Philips OLED770 vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

The Philips OLED770 does not attempt to compete with the brightest OLEDs on the market, and it would actually be hard to expect that, as it is the lowest model in Philips's series for 2025. In our measurements, it achieved a maximum brightness of about 700 nits, which allows for enjoyment of HDR effects in scenes where light appears point-wise – for example, in the flash of headlights or a starry sky. In such moments, the picture can truly impress. However, it is different when there are more bright elements on the screen. The television, like many cheaper OLEDs, limits brightness in those cases, and the entire picture noticeably dims. This was best seen in a scene from the movie The Meg, where the sun rises behind an oil rig – at that point, the brightness dropped to about 250 nits, nearly three times less. The HDR effect remains visually pleasing, but it is worth being aware that this model performs best in scenes with less intense light. Fortunately, the OLED770 has an ace up its sleeve – the coverage of the DCI-P3 color palette is as high as 99%, so colors in movies and games are saturated and very close to what the creator intended to convey.

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 first measurements already show that the factory settings of the Philips OLED770 have a lot to improve even in Filmmaker mode. The white balance chart clearly shows a lack of blue, which gives the image a slightly yellowish tint. In practice, the white is not snow-white, but leans towards warmer hues – which some may even like, but from the accuracy perspective, this is a deviation from the norm. The gamma, on the other hand, tends to be on the darker side – the average value is about 2.6 instead of the reference 2.4. In the mid-tones, the image appears muted and more saturated, which may look too "filmic," but takes away some naturalness. However, the biggest issues can be seen in color reproduction. The average error is relatively high, and some colors – especially shades of gray – clearly deviate from what should be seen. In everyday viewing, this means that sometimes colors may look less natural than we would wish.

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.

Philips OLED770 has shown signs from the beginning that it houses significant potential, but it was difficult to fully see this in the factory settings. The image was sometimes too warm, and some colors seemed to have lost their naturalness along the way. However, calibration revealed that it is a television very receptive to adjustments – it reacted to every correction and almost immediately unveiled another layer of its capabilities. The white balance was successfully set both in SDR and HDR, eliminating the yellowish glow and presenting a neutral, clear white. Gamma stabilized closer to perfection, allowing midtones to regain their naturalness, and shadows no longer appeared artificially darkened, possibly even with a slight brightening effect. The effect was obvious... Movies are watched with greater ease; the image has cinematic depth, but without the feeling that something is exaggeratedly darkened. However, the most interesting part was the work on colors. Out of the box, the errors were not dramatic but slightly noticeable – skin tones were sometimes too warm, and gray didn’t always have the shade we expected. After calibration, the error values dropped to around 2, and in many cases even below 1. This is a level significantly lower than the threshold of perception for the human eye. In other words, after correction, the colors finally “clicked” into place. Looking at the screen, we had the impression that the television had begun to speak with a full voice. Like an instrument that has finally been well-tuned.

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 problem of the previously mentioned color connections can largely be mitigated by the "distortion reduction" feature, which is an algorithm for smoothing tonal transitions in Philips TVs. It works best at a low setting—effectively eliminating unwanted color bands while not introducing strange artifacts or losing image detail. It's one of those features that is truly worth keeping switched on.

The issue with upscaling is somewhat less favorable. The image from a lower resolution can be too soft, while at the same time, distinctive "jaggies" appear in certain areas. The impression is that the algorithm is trying to reconcile two contradictory directions—smoothing and sharpening—and ultimately hasn't found the golden mean. As a consolation, it's worth noting that the television has no issues with overscan, meaning it doesn't cut off the edges of the image, which sometimes happens with other competing models.

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 issue of the panel in the Philips OLED770 is not entirely straightforward. The manufacturer claims a 120 Hz panel, but our measurements showed that the screen can accept a 4K signal even at 144 Hz. This sounds like great news – because who wouldn't want an extra mode for PC gaming at this price? However, the reality turned out to be more complex. With 120 Hz materials, the television behaves like most OLEDs – the picture is absolutely clear, with no trace of ghosting or blurring, making it ideal for both fast-paced games and sports broadcasts. The problem arises only at 144 Hz. Unlike models with official support for that frequency, here we observe the phenomenon of so-called frame skipping. This means that the television is unable to display all frames – some of them are skipped, causing the motion to lose fluidity, and double outlines appear on the screen. The effect resembles the operation of the BFI function, which Philips does not offer in this model anyway.

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.

If someone is looking for a gaming TV, the Philips OLED770 is a candidate that's hard to ignore. The mere fact that we have an OLED here provides a great starting point – perfect blacks and infinite contrast make evening sessions in atmospheric games look like they’ve been pulled straight from the cinema. On top of that, there’s the Ambilight system, which features LEDs on the back of the TV that extend the image onto the wall behind the screen. The effect is such that even regular gameplay in FIFA can look like a small spectacle, and in horror games, the atmosphere becomes really intense. On the technical side, it’s pretty good as well. The Philips OLED770 supports Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) up to 120 Hz, has an automatic low latency mode for gamers (ALLM), and if someone is using an Xbox Series X, they can also count on Dolby Vision support in games. You just need to know that in this mode, input lag is slightly higher than standard, although still at an acceptable level. As a bonus, we get the “Game Bar” panel, which is a special tool strip for gamers. It's not the most conveniently designed solution, but it allows you to check key parameters without leaving the game. In total, this presents a picture of a TV that on one hand has all the most important gaming features, and on the other can add something unique – Ambilight. And it’s this mix of technology and visual effect that makes the OLED770 one of the better screens for gaming in a home environment.

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.