Hisense U8Q vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

When it comes to HDR, Hisense U8Q shows its claws. On paper, meaning in synthetic measurement tests, the television can "score" nearly 4000 nits of peak brightness. That's a value that most models can only envy. In practice, this translates to very strong lighting effects in films – in some scenes, we managed to measure a real 1500 to 2000 nits, which is a level usually reserved for the absolute top of televisions on the market.

Of course, it's not always that perfect. With small, pinpoint elements, brightness can drop – a good example is scene number 4 from the movie Sicario 2, where instead of thousands of nits, we get around 500. But it's worth noting that the effect doesn't vanish completely – the light is still visible, and the image doesn't feel artificially dimmed. This is a typical drawback of Mini LEDs, so it's hard to consider it a significant minus.

On the huge plus side, color reproduction deserves high praise. Thanks to additional coatings that improve color saturation, the U8Q nearly covers the full DCI-P3 color space (98%), and in the case of the wider BT.2020 gamut, it achieved a score of over 80%. This is an excellent result, making HDR films look juicy, vibrant, and simply very cinematic.

Bravia 3 II is certainly not a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached about 450 nits, so it's far from the strongest designs on the market. That said, HDR here is not just a paper feature. Compared with regular SDR material, the brightest parts of the image can already punch through, and reflections, highlights, or 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 many bright elements appear on screen. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a hint 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 strong, striking HDR we get only a correctly rendered picture.

Colors

Bravia 3 II uses a QLED-type panel, although technically it does not use a traditional quantum-dot layer. Instead Sony applied a PFS phosphor-based solution that serves a very similar role: it allows for more saturated reds and greens and thus lets the TV display a much wider color gamut. Measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut and about 74.4% of the very wide BT.2020. Those are good results for this class of hardware, meaning the Bravia 3 II has no problem showing adequately saturated colors in HDR content. Colors don't look washed out, and the more intense shades can look really attractive.

We have to admit that when the U8Q arrived at our editorial office, we were slightly surprised… and positively so. Usually, televisions require immediate white balance correction – it can be too warm or too cold, which immediately leads to strange color errors. Meanwhile, here the situation looks really good right out of the box. Of course, we are talking about our unit, so there’s no guarantee that every model will be tuned as well, but in our case, the first impressions were very positive. The only more pronounced issue was related to how the television manages brightness. Looking at the EOTF chart, it is evident that the U8Q tends to brighten small elements on the screen. This, in turn, caused what we mentioned earlier – slight overexposures and the impression that the entire scene can sometimes be a bit too bright. However, this is not a flaw that undermines the image, rather it is a characteristic effect of this model.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II, straight out of the box, delivers a fairly good level of color reproduction. In SDR the most noticeable issue is a slightly low gamma, which makes the midtone areas a bit brighter. White balance is not perfect either; as brightness increases there is a slight lack of blue and red, so whites can sometimes take on a slightly warmer, mildly greenish tint. However, these are not errors that immediately stand out while watching a movie. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory preset can be considered quite good. The situation is similar in HDR. Here again there is a slight deficiency in the blue component, so the image is a touch warmer than the reference, but the difference is not large enough to be significantly distracting during normal viewing.

Of course, we wouldn't be ourselves if we didn't make adjustments to the white balance. After calibration, we managed to align the SDR signal to near perfection – older movies, YouTube content, and classic television looked almost perfect on the U8Q. This is truly an outstanding level that shows this model can do a lot if given a little help. Unfortunately, the situation is different with HDR content. The colors themselves aren't a major issue, but the biggest flaw of the U8Q remains the EOTF brightness characteristics. In practice, the TV tends to "blow out" beyond how the image should look in its original form. It's that slight "blown out" effect we saw earlier in comparisons with the best screens on the market. It's a bit of a shame that this characteristic can't be fully tamed – if we could maintain similarly good control over brightness in HDR as we do in SDR, we would have an absolutely reference-quality image.

