Sony A75L OLED  TV Review

The Sony A75L has a design nearly identical to that of higher-end Sony models like the Sony A80L OLED. The stand has a simpler design that's more typically found on budget or mid-range models.

The stand consists of two V-shaped feet that are located close to each end of the TV. They take up a lot of space but support the TV well, as it doesn't wobble easily or for long. Stepping down from the higher-end Sony TVs like the Sony A80L OLED, there's no alternative stand position for narrower cabinets. The feet lift the TV high enough that any soundbar fits in front of it without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 65-inch TV: 38.3" x 13.1" x 3.7".

The back of the TV features a 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. There's a cover to hide the inputs, and the TV comes with clips for the feed to help with cable management.

The Sony A75L OLED has excellent build quality. It's very similar to higher-end Sony TVs, including the Sony A80L OLED, but the stand is made of plastic and feels a bit cheaper overall. Other than that, there are no noticeable issues with the overall assembly.

The Sony A75L 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 A75L has good peak brightness in HDR. Although the brightest scenes in HDR aren't very bright, most content is displayed well, and it delivers an impactful HDR experience overall. Its near-infinite contrast ratio allows it to display small bright highlights well, even in already bright scenes.

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

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

If you prefer a brighter image in HDR, switching the HDR Tone Mapping setting to 'Brightness Preferred' increases the brightness of midtones, but reduces gradation in bright scenes, so some bright highlights blend together.

These are the real scene brightness measurements with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Brightness Preferred':

• Hallway Lights: 576.0 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 428.3 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 206.0 cd/m²

The Sony A75L is slightly dimmer in the Game mode than the calibrated picture modes. It's odd, but the Sony A80L OLED and Sony A95L OLED both exhibit the same behavior.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point, with all eco settings disabled, with the following settings:

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

If you prefer a brighter image in HDR, switching the HDR Tone Mapping setting to 'Brightness Preferred' increases the brightness of mid-tones, but reduces gradation in bright scenes, so some bright highlights blend together.

These are the real scene brightness measurements with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Brightness Preferred':

• Hallway Lights: 366.2 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 461 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 206.0 cd/m²

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is fantastic, and most scenes are displayed at exactly the brightness level the content creator intended.

The HDR Tone Mapping setting has a significant impact on the PQ EOTF tracking on this TV. Setting it to 'Gradation Preferred' delivers the most accurate results and preserves fine details in the brightest scenes. If you prefer a brighter image, setting it to 'Brightness Preferred' instead increases the brightness of most scenes but results in a slightly sharper cutoff near the TV's peak brightness, resulting in a loss of gradation in bright scenes, as you can see in this EOTF graph. Setting it to 'Off' disables tone mapping entirely, so almost all scenes are too dim. Bright scenes are a bit brighter overall, though, as the TV isn't tone mapping in scenes close to its peak brightness as shown in this EOTF graph.

The Sony A75L has decent peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to handle a moderate amount of glare, and it looks good in a bright room, but it's not as bright as higher-end OLED models like the LG C3 OLED or the Samsung S90C OLED.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

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

If you need an OLED with better SDR peak brightness, take a look at the Sony BRAVIA 8 OLED.

The Sony A75L has an excellent HDR color gamut. It displays most of the DCI-P3 color space used by most HDR content. The tone mapping is a bit off in duller shades, which tend to be closer to white than they should be. It has decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but the tone mapping is worse, and saturated green and cyan are noticeably off.

The Sony A75L has great color volume. As with all OLEDs, it displays dark colors well due to its perfect blacks and near-infinite contrast ratio, but colors don't get very bright in part due to the A75L's relatively low peak brightness but also due to its WOLED panel.

The Sony A75L has good accuracy in SDR with the best settings out-of-the-box. The white balance is the most noticeable issue, as there's too much red and blue in brighter shades, and gamma is over-brightened in bright scenes. The color accuracy is excellent, with just a few slight issues in colors close to white.

The white balance is very easy to calibrate on this TV, and the results after calibration are fantastic. The color calibration system isn't very useful, though, as any adjustments made to the TV made the overall accuracy worse.

You can see the full calibration settings used here

The gray uniformity of this TV is excellent. 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 some noticeable vertical banding.

The Sony A75L has perfect black uniformity, with no cloudiness or bright patches.

The Sony A75L has a fantastic viewing angle. This is great for a wide seating arrangement, as everyone will enjoy a consistent image even if they're sitting to the side.

The reflection handling on this TV is fantastic. The semi-gloss anti-reflective coating significantly reduces the intensity of direct reflections without adding any rainbow smear.

Gradients are displayed very well, with just a few noticeable issues in certain shades.

As is typical of Sony, the low-quality content smoothing on this TV is great. It's almost free of macro-blocking in dark scenes, and fine details are preserved very well.

