Sony A95L OLED TV Review

The overall design of the Sony A95L is very impressive. With incredibly thin bezels and a nearly frameless design, it looks great in any room.

Sony has abandoned the odd stand design on the Sony A95K OLED, instead opting for a more traditional design, with two feet set at opposite ends of the TV. The 55-inch and 65-inch models support either Standard or Soundbar positions, both of which require a large cabinet if you're not planning on wall-mounting it. The 77-inch model also offers a Narrow position, which requires about 23" of space.

Footprint of the 65-inch TV:

• Standard position: 56.8" x 13.3" x 0.4"
• Soundbar Position: 56.8" x 13.3" x 3.0"

The back of the TV features textured plastic with a checkerboard pattern that's typical of Sony TVs. The inputs are close to the side of the TV and easy to reach if you wall-mount it. The back includes covers for cable management, giving you a very clean setup overall.

The TV leans back about 1.5°, but this isn't at all noticeable when watching TV.

The Sony A95L has fantastic build quality. It feels very premium and is built with solid materials. The stand supports the TV well, with minimal wobble. There's some flex to the back panel, but this is very common on any TV and doesn't cause any issues.

The Sony A95L has a QD-OLED panel, which is a type of OLED panel, and it has a near-infinite contrast ratio. This allows it to display perfect blacks even immediately next to the brightest highlights.

Since pixels can be completely turned off next to pixels that are lit up to their maximum brightness, the blacks surrounding bright elements are perfect and don't have any blooming.

As with other OLED TVs, this TV doesn't have a backlight, but its self-emissive pixels give it the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature with no zone transitions. We still film the zone transition video on the TV so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a TV that has local dimming.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and Game Mode.

The Sony A95L has excellent peak brightness in HDR. It's bright enough to bring out very bright specular highlights, even in very bright scenes. Overall, it delivers a very impactful HDR experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Professional
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 90
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High

The Sony A95L is dimmer in the Standard (Game) mode than the calibrated picture modes. It's still bright enough to deliver a great HDR experience overall. For a better overall Game Mode performance, see the cheaper Samsung S89C OLED.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Standard (Game)
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 90
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High

The PQ EOTF tracking of this TV with HDR10 content is nearly flawless. There are a few minor bumps along the way, but most scenes are displayed at exactly the brightness level the content creator intended. There's an extremely sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness, causing a loss of bright details in extremely bright scenes.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with low-level tone mapping on this TV when watching Dolby Vision content. Some shadow details are raised and brighter than they should be, and there's a very slight greenish tint in some content. This varies between content and even between individual units, as some owners and other reviews have reported a pink tint instead of green. This is even noticeable as a full-screen flash during the initial handshake when Dolby Vision content starts playing.

The Sony A95L has great peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to easily handle glare in most rooms, even if you have a lot of windows or bright lights. Like all OLEDs, it struggles with extremely bright scenes, but this isn't very noticeable in real-world usage.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Professional
• Brightness: 100
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• Peak Luminance: High
• Gamma: 0

This TV has a superb color gamut in HDR. It can display the entire DCI-P3 color space used by most HDR content, and color accuracy in that color space is nearly perfect. It also has excellent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, and again, the tone mapping is fantastic. Pure blues and greens are slightly off, but it's very minor and not noticeable in most content.

The color volume of this TV is fantastic. Thanks to its nearly infinite contrast ratio, it displays dark saturated colors perfectly, and the QD-OLED panel delivers much brighter color details than traditional WOLED TVs like the LG G3 OLED.

With just a few quick settings changes out-of-the-box, the Sony A95L has exceptional SDR accuracy. There are no noticeable issues in the white balance or overall color accuracy, and the color temperature is very close to the ideal target. Gamma is nearly perfect, but bright scenes are slightly darker than they should be.

Although this TV doesn't need to be calibrated, the calibration system is easy to use if you choose to do so. On our specific unit, we had to adjust the 2-point white balance and then the 10-point, at which point colors didn't need any further tuning.

You can see the full calibration settings used here

The gray uniformity of this TV is amazing. Bright scenes with uniform colors look incredible, with very little dirty screen effect in the center. Dim scenes look great, but in near-black scenes, there's noticeable vertical banding. Although faint vertical bands are a common issue with all OLED displays, it's worse on the Sony A95L, and other owners have reported the exact same issue.

The Sony A95L has perfect black uniformity, with no cloudiness at all.

The Sony A95L has an outstanding viewing angle. Although it isn't perfect, you won't have any issues using it in a wide seating area as people viewing it from the side see the same image as in front.

The Sony A95L has fantastic reflection handling. The intensity of bright lights is significantly reduced, and with the TV on, they're hardly noticeable. Like the Sony A95K OLED, there's a slight purple haze to the screen when there's ambient light, but it's significantly less noticeable.

The gradient handling in HDR is nearly perfect, with almost no noticeable banding in any color. There's some very slight banding in shades of gray, but it's hardly noticeable.

The Sony A95L has great low-quality content processing. It's very effective at smoothing out macro-blocking and pixelization when streaming content, with almost no loss of fine details.

