the EOTF curve characteristic, which still indicates that the image has a tendency to brighten HDR materials. Despite our efforts, the darkest parts of scenes are still sometimes too bright, and the brightest ones do not always achieve their full contrast potential. However, it must be clearly stated that we are dealing with a typically budget construction – one cannot expect reference-level reproduction of HDR content from it.

Calibration has definitely helped this model – it improved the balance, toned down the aggressive colour palette, and brought the image closer to what one might expect from a well-configured movie mode. However, there are certain limitations that cannot be overcome.

After calibration, there is particularly a lot to be gained from SDR content. The white balance was set almost perfectly, the gamma practically matches the reference value, and the average colour errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That is already a level at which differences from the reference image are, in practice, very difficult to detect. The Bravia 3 II therefore shows that, despite its position in Sony’s lineup, it has quite a lot of potential for precise picture calibration. Improvements are also visible in HDR, although here it is no longer possible to avoid all the limitations of the TV itself. After evening out the colours, it is easier to notice that the EOTF curve in film content runs slightly below the reference value in places, so the Bravia 3 II gently darkens part of the image. This is not an ideal solution from a reference point of view, but in this particular TV it also has its benefits. With no local dimming and average black levels, this behaviour slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps maintain a stronger impression of contrast. So you could say Sony partly masks the limitations of the panel this way, instead of trying at all costs to stick to the reference luminance.

Philips PUS8560 offers a function for reducing posterization, hidden under the name "distortion reduction". And although it indeed fulfills its role by smoothing out problematic tonal transitions, it works a bit too broadly. In practice, it affects not only colourful gradients but also softens faces, the textures of clothing, and the surfaces of furniture. This compromises the authenticity of the image – especially in films where natural texture is very important. However, if someone is looking for smoothing at all costs, it's best to set this option to "Low". For cinema image enthusiasts – we definitely do not recommend it.

On the positive side, the quality of upscaling older materials is noteworthy – the PUS8560 model handles them surprisingly well. The image retains its natural softness, without artificially boosted sharpness. It is also worth mentioning that the television correctly displays content with very low resolution, avoiding issues with image edge cutting (so-called overscan).

The Bravia 3 II is Sony's first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, and there are a few changes in image processing. Starting with the basics. The upscaling itself is adequate. The TV can sensibly pull up lower-resolution material and does not have a strong tendency to over-emphasise jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or weaker streaming material the picture therefore remains quite pleasing. 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 role is essentially very similar: it is supposed to smooth unpleasant tonal transitions and artefacts resulting from heavy signal compression. Unfortunately, this function performs noticeably worse than before. At the "High" setting (the only one that had any visible effect) the TV can smooth away too many elements of the image at once, causing film grain to disappear and the texture of objects or even skin to start looking unnatural. Worse still, the effect is not particularly stable. When a scene contains more motion, the function's effect clearly weakens and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the picture altogether. For everyday viewing we therefore would not recommend using it at a high level. It can help on a static shot, but the price is often an excessive loss of detail.

The Philips PUS8560 is a television equipped with a panel featuring a refresh rate of 60 Hz, which immediately limits its capabilities in terms of displaying dynamic content. Watching sports or playing on a console is not particularly enjoyable. The situation is further worsened by the lack of any option to improve the smoothness of films. In the menu, we won't find settings that would allow us to enable a motion smoother or even a slight motion smoothing for films recorded at 24 frames per second. You can imagine the effect. The image can appear jerky, especially in shots with panoramic camera movements.

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

Although the Philips PUS8560 is not designed with gamers in mind, the manufacturer has decided to equip it with a few features that may prove useful when connecting a console. On board, we find automatic switching to game mode (ALLM), as well as a simple connection status information bar – the so-called Game Bar. It does not make a particularly strong visual impression, but it serves its purpose. The presence of variable refresh rate (VRR), operating in the range of 48 to 60 Hz, may come as a surprise. While this is not a wide range, in the case of less demanding games or titles with unstable frame rates, VRR can help reduce screen tearing. However, this is the only element that could be considered beyond the minimum.

It must be made clear that the PUS8560 is not equipment for gamers looking for a responsive screen and full support for modern console features. It lacks HDMI 2.1 ports, the refresh rate is limited to 60 Hz, and the response time of the panel is not among the fastest. This model may be suitable at most for casual gamers who want to enjoy the Ambilight system.

Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been implemented exactly as we would like. The biggest change concerns the connectors. For the first time in a Sony TV we get as many as four full HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset. That removes one of the issues that has plagued this manufacturer’s TVs for years. We can connect several devices at once and on each input use the device’s full capabilities, for example VRR or ALLM. There is also a simple Game Bar that lets you view 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. However, there are two limitations worth knowing. The first is the lack of support for 1440p at 120 Hz. That will not be a problem 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 does not allow you to disable the TV’s tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the screen is always processing HDR content even when you would prefer to leave that task to the console. This is most obvious during HDR setup — the checkerboard pattern does not disappear at the point that corresponds to the TV’s actual capabilities. That does not mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to approach the setup a little differently and, instead of relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to around 450 nits. The issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start setting up the console.