As is typical of Sony TVs, the Sony A75L has remarkable sharpness processing capabilities. Low-resolution content is upscaled well, and lines are sharp with very little over-sharpening. Fine details in busy scenes are easy to make out, and hardcoded text looks great.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Sharpness: 55
• Reality Creation: 20

The TV uses an RWBG panel, or WOLED, with four subpixels. While it doesn't affect picture quality, it's still important for users wanting to use the TV as a PC monitor, as Windows ClearType still can't fully compensate for non-RGB subpixel layouts, negatively affecting text clarity. You can read more about it here.

The Sony A75L has a near-instantaneous response time, resulting in almost no motion blur behind fast-moving objects. However, due to the sample-and-hold nature of OLEDs, there's still some persistence blur.

The TV is not quite flicker-free, as there's a very small dip in brightness every 8 ms, corresponding to the TV's refresh rate. You won't notice it, however, and it's not the same as pulse width modulation (PWM) on LED TVs, as it isn't a full-screen on-and-off cycle.

The TV has an optional black frame insertion feature to reduce persistence blur. Unfortunately, it only works with 60 fps content, so you can't use it with 120 fps video games.

The TV has a motion interpolation feature to bring 30 and 60 fps content up to 120 fps. It does a good job with real content, especially in panning shots and slower dialog scenes. However, as is typical of motion interpolation, once the action ramps up, there are more noticeable artifacts, and in really busy scenes, it even stops interpolating entirely. This sudden change creates a jarring effect and is quite distracting due to the sudden significant change in frame rate.

Like all OLED TVs, there's noticeable stutter due to the TV's nearly instantaneous response time. It's especially noticeable in slow-panning shots.

The TV removes 24p judder from any source, including 60p sources that don't have a Match Frame Rate feature, like a cable box.

The TV supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. HDMI Forum VRR and G-SYNC compatibility work over the entire refresh rate range.

The TV has low input lag as long as you're in Game Mode. Although it's a bit higher than most other OLEDs from competing manufacturers, like the LG B3 OLED, it's still good enough for a responsive gaming feel.

The TV supports most common resolutions—except 1440p at any refresh rate—up to 4k @ 120Hz with HDMI ports 3 and 4 or 4k @ 60Hz on HDMI 1 and 2. It displays chroma 4:4:4 with all of its supported resolutions, which is essential for clear text when using the TV with a PC.

This TV supports almost everything the PS5 offers through HDMI ports 3 and 4, which are the TV's two HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports, except for 1440p. It has a few PS5-specific features like Auto HDR Tone Mapping and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), with the latter working automatically on the PS5 without needing to enable it first.

The TV works well with the Xbox Series X|S as long as it's connected to ports 3 or 4, which are the TV's two full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) support, although you need to set it to 'On' before it can work with the Xbox, and then it only switches into Game Mode when a game launches. The TV only supports Dolby Vision up to 4k @ 60Hz from the Xbox, as unlike the Sony A95L OLED, this TV doesn't support Dolby Vision with 4k @ 120Hz signals. Unfortunately, this TV doesn't support 1440p.

The TV supports full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 3 and 4, while HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. As HDMI 3 is also the eARC port, you lose an HDMI 2.1 slot if you connect a receiver to it, which means that you can't use multiple HDMI 2.1 devices simultaneously when an audio receiver or soundbar is connected to the eARC port unless the receiver has HDMI 2.1 ports with pass through. The tuner supports ATSC 3.0, allowing you to stream over-the-air 4k channels.

As is typical of Sony TVs, the Sony A75L supports a wide range of advanced audio formats through eARC. The TV supports every major audio format, so you don't have to worry about it being compatible with different external sources.

The frequency response of this TV is just okay. It's well-balanced at moderate volume levels, but there's an odd dip in the mid-treble range, so some dialogue sounds a bit muddy. Like most TVs, there's very little bass, with no thumb or rumble. Sadly, it can't get very loud, and there's significant compression at max volume.

Unfortunately, there's noticeable distortion even at moderate volume levels. It increases a bit at max volume, but since it's not very loud anyway, it's not a significant difference.

Oddly, the Sony A75L runs an older version of the Google TV smart interface. The differences are minor, though; it still comes with the same great selection of streaming apps. It's powered by the MT5895 chipset, which is a few years old. You can see the internal specs here.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, ads are throughout the interface, and you can't fully opt-out.

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

The included remote is small and has a built-in microphone, and there's also one in the TV, so you can use Google Assistant through both. The assistant works well; you can ask it to change the TV's inputs, search for content within apps, and even change the TV's brightness.

There's a single button underneath the center of the TV that you can use to turn it on or off and change channels, the volume, and the inputs.

• Remote control
• 2x AAA batteries
• 4x VESA adapters
• Cable management clips
• Power cable
• User guides