Philips OLED769 vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

The Philips OLED769 performs admirably in film scenes featuring small bright elements. With peak brightness reaching around 800 nits, the TV handles light sources like street lamps or stars with remarkable vividness and detail. However, its limitations become evident during scenes with full-screen brightness, such as sun glare, where brightness drops to approximately 250 nits. This is a common challenge for more affordable OLED models, which often struggle to sustain high brightness across the entire display.

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.

The "Film" mode on the Philips OLED769 proved to be the most faithful factory setting for preserving the source material, and it was the basis for our tests. However, like other factory presets, it has a few flaws. Let’s break down the key issues observed in SDR and HDR content.

In both formats, the white balance exhibited a noticeable dominance of green and red tones. This led to a yellowish tint across the image, resulting in yellowed whites and slightly unnatural skin tones. This was particularly evident in the "ColourChecker" palette, where colour samples leaned toward warmer shades.

In terms of contrast and brightness, two critical graphs tell the story: the Gamma curve for HD content and the EOTF curve for 4K HDR content. For SDR, the gamma value dips below the ideal 2.4 level, causing lighter parts of the image to appear overly bright. This overexposure reduces detail and depth in bright areas. In contrast, the EOTF curve for HDR content performed admirably, accurately maintaining details in both bright and dark regions. This ensures realistic, dynamic scene reproduction that enhances the overall viewing experience.

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 professional calibration, the Philips OLED769 truly excels in colour accuracy. Any yellow tint previously seen in HD and 4K content is now eliminated. The Colour Checker test shows minimal deltaE errors, occasionally exceeding a value of 2, which indicates a nearly perfect representation of the director's intent.

When it comes to contrast, the results are equally impressive. For 4K materials, there was little room for improvement initially, but the gamma curve has been significantly refined. This leads to a more accurate rendering of dark and bright areas, resulting in a dynamic and realistic viewing experience.

Thanks to the calibration, the full potential of the television has been unlocked. The Philips OLED769 now delivers vibrant, natural, and high-quality images, making it an excellent choice for movie lovers and multimedia users.

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.

When it comes to lower-quality materials, the distortion reduction in the Philips OLED769 does well in smoothing tonal transitions, especially at the minimum setting. It's worth noting that film grain is not blurred, which is a positive surprise, as such negative phenomena often occur with other manufacturers. Overall, this is quite a decent solution. However, it should be pointed out that this setting does not work in HDR mode, where gradation issues are much more pronounced. In HDR mode, the TV struggles with smoothing tonal transitions and may exhibit more noticeable distortions and noise, reducing image quality in dynamic scenes.

As for digital processing, the Philips OLED769 performs well. The model in the photo is not overly jagged, and the branches in the background lack characteristic jagged edges. The TV achieves this effect thanks to the absence of artificial sharpness, which may be an advantage for some users. However, others may find this less attractive as they prefer a more pronounced, sharper image instead of a subtle effect. This effect can be mitigated using a higher setting for the "Sharpness" parameter.

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 Philips OLED769 features a multi-stage motion smoother called "Motion Style," which will satisfy users who value the ability to customize motion fluidity in movies. Thanks to this function, the image can be set to be more frame-like or fluid, resembling a theatrical effect. This is a great solution for those who want to match the displayed content to their visual preferences. Gamers will also be pleased, as the TV, like most OLEDs, is equipped with a 120Hz panel. This provides extraordinary fluidity and image dynamics. Unfortunately, the Philips OLED769 lacks BFI (Black Frame Insertion) functionality, which could further improve motion fluidity and sharpness. Despite this limitation, it offers excellent visual experiences for cinema and gaming enthusiasts, one of its main strengths.

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 Philips OLED769 was created with gamers in mind, offering full compatibility with consoles and the highest-quality gameplay. The television received the maximum rating in this category, providing everything one could desire. With HDMI 2.1 ports fully supporting ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) and VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), the television ensures smooth and hassle-free gaming. ALLM automatically switches the TV to low latency mode, and VRR eliminates stuttering and screen tearing, resulting in fluidity and stability in gameplay. The Dolby Vision feature for gamers is another advantage, though it only works at 60 Hz. Most casual gamers are unlikely to feel the lack of a higher frequency, but more demanding users may have some reservations. This allows for enjoying a dynamic range of tones and realistic images, enhancing the gaming experience. PC gamers will also not be disappointed, as the Philips OLED769 offers full compatibility with Nvidia graphics cards, thanks to support for G-Sync. This technology synchronizes the TV's refresh rate with the graphics card, eliminating tearing and stuttering, translating to excellent image smoothness.

The Philips OLED769 is a television that perfectly meets the needs of gamers, offering a wide range of advanced features and technologies that significantly improve game quality and user comfort.

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.