The Sony A95L has superb sharpness processing and upscaling overall. Fine details in low-resolution content are upscaled well, and text is clear and easy to read.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Sharpness: 60
• Reality Creation: Auto

The QD-OLED panel on the Sony A95L uses a unique subpixel structure. Unlike most TVs, the pixels aren't in a row; instead, they form a triangular shape, with the green pixel on top and the red and blue pixels on the bottom. It results in some color fringing when displaying content with black bars on the top and bottom, as you'll see a thin green line at the top and a thin red line at the bottom. The subpixel structure isn't ideal for PC use as it causes some issues with the text clarity, which you can learn more about in the Dell Alienware AW3423DW review. Windows ClearType can't correct it, but there are workarounds like using third-party software to improve text clarity or increase the scaling.

Like all OLED displays, the Sony A95L has a nearly instantaneous response time, resulting in incredibly clear motion with minimal ghosting behind fast-moving objects. There's some overshoot in shadow details, but it's minor and not really noticeable.

The Sony A95L isn't technically flicker-free because there's a slight dip in brightness every 8 ms, which coincides with the refresh rate. However, it isn't the same as pulse width modulation on LED TVs because it isn't a full on and off, and it's not noticeable.

The Sony A95L has an optional black frame insertion feature to reduce persistence blur. It only flickers at 60Hz, which isn't ideal for 120 fps games.

This TV offers an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the appearance of motion. Like most TVs, it struggles with fast-paced content with everything at max, resulting in noticeable artifacts and loss of details. These issues are noticeable even with lower settings, but it's not as bad.

Due to the near-instantaneous response time, there's noticeable stutter as each frame is held on longer with low-frame-rate content.

This TV removes 24p judder from any source, including those that output content in 60Hz. It helps with the appearance of motion in movies. When you enable the BFI feature, it removes judder from 24p sources, but not with 60p/i sources, like a cable box.

The Sony A95L supports variable refresh rate (VRR) to reduce screen tearing from consoles and PCs. Unfortunately, it doesn't support FreeSync, which limits its compatibility with older AMD graphics cards.

The Sony A95L has incredibly low input lag, ensuring a smooth and responsive gaming experience. It's a bit higher than most other high-end TVs, like the LG G3 OLED and the Samsung S95C OLED, but it's still low.

The Sony A95L supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz. While there are some text clarity issues due to its subpixel layout (see the Pixels section for more information), it still displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with all supported resolutions. Only HDMI ports 3 and 4 support full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and the full range of supported modes. HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth and don't support certain signals like 4k @ 120Hz 4:4:4.

The Sony A95L is nearly fully compatible with the PS5 as long as you have it connected to HDMI 3 or 4. As it's part of Sony's 'Perfect for PS5' lineup, it also has a few proprietary features made for the PS5, like Auto HDR Tone Mapping, which automatically adjusts certain settings to get the best HDR experience.

The Sony A95L is nearly fully compatible with the Xbox Series S|X as long as you have it connected to HDMI 3 or 4. In a first for Sony TVs, it even supports Dolby Vision gaming at up to 4k @ 120Hz.

This TV supports HDR10 and the more advanced Dolby Vision HDR format. There are some issues with Dolby Vision content, though. The user interface slows down considerably when anything starts playing in Dolby Vision, but it goes back to normal after around 10-15 seconds. There are also some issues with low-level tone mapping; you can read more about those issues in the PQ EOTF section.

This TV supports eARC, allowing you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable. However, because the eARC port is also one of the HDMI 2.1 ports, you can only connect one other HDMI 2.1 device if you connect a soundbar or receiver that doesn't support HDMI 2.1 passthrough. You can also connect a compatible Sony soundbar to the S-Center speaker input and use the TV's speakers as a center channel or use the speaker terminals to achieve the same thing with any home theater receiver.

The frequency response is just decent. Like most TVs, there's no thump or rumble and very little bass response overall. Above the low-frequency extension (LFE), the frequency response at moderate volume levels is very well-balanced, and dialogue is clear and easy to understand. Unfortunately, there's a moderate amount of compression, and the treble range falls off sharply at max volume.

This TV has very little distortion, especially when listening at low volume levels. It's a bit worse at max volume, but isn't noticeable.

The Google TV interface is user-friendly and feature-packed, but there are a few bugs. The menu is very slow when the TV is first powered on, and it slows down for a little while after changing inputs or changing settings from a connected device. There are also some audio sync issues.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, there are ads throughout the interface. You can opt out of personalized ads; however, you'll get non-targeted ads instead.

The Google Play Store has tons of apps available to download, and they run very smoothly. It has Google Chromecast built-in, meaning you can cast content from your phone.

The Sony A95L has a premium remote with a brushed silver finish. The buttons are backlit and turn on automatically when you pick up the remote. A mic's also built into the TV for hands-free voice control or to help find your remote.

The TV comes with the BRAVIA webcam, which you can attach on top. It provides a few extra features like Auto Power Saving Mode that darkens the screen when you walk away. It also supports Gesture Control and Proximity Alert.

There's a single button above the side inputs to turn the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, switch inputs, or use the Find Remote feature. There's a switch to turn the built-in mic in the TV off if you're concerned about privacy, and you can also shut the camera when you aren't actively using it.

• Remote control
• 2x AAA batteries
• Cable tie
• User guides