XIAOMI S Mini 2026 (55"-75") 60Hz vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

When it comes to HDR, the capabilities of the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 are really good, especially given the segment this model belongs to. The set reaches roughly 1,000 nits of brightness without much trouble, allowing it to deliver a very pronounced HDR effect in bright scenes. Sun highlights, reflections, and brightly lit parts of the image can be very intense and at times almost blindingly bright. It’s a little different in dark scenes, though. Very small light sources surrounded by black are shown at significantly lower brightness, so they lack the point-like intensity seen in the best TVs. This is not unusual for a Mini LED. The local dimming algorithm limits the backlight to keep blacks as deep as possible, which in those scenes matters more than a few extra nits.

HDR Colors

Color reproduction also performs well. Xiaomi markets the S Mini 2026 as a QLED TV, although the solution used here is practically based on a PFS phosphor. What matters most is the result, and it’s quite good. Our measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut, while in the much wider BT.2020 space it was around 74%. That means the TV can reproduce most of the colors used in HDR films with suitably high saturation. Its limitations are most visible only with very saturated shades of green, where the color range starts to fall short.

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 Xiaomi S Mini 2026 in 55–75-inch sizes in Film mode, which offered the most accurate colors compared with the other presets. That said, the picture wasn't perfectly set up out of the box. In our unit the white balance was clearly shifted toward warmer tones. There was too little blue and too much red, so whites and grays had a slightly warm tint. The TV also tended to brighten darker parts of the image too much. This came from the gamma, which instead of staying around 2.4 sometimes dropped to about 2.0. That made more shadow detail visible, but the picture lost some depth. The factory settings weren't bad, but they still needed tweaking to reproduce the image correctly.

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.

Contrary to appearances, the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 responds quite well to calibration. After our adjustments we were able to noticeably improve the white balance, and the picture stopped leaning too warm. With SDR content the result is really good, the TV can display such images very accurately, and it's hard to find major faults in its color reproduction. We applied similar corrections in HDR as well, though not everything could be fixed. Colors look better than at factory settings, but the TV still tends to render the image slightly brighter than it should. You can see this in the EOTF curve, which sits above the reference value. In practice this means some HDR scenes are brighter than the creators intended. This is a quirk of this TV and we can't do anything about it.

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 in the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 is handled by the MT5896 processor. Unfortunately, in this respect the TV performs rather average. Low-resolution content is not upscaled very well, and its limitations become quickly apparent on a large screen. The image looks quite digital, and the TV can't extract many additional details from it. Additionally, you cannot disable overscan for low-resolution material. Things are even worse when it comes to smoothing posterization. On the smaller models there isn't even a dedicated feature to reduce the visible banding between similar shades. So if such imperfections are already present in the source material, Xiaomi effectively does not mask them.

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 smaller variants of the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 use a 60 Hz panel, and that's their biggest limitation when it comes to motion. For movies and TV series this isn't yet a major issue, because the TV has a classic motion smoothing for 24/30 fps content. So we can reduce the characteristic judder and adjust motion to our own preferences. Sports and other 50/60 Hz content fare worse, because there is no additional feature to improve smoothness. With that kind of material we are therefore limited by the panel itself.

In terms of motion blur the TV performs quite typically for a VA panel. Most trailing is visible behind objects moving on a dark background, while in brighter scenes the effect is noticeably smaller. It's not at a level that completely ruins motion perception, but in dynamic scenes you can tell the panel isn't among the fastest.

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.

In larger sizes the Xiaomi S Mini 2026 becomes a far more interesting option for gamers. The panel natively runs at up to 144 Hz, so when connected to a PC we can take advantage of the high refresh rate even in 4K. At lower resolutions the TV can go even further and reach up to 288 Hz. There’s also ALLM, automatic switching to game mode, and a Game Bar with the key settings at hand. Of course, the TV is equipped with two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. In terms of smoothness, the difference compared to the 55 to 75 inch versions is therefore substantial and especially noticeable when using a PC or console. Not everything works perfectly, though. As with the smaller variants, we have reservations about the HGiG implementation. The HDR setup screens on the PS5 and Xbox don’t exactly match the TV’s real capabilities, so if you configure the consoles according to those prompts the brightest parts of the image can be blown out and lose some detail.

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.