Hisense UR8S vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

UR8S is a slightly higher-end Mini-LED, so you could expect a lot in terms of brightness. And indeed, on a synthetic test pattern the peak brightness reached around 2200 nits. That's a very good result, but as always what matters more is what the TV does in normal film scenes. Here the results are a bit more uneven. In bright scenes with a lot of light on screen, the UR8S can deliver really strong HDR. Brightness then reaches about 1500 nits, so the image is very intense and has a lot of punch. It's worse with small bright elements on a dark background. The TV noticeably dims them to maintain good blacks and avoid excessive blooming. As a result, things like single stars or tiny specular highlights can be only around 200 nits. And here HDR is no longer as impressive. So the local dimming algorithm works effectively, but it comes at a cost, sometimes it simply sacrifices the brightness of small details too much in favor of contrast.

Colors

With RGB Mini-LED TVs, colors should be evaluated a bit differently than usual. If we look solely at the panel's capabilities, the UR8S performs great. We measured about 94% coverage of BT.2020 and practically full DCI-P3. These are among the highest values currently found in LCD TVs, and this is where the potential of RGB backlighting is most apparent. The problem is that this potential isn't always used in real scenes. When we ran the same measurements on patterns with an overlaid film background, the saturation of some colors dropped noticeably. Individual zones can't always control the three RGB components as precisely when the scene becomes more complex. This is most noticeable with blue and magenta. In simple test patterns they can look very strong, but in tougher scenes samples of those colors clearly shrink. So the UR8S has enormous potential, but the TV can't always make full use of it.

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.

For evaluating out-of-the-box colors we used Filmmaker mode, which is supposed to show the image as close as possible to how the material was intended. Looking at white balance alone, the UR8S does quite well. There is no strong color cast that immediately jumps out, although as brightness increases a bit too much blue and red appear while green becomes deficient. Color errors therefore show up in measurements, but the image itself does not look bad.

We have far bigger reservations about how the UR8S manages image brightness. In SDR the gamma stays around 1.9 to 2.0 for most of the range instead of the target 2.4. In practice this simply means the image is too bright, especially in the midtones. Shadows are lifted too much, so the image loses some depth. A similar trend is visible in HDR. The EOTF curve sits above the reference value for a large portion of the range, so the UR8S again brightens the image more than it should. This is not a matter of the TV lacking brightness; it has plenty of it. The issue is how it manages that brightness. As a result, HDR material can look very striking, but not always exactly as it should.

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.

Hisense offers quite a few calibration options, and in SDR you can achieve a really good result with them. After calibration, the white balance is practically uniform across the entire range, and color errors drop to very low values. The UR8S can be adjusted very precisely here. HDR looks a bit different. The white balance itself can also be noticeably improved, although at the highest brightness levels larger deviations start to appear. What's most interesting, however, is the behavior of the EOTF curve. Even after it is properly set on test patterns, the UR8S can still interpret brightness its own way during movie playback. Depending on the scene, parts of the image are slightly brightened while others are darkened compared to how they should look. This shows that the algorithms responsible for backlight control have a fairly large impact on the final image. So calibration can greatly improve colors, but we can't completely "turn off" the way the UR8S manages brightness in HDR.

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.

A major advantage of the UR8S is its MediaTek Pentonic 800 processor, and digital image processing is one of this model’s strengths. The TV handles smoothing tonal transitions very well, especially with lower-quality sources. The feature responsible for this effect works effectively without overly interfering with the picture. Even at the medium setting it can noticeably reduce visible banding and unevenness without heavily blurring details. Upscaling also performs very well. Lower-resolution content is displayed cleanly, edges look natural, and the image isn’t overly sharpened. The UR8S simply copes very well with weaker signals, and in that respect it’s one of its clear strengths.

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.

The UR8S is equipped with a panel that has a native 180 Hz refresh rate, so it already offers great potential for smooth motion. The panel itself performs really well, though some limitations typical of VA panels are still visible. Smearing is relatively low for this type of screen, but with faster motion (especially on darker backgrounds) it can still be noticed, particularly when compared with the same image on OLED TVs.

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 gamer features the UR8S performs really well. The TV supports practically everything you’d expect from a modern console or PC display. It offers ALLM, VRR, and 4K at 120 Hz. It also supports Dolby Vision in game mode, so when using an Xbox Series X you don’t have to give up that HDR format. PC gamers get even more options. The panel can run at 4K/180 Hz, and dropping to Full HD can raise the refresh rate up to 330 Hz. There’s also a Game Bar that lets you quickly view key information and change gaming-related settings. The only clear shortcoming is a proper implementation of HGiG. With it enabled the TV still interferes with HDR brightness mapping, so we don’t get the effect intended by that standard. Aside from that, the UR8S is very well prepared for both consoles and a powerful PC.

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.