SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2) vs TCL P7L / P79L

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.

The biggest limitation of the TCL P7L in HDR is simply brightness. The TV does not have much luminance headroom, so strong highlights, the sun or small light sources can't clearly 'pop' out of the picture. As a result, even well-produced HDR material looks fairly restrained and, in terms of dynamics, is closer to good SDR than to what brighter models show. That does not mean the P7L completely fails at HDR. The issue is primarily a lack of backlight power.

Looking at colours, the situation is a little better. The TV covers around 91% of the DCI-P3 gamut and about 68% of the wide BT.2020 colour space, so for this price class the colour range is quite respectable. TCL markets this model as QLED, although the nature of the solution used is closer to backlighting that uses a PFS phosphor than to a classic quantum-dot layer. What matters most to the viewer, however, is the effect: more saturated colours are on offer.

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.

In Film mode the TCL P7L performs quite respectably without major changes to the settings, particularly with ordinary SDR material. White balance is relatively even, though as brightness increases there is a slight rise in red and blue and a touch too little green. This does not, however, produce a strongly visible tint and most colours remain close to their reference points. The Colour Checker confirms this, with a large portion of errors falling below the level that should be particularly noticeable during normal viewing. We have more reservations about the gamma response. In the darkest parts of the image the TV runs it noticeably above the reference value, so some shadow detail can be a little too subdued. The characteristic then calms down and across much of the range it is close to the intended behaviour. As a result SDR generally looks natural, but in dark scenes the P7L can lose some subtlety.

In HDR the factory calibration is less precise. As brightness increases the excess of blue becomes more pronounced, which can make the image look cooler than it should. The number of larger colour deviations also grows, particularly in brighter hues. As for the EOTF curve itself, it is handled fairly conservatively, with the TV showing the image darker than the reference across much of the range. For such an inexpensive model, the factory Film mode settings are not bad.

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.

After calibration the TCL P7L can deliver a genuinely pleasant picture, especially with conventional SDR material. We managed to even out the white balance very well, and the gamma curve now tracks close to the target value of 2.4. This is also reflected in the colour measurements: most errors have fallen noticeably, and in everyday viewing it is hard to point to any obvious inaccuracies. Films, series, YouTube and ordinary broadcast TV therefore look more natural, without unnecessary warmth or a cool tint. For a model in this price bracket the SDR performance is really very good.

With HDR the situation becomes more complicated. Calibration helped improve the white balance and tidy up some deviations, but here the panel's limitations become increasingly apparent. The P7L has relatively low brightness and cannot maintain adequate luminance for more saturated colours, so some errors remain even after careful tuning. In other words, settings can improve the way the TV interprets the signal, but they cannot overcome its physical limits. That is why calibration makes most sense for this model primarily in SDR.

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.

In this respect the TCL P7L performs surprisingly well, especially for such an inexpensive TV. The banding-reduction feature, which in many budget models does little or nothing, actually manages to improve the picture here. It does not remove all banding entirely, but it can noticeably reduce posterisation and make more challenging gradients look more natural. At this price point that’s a genuinely pleasant surprise. Upscaling itself also performs well. Lower-resolution material is scaled correctly, without over-sharpening or adding artificial outlines around objects. Of course the P7L won’t turn a very poor source into a 4K-quality image, but for regular TV the result is simply solid. For a model in this class there is little to criticise.

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.

The TCL P7L uses a panel with a native 60 Hz refresh rate at 4K resolution, and that's how it should be regarded in everyday use. When watching films the TV mainly offers frame interpolation, so it can smooth motion and reduce the characteristic judder, but it does not deliver the fluidity typical of true 120 Hz panels.

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.

For such an inexpensive TV, the P7L has quite a lot to offer gamers. It has ALLM, VRR, Dolby Vision for gaming, and TCL also includes its Game Bar, which lets you quickly check the key information or change some settings without leaving the game. Not everything is perfect, though, because HGiG doesn’t work here as it should, but at this price point it’s hard to complain about the feature set. The most interesting part starts when you give up 4K. At that resolution the TV runs at up to 60 Hz, but at 1440p and 1080p it can display at 120 Hz. And that’s not just a line in the specs. In fast-paced games that support that frame rate you can really notice the improvement in smoothness, so if you value smoother motion more than maximum image detail, that mode can make a lot of sense. Of course, that doesn’t turn the P7L into a proper 120 Hz TV. Even so, those extra modes are exactly what make the P7L perform very well for gaming.