Hisense UR9S vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

The Hisense UR9S is without a doubt a show of strength from the Chinese manufacturer when it comes to luminance. On a synthetic test pattern the panel reached as much as 2600 nits, which is an impressive result. But you have to clearly separate lab results from film realities. In real material the UR9S behaves much more restrained. Peak brightness in balanced scenes hovers around 1500 nits. In demanding, dark shots—where the algorithms must at the same time preserve deep blacks and precisely light small details—brightness can drop drastically, even down to around 400 nits. The gap between the chart and reality is therefore huge. This is a direct consequence of conservative local-dimming behavior. When a bright object occupies a large portion of the frame, the system can easily maintain a high luminance. But in night scenes the priority becomes protecting black levels and fighting the halo effect (unsightly glows around bright edges). To avoid degrading contrast, the TV drastically limits its light output. Even so, the UR9S can still produce a very powerful, engaging HDR effect that impresses in bright, spectacular sequences.

Color gamut coverage

On test patterns the Hisense UR9S performs excellently in terms of color. DCI-P3 coverage is nearly 100%, and BT.2020 coverage reaches 93%. Those are figures even the best QD-OLED TVs don't achieve. But again, synthetic measurements are one thing and movies and series are another. In real-world scenes the numbers fell to 93% for DCI-P3 and 81% for BT.2020. That's still great, but the advantage of RGB Mini LED is no longer as dramatic as manufacturers promise in marketing materials. You could even say their capability is now close to TVs equipped with quantum dots, the so-called QLEDs. Why does this happen? Largely, color reproduction depends on how the local dimming zones operate. When a highly saturated color appears next to white or another, more complex element, a single zone must handle both parts of the image at once. Under those conditions the backlight cannot maintain extreme saturation of a given color on the screen, because the emitted light takes on a character closer to white. Hisense refined this quite well in the UR9S, but still not enough for the TV to sustain such high color saturation in every situation.

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 tested the Hisense UR9S in Filmmaker Mode, which, by default, provides the most accurate image reproduction. In HDR content the TV performed quite well in that regard. White balance did not show large errors, and the luminance curve, though typical for Hisense, was at a reasonable level. So the image was neither overly bright nor noticeably color-shifted. The same mode fared much worse with SDR content, meaning the content we watch most often, such as broadcast TV or YouTube. White balance was strongly shifted toward red and blue, giving the image a slightly pink tint. This also affected the gamma curve. Instead of approaching the reference value of 2.4, it was closer to 2.0, which made the image look too bright, especially in midtones and darker areas. Filmmaker Mode therefore remains the best out-of-the-box choice, but it's not without flaws.

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.

After calibration we saw the biggest improvement in SDR mode, though we also refined the HDR picture. Hisense offers a lot of calibration settings in the TV's menu, so we could precisely correct the white balance and other image errors. The most important change was removing the pink cast that had previously been clearly visible in SDR content. After calibration the picture looks much more natural, especially in everyday content such as TV or YouTube.

Color reproduction errors on the ColorChecker chart are very small after calibration. The vast majority of colors fall below a Delta E of 2–3, meaning at a level very hard for the human eye to detect. The only thing we couldn't completely eliminate is the characteristic HDR tone mapping typical of Hisense TVs. It affects how brightness is distributed in movies and can subtly "beautify" the image, rather than strictly following the creators' intent. For a less experienced viewer this can produce a stronger "wow" effect, but it won't always fully match how the content should look.

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.

Digital image processing has been one of Hisense's strengths for two years, and the UR9S is no exception. The manufacturer uses the Hi-View AI Engine RGB processor, which is essentially based on the well-known MediaTek Pentonic 800 platform, previously used, among others, in the U8Q. The TV handles upscaling lower-resolution material to 4K and low-bitrate content very well, where various compression-related artifacts are common. Thanks to a feature called "Smooth and Gradient Picture", the image remains detailed without appearing overly sharpened or artificially smoothed. When watching regular TV or older, lower-quality material, the UR9S can pull a surprising amount out of them. In terms of digital image processing, this is one of the most refined LCD TVs we've had the chance to test.

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 Hisense UR9S is one of the first TVs on the market with a 4K panel and a 170 Hz refresh rate. In the larger sizes, 75 and 85 inches, that goes up to 180 Hz. Such a high refresh rate will mainly be useful to owners of very powerful PCs. We still watch movies and series mostly at 24 fps, and sports broadcasts at 50 fps, so in everyday use panel response time and the performance of motion smoothing are more important. In that respect the UR9S performs very well. Motion blur is minimal, as our UFO test also confirmed. Moving objects do not leave a pronounced trail, so the picture remains clear even in fast scenes.

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.

The Hisense UR9S is very well prepared for gaming. All three HDMI ports are HDMI 2.1 and offer the full 48 Gb/s bandwidth. The TV supports 4K at 170 Hz, and on larger screen sizes even 180 Hz. On top of that there are VRR, ALLM, NVIDIA G-Sync and AMD FreeSync, so in terms of core features there’s little to complain about. PC gamers can also enable DLG mode. After switching the resolution to Full HD the refresh rate can increase to as much as 330 Hz. That’s probably an option for a narrow group of users, but it shows how much headroom the panel has. Hisense also added a Game Bar that lets you quickly change key settings, check the refresh rate, or enable a reticle and minimap zoom. The biggest downside remains the lack of a properly working HGiG. The TV keeps using its own tone mapping, which makes setting HDR on a console a bit more difficult. In our case values between 1500 and 2000 nits worked best, but it’s worth checking which setting still preserves all the details in the brightest parts of the image.

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.