Sharp FQ8 vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

The Sharp FQ8 achieves a maximum brightness of over 450 nits, which is commendable for its price range. While this level might not be groundbreaking, it places the television among the better-performing models in its class. At this brightness, the image appears vivid and detailed, and the HDR metadata functions effectively, offering a more immersive viewing experience compared to dimmer devices.

The television supports the advanced Dolby Vision HDR format, enhancing the depth and richness of the content. It also includes Dolby Vision IQ, which adjusts the image's brightness and colours based on ambient lighting. However, the implementation of this feature on the Sharp FQ8 is suboptimal, introducing artificial brightening and noticeable distortions. For this reason, it is advisable to disable Dolby Vision IQ for the most accurate picture quality.

With quantum dot technology, the television achieves a colour gamut coverage of approximately 94%, resulting in vibrant and realistic colours. This combination of features ensures the Sharp FQ8 delivers an engaging and detailed visual experience, even with some limitations.

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 Sharp FQ8 was evaluated for colour reproduction in its movie mode, which provides the best default settings for achieving realistic visuals. While it performs adequately, certain issues impact the overall image quality. Tests on HD content revealed significant white balance problems, with a marked dominance of red. This is evident in the colour graph, where the red line noticeably rises above the others, and in practical tests, such as a movie scene featuring a child, where the image appears overly warm and unnaturally red. Similar issues persist with 4K HDR content, where an excessive red tint detracts from the accuracy of colour reproduction, an important consideration for viewers prioritising faithful visuals.

For SDR contrast, the gamma graph displayed an unusual anomaly at the start, highlighting reproduction issues. The remainder of the gamma curve lies below the reference line, indicating suboptimal brightness and contrast levels for standard content. In 4K HDR, the EOTF curve also deviates significantly, suggesting inconsistencies in brightness reproduction. These fluctuations can result in less enjoyable viewing experiences for HDR content, particularly in scenes requiring precise light and dark balance.

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, the Sharp FQ8 shows notable improvements in its performance for SDR content. The white balance has been significantly refined, with all lines approaching the reference line. While the lines are not perfectly straight, the results are impressive for a TV in this price range. This adjustment enhances the naturalness and accuracy of colours, contributing to a more enjoyable visual experience. However, the gamma chart still displays the peculiar jump at the start, though the remaining line now aligns much closer to the expected outcome.

For HDR content, the white balance also sees meaningful improvements compared to the pre-calibration state, although it doesn’t perform as well as in SDR mode. This refinement results in more consistent and visually appealing colours, despite some remaining imperfections. On the downside, the EOTF chart reveals limited progress in contrast due to the lack of control over dynamic tone mapping settings, which hampers uniform brightness representation in HDR.

Despite these limitations, the calibration significantly elevates the Sharp FQ8, particularly in SDR mode. The improved white balance and colour reproduction deliver a more natural and pleasant viewing experience. While HDR content still leaves room for improvement, the TV achieves a respectable level of performance, solidifying its position as a strong contender in its price range.

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 Sharp FQ8 performs adequately with its 10-bit colour reproduction feature, providing smooth transitions between grey shades in the light bulb photo. For optimal results, setting it to medium is recommended, as it avoids issues like grain smoothing or blurring key elements. The "low" setting also yields good results without introducing unwanted visual artefacts.

In terms of upscaling, the Sharp FQ8 TV handles video without overscan, making full use of the screen. The jagged edges of branches are noticeable, but the edges of trousers appear without any clear jaggedness, contributing positively to the overall image quality. Additionally, the TV's AI Super Resolution feature enhances clarity by artificially sharpening jagged elements, further improving the viewing experience.

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 Sharp FQ8 features a 120 Hz panel, able to support playback at 144 Hz when connected to a PC, which should theoretically provide smooth motion rendering. The TV includes features designed to enhance film fluidity and reduce motion blur, crucial for more dynamic content. However, in the absence of Black Frame Insertion (BFI) technology, the panel's average response time leads to less-than-ideal results. This results in slight motion blur, which may be particularly noticeable when watching sports or during intense gaming sessions.

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 Sharp FQ8 offers several features that cater to gamers, enhancing the overall gaming experience. Firstly, the television is equipped with HDMI 2.1, which brings several advantages. ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) automatically switches the TV to a low-latency mode when a gaming device is detected. VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) helps reduce screen stuttering by adjusting the screen’s refresh rate to match the number of frames generated by the console or PC, providing smoother gameplay, especially in dynamic games. Additionally, the TV supports G-Sync, which synchronises the image with the graphics card, preventing stuttering and screen tearing.

Despite these advantages, the FQ8 has some limitations. The lack of support for HGiG (HDR Gaming Interest Group) means the TV does not optimise the dynamic range for HDR games. Furthermore, while Dolby Vision mode can improve picture quality in supported games, it suffers from very high input lag.

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.