After calibration you can get a lot out of SDR content. The white balance was set almost perfectly, gamma practically matches the reference value, and average color errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That's a level at which differences from the reference image are, in practice, very hard 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 tuning. Improvements are also visible in HDR, although here you can no longer work around all of the TV's limitations. After equalizing the colors 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 slightly darkens part of the image. That's not ideal from a reference standpoint, but in this particular TV it also has an advantage. With no local dimming and average black levels, this behavior slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps maintain a greater sense of contrast. So you could say Sony partially masks the limits of the panel that way, rather than trying at all costs to stick to the reference luminance.

The Hisense U8Q handles lower-quality materials quite well. The TV can smooth out tonal transitions thanks to the "Smooth and Gradient Picture" feature – it works best when set to Medium. At that setting, it nicely reduces unwanted bands and unevenness in the image, but importantly, it does not remove cinematic grain or fine details.

The upscaling itself is also at a good level. Images from lower resolutions look smooth and soft, at times even a bit too much – we get a plastic effect that may not appeal to everyone. Fortunately, this can be easily adjusted with the sharpness slider to fit personal preferences.

The Bravia 3 II is Sony’s first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, and you can see a few changes in image processing. Starting with the basics: upscaling is solid. The TV can sensibly upscale lower-resolution material and doesn’t have a strong tendency to overemphasize jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or lower-quality streaming the picture remains quite pleasing. We have more reservations about the digital image processing. In this model Sony replaced the well-known "Smooth Gradation" feature with a new setting called "Digital Noise Reduction." Its role is essentially the same: to smooth unpleasant tonal transitions and artifacts caused by heavy compression. Unfortunately, this feature performs noticeably worse than before. At the "Large" setting — the only one that noticeably affected the picture — the TV can smooth away too many image elements at once, causing film grain to disappear and surface textures or even character skin to start looking unnatural. Worse, the effect is not very consistent. When a scene contains more motion the function’s effect weakens significantly and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the image altogether. For everyday viewing we therefore don’t recommend using it at a high level. It can help on a static shot, but the price is often too much loss of detail.

Hisense U8Q has a display that can refresh the image up to 165 Hz in 4K resolution. In practice, this will mainly be utilized by PC gamers, but as they say – it’s better to have it than not 😊. For movies and series, we have a built-in smoothness enhancer called Ultra Smooth Motion. In the settings, it can be easily adjusted to personal preferences – whether we want more of a "cinematic" frame rate or a smooth, theatrical spectacle.

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. Here Sony has managed to get that problem very well under control. Fast-moving objects remain sharp, and the characteristic trails and blurring are reduced to a very low level, if not to zero. It's one of the least smearing 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 terms of features, the Hisense U8Q has practically everything one could expect from a modern gaming television. Thanks to the new processor, the manufacturer has managed to implement as many as three HDMI 2.1 ports, so there is no problem connecting multiple consoles or a computer. In addition, it includes all the key technologies – Game Bar with parameter monitoring, variable refresh rate (VRR), automatic low latency mode (ALLM)... in short, a complete set.

But as is often the case with Hisense, it falls a bit short of perfection. The biggest drawback remains the lack of support for the HGiG format, which allows you to adjust the television's brightness to the console and get the most out of HDR in games. It's a shame because if this feature were included, we would have a device practically made for gamers. As it stands, the U8Q remains "just" a very good choice 😉

Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been handled the way we'd like. The biggest change concerns the connections. 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 long-standing issues that has plagued the manufacturer's TVs. You can connect several devices at once and use each input's full capabilities, including VRR and ALLM. There's also a simple Game Bar that lets you check 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. This won't 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 disabling tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the TV continuously processes HDR content even when you would prefer to leave that task to the console. You can most easily notice this during HDR setup. The checkerboard pattern does not disappear at the point corresponding to the TV's actual capabilities. That doesn't mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to approach the setup a bit differently and, instead of relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to about 450 nits. The issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start configuring your console.