The Sony A9G is an excellent OLED TV that delivers an amazing picture quality with perfect blacks and smooth motion handling. It has wide viewing angles, making it suitable for any type of room configuration, and it handles reflections exceptionally well. It provides a great HDR experience thanks to its wide color gamut and decent peak brightness, and its remarkable uniformity is a big plus for sports fans. Although it doesn't have any advanced gaming features like variable refresh rate, most gamers will appreciate the 120Hz panel and low input lag. It comes with support for Dolby Vision as well as eARC, and Android TV is a user-friendly platform with access to an enormous library of apps.
The Sony A9G is an excellent TV for most uses, whether it's for watching HDR movies or for use as a PC monitor. It has remarkable dark room performance and its exceptional motion handling results in clear images with nearly no visible motion blur. Its low input lag and 120Hz refresh rate provide a responsive gaming experience, but unfortunately, it doesn't support any VRR technology. It runs on Android TV, which is a great platform for those who get most of their content through streaming.
The Sony A9G is an exceptional TV for watching movies. With its emissive technology, this TV can produce perfect blacks, which is great for watching in a dark room. It can remove judder from any source and has a motion interpolation feature to make motion look smooth and fluid.
This is a great TV for watching TV shows. It isn't the best choice for watching in very bright rooms, but in an average-lit or dark room, it performs remarkably well. Its wide viewing angles allow you to walk around without the image degrading and it upscales lower-resolution content like cable TV without any issues.
The Sony A9G is an excellent TV for watching sports. Its response time is extremely fast and fast-action sports are displayed with minimal motion blur. Gray uniformity is excellent, with no noticeable dirty screen effect, and it has wide viewing angles, making it a great TV for watching a big game with friends and family.
The Sony A9G is an outstanding TV for playing video games thanks to its extremely fast response time and low input lag. It has a 120Hz refresh rate to make motion look silky smooth, but sadly, there's no support for FreeSync variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. Also, there are risks of permanent burn-in with OLED TVs, especially with static content like the user interface of a video game.
The Sony A9G is a remarkable TV for watching HDR movies. It can produce vivid and vibrant colors thanks to its wide color gamut, and it can get decently bright to bring out small highlights in dark scenes. Since OLED TVs can turn off individual pixels, there aren't any issues with blooming around bright objects. Additionally, this TV supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision.
The Sony A9G is an excellent TV for playing HDR games. The TV can display HDR content with vibrant colors due to its wide color gamut, but its peak brightness in HDR mode is only decent and doesn't feel as dramatic, especially when using the TV in a bright room setting. On the upside, it has a low input lag in HDR mode to make gaming feel extremely responsive and its fast response time results in clear images with minimal motion blur.
The Sony A9G is a great TV for use as a PC monitor. It can display most common resolutions with proper chroma 4:4:4 without any issues, and it has excellent wide viewing angles, so the sides look uniform when you sit up close. Input lag is very low to provide incredible responsiveness, but unfortunately, a static desktop interface increases the risk of permanent burn-in.
The Sony A9G is a high-end 2019 OLED TV and directly replaces the 2018 Sony A9F OLED. All OLEDs deliver very similar overall picture quality, so the design and the additional features are the main differences from one to the other. The main competitors to the Sony A9G are the LG B9 OLED, LG E9 OLED, LG C9 OLED, and Sony A8G OLED. The main LED competitors are the Sony Z9F, the Samsung Q90/Q90R QLED, and the Samsung Q80/Q80R QLED.
The Sony A9G's design is outstanding. It has a clean and minimalist look, with thin bezels on all sides, and the flat stand doesn't take up a lot of space. However, unlike the A8G, the stand isn't adjustable, making it difficult to place a soundbar in front without blocking part of the screen.
The back of the TV has an interesting checkerboard design, with vents for cooling the TV's internals and panels to hide the inputs. There's cable management built-in, routing all the cables to a single exit at the bottom for a clean setup.
Due to OLED's emissive technology, this TV can turn individual pixels off and doesn't need a backlight. As such, there are no issues with blooming around bright objects in dark scenes, and subtitles are displayed perfectly.
SDR peak brightness is decent. The TV gets bright enough for most settings, but visibility can be an issue in very bright rooms.
We measured the peak brightness after calibration, using 'Custom' Picture Mode, with Peak Luminance set to 'High', and Color temperature set to 'Expert 1'.
If you don't care about image accuracy, you can obtain higher brightness levels. We were able to momentarily reach 768 nits with the 2% window using the default settings of the 'Vivid' Picture Mode, Brightness set to 'Max', Contrast set to 'Max', Peak Luminance set to 'High', Adv. Contrast enhancer set to 'High', and Color set to '60'.
Decent HDR peak brightness. It's good enough to display bright highlights in HDR content when viewing in a dark environment, but it isn't as noticeable in a bright setting.
We measured the peak brightness, using 'HDR Cinema' Picture Mode, with Brightness set to 'Max', and Color temperature set to 'Expert 1'.
If you don't care about image accuracy, you can obtain higher brightness levels. We were able to momentarily reach 794 nits with the 2% window using the default settings of the 'Vivid' Picture Mode, Brightness set to 'Max', Contrast set to 'Max', Black Level set to 'High', Adv. Contrast enhancer set to 'High', and Color set to '60'.
Gray uniformity is excellent. There's no noticeable dirty screen effect and uniformity in darker scenes is equally outstanding. Like previous OLED TVs, there are some very faint horizontal and vertical lines that are noticeable when displaying near-black scenes in a dark room.
The color accuracy is decent out-of-the-box. There are some inaccuracies with several colors, particularly with shades of gray, and the color temperature is much warmer than our target of 6500K, resulting in a slightly reddish tint. Gamma doesn't follow the target, with most scenes appearing brighter than they should. If you want a TV that has better out-of-the-box accuracy, check out the Sony A9S OLED.
Color accuracy is exceptional after calibration. The color temperature is almost right on target and gamma is perfect. Any remaining inaccuracies shouldn't be noticeable