Sony BRAVIA 2 II (S25M2) vs Philips OLED811

Sony Bravia 2 II is not a very bright TV and unfortunately that is immediately apparent in HDR. In our measurements brightness stayed around 300 to 330 nits, which is definitely too low for the brightest parts of the picture to look truly impressive. In practice HDR here does not differ that much from ordinary SDR. Bright highlights, the sun, or lamps are of course visible, but they lack the intensity you would expect from HDR material. The Bravia 2 II therefore performs much better with regular SDR content, and it is in that use case that its limited brightness will be least noticeable.

Color gamut coverage

Sony Bravia 2 II also doesn't impress when it comes to colors. The TV doesn't use any additional gamut-expanding filter, such as the quantum dots found in QLED TVs or a PFS phosphor layer. In our measurements DCI-P3 coverage was about 78%, and the very wide BT.2020 around 57%. That's definitely too little to talk about truly saturated colors in HDR content. More intense reds, greens, or turquoise hues will simply be less striking than on TVs with an expanded color gamut. The Bravia 2 II therefore fares much better with standard Rec.709, the gamut used for movies, series, and TV in SDR.

Philips OLED811 uses the new generation WOLED EX panels, also found in models like the LG C6 and Samsung S90H. After calibration we measured around 1500 nits, which is a very good result for an OLED TV. You can see it clearly in movies and series. All kinds of light flashes have the right intensity, especially when they appear on a dark background. In such scenes the OLED811 can deliver truly impressive HDR. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll see that peak brightness in every shot. When the screen is filled with a large area of white or a big explosion, brightness falls to around 600 nits. That's still a good result, but those scenes no longer have the same punch as small, bright elements on a dark background. This is a known limitation of OLEDs, and the OLED811 is no exception.

Colors

Aside from HDR brightness, colors also matter, and Philips performs very well here too. It covers almost the entire DCI-P3 gamut, which contains most of the colors used in HDR movies and series. So you get rich reds and lush greens, and while watching it's hard to find major faults in this area. It looks a bit worse with the much wider BT.2020 gamut — its most saturated shades are already beyond the reach of this panel. Added to that is the issue of the white subpixel the WOLED panel uses to help boost brightness. With very bright colors you can see some "whitening": the color is bright but loses some of its saturation. In exactly these situations QD-OLED panels from Samsung Display have the advantage. In most movies and series, however, this won't be something that immediately stands out.

Out-of-the-box color reproduction in Cinema mode was really good, at least for ordinary SDR material. The Bravia 2 II had a slight tendency to boost reds, so some colors skewed a bit warmer, at times with a faint pinkish tint. However, it wasn't a major fault, and during normal viewing the picture still looked quite natural. There was a bit more going on with image brightness. Looking at the gamma trace, you can see Sony doesn't stick exactly to the reference value. The darkest parts are slightly lifted, while as brightness increases the gamma gradually rises and a larger portion of the image becomes darker than it should. That said, the difference isn't large enough to seriously interfere with everyday viewing. Overall, SDR straight out of the box performs pretty well.

The situation is much worse in HDR. We already mentioned the limited color gamut, but the Bravia 2 II also manipulates image brightness quite aggressively here. The EOTF curve sits below the reference for a large part of the range, which means the TV renders most midtones and brighter parts of the scene darker than the source material intends. Only toward the very end of the range does the curve flatten out, as the panel reaches the limits of its capabilities. Combined with a peak brightness of around 300 nits, this results in HDR that not only lacks punch but can simply look too dim.

The movie mode on the Philips OLED811 is sensibly configured right out of the box. Most color errors are minor, both in SDR and HDR, so you can sit down and watch without first adjusting the settings. There are no major inaccuracies that would immediately pull attention away from the film.

It's not perfect, though. The white balance shows a slight deficiency of red compared with green, so whites and grays can have a faint greenish tint. It's not a strong cast, but measurements clearly show it. There are also small brightness deviations in SDR: some areas of the picture are slightly lifted, and the deepest blacks aren't always rendered evenly. In HDR the TV tracks the reference much more closely, although in places it slightly pulls details out of the shadows. These are generally things to refine. The factory movie mode provides a good starting point, and calibration will show how much more you can get out of it.

Calibration did a lot for the Bravia 2 II, especially with SDR content. Above all, we were able to even out the white balance and tidy up the gamma, which now sticks much closer to reference values. As a result, the picture no longer has the previous pink tint, and the brightness of individual areas is much better balanced. You can also see this in the color errors, which dropped to a very low level after calibration (with minor issues in the most saturated reds).

We also partially tamed the Bravia 2 II in HDR, particularly in how the TV manages image brightness. However, there is one thing no calibration can fix: the panel's inherent limitations. The narrow color gamut means the TV physically cannot reproduce the most saturated colors present in HDR content. On top of that, the IPS panel's low contrast leaves darker scenes veiled by a grayish glow, causing colors to lose some of their depth. So we can improve how the Bravia 2 II uses its capabilities, but unfortunately we can't overcome the panel's fundamental limits.

After calibration the Philips OLED811 produces an image very close to the reference. We managed to even out the white balance and remove the subtle color cast visible in the factory settings. Errors in Color Checker measurements for SDR and HDR dropped to around 1 to 2, and many samples even fall below 1. That's a level at which it's hard to spot differences from the reference image with the naked eye. We also improved the gamma, and only in the brightest whites a slight brightening remains. In HDR the EOTF curve also stays close to the reference, although the TV still tends to slightly boost the brightness of small elements like stars or subtitles. That gives the image a bit of extra glow that shouldn't be there, but otherwise there's little to complain about. It was already good out of the box, and after calibration we managed to refine most of the remaining shortcomings.

Upscaling in the Bravia 2 II performs quite well, and in that respect the TV maintains the standard Sony has accustomed us to. Lower-resolution content is sensibly scaled to 4K, with the image slightly smoothed and without over-sharpening edges. It’s a different story when it comes to improving content with visible compression. That’s handled by the "Digital Noise Reduction" feature, which on the "High" setting can indeed smooth out some ugly tonal banding. The problem is it does so fairly aggressively, removing a lot of fine detail along with the imperfections, including natural film grain. Moreover, when there’s more motion on screen its effectiveness drops significantly and the improvement becomes minimal. So we generally avoided using this feature in everyday viewing.

The OLED811 handles lower-quality content reasonably well, though it's far from perfect. The "Artifact Reduction" feature helps smooth tonal transitions and on the low setting delivers a pretty good result. It doesn't remove banding between shades as effectively as similar solutions from some competitors, but at least it doesn't introduce new artifacts. That's a sensible setting for everyday viewing. Still, there's some disappointment, because the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chip used here can, in other manufacturers' implementations, deal more effectively with heavy compression even at similarly low settings. A lot therefore depends on how each manufacturer uses its capabilities. We have a few more reservations about the 4K upscaling itself. There is plenty of detail, but the overall image looks fairly soft. Edges are heavily smoothed, which robs the picture of some sharpness and clarity. You can partly correct that with the sharpness slider in the menu, though that will just emphasize outlines rather than recover detail. On the plus side, there is no overscan, so even with an SD signal the TV does not crop the edges of the picture.

The Bravia 2 II uses a 60 Hz panel and, given its capabilities, handles motion quite well. However, keep in mind this is a basic panel, and its limitations are already noticeable, especially with sports. The TV cannot interpolate 50/60 fps content to a higher refresh rate, so it can't further improve the sharpness of fast-moving objects. For movies and series, you get a standard motion smoother that can reduce the characteristic judder of material shot at 24 fps.

In terms of motion handling, the OLED811 performs excellently. At 120 Hz, which is useful for console gaming and watching sports, the image stays clear and moving objects don’t leave noticeable trails. The fast response of OLED pixels helps here; you can see it clearly in the UFO test, even on dark backgrounds. There are also motion-smoothing controls. For movies you can adjust the strength of smoothing to your taste, ranging from preserving a cinematic feel to much smoother motion. A separate motion blur reduction control is useful for fast-paced content like live sports broadcasts.

The Bravia 2 II is not a TV particularly well suited for gaming, and the feature list makes that clear pretty quickly. You basically only get automatic low-latency mode (ALLM) and a simple Game Bar where you can view basic signal information and change a few settings. But that's where the list of advantages ends. The TV doesn't support VRR or 120 Hz (not even at lower resolutions), and on top of that it has problems with a proper implementation of the HDR HGIG format. It can, of course, be used for occasional console gaming, and thanks to low input lag controls stay responsive, but if you're mainly looking for a TV for gaming, the Bravia 2 II will simply be a very limited choice.

OLED811 has almost everything you could expect from a gaming TV. It supports 120 Hz at Full HD, 1440p and 4K resolutions, and when connected to a PC can reach 165 Hz. It also has VRR, which helps avoid screen tearing with variable frame rates, and ALLM, which automatically switches to game mode. So you don't have to dig into the settings every time you power up your console.

HGiG also works correctly, so once you enable HDR on the console the TV doesn't apply its own brightness adjustments. There's also a Game Bar that lets you check signal parameters and quickly change settings useful while gaming. The list even includes Dolby Vision for games, but there's a significant catch, which you'll read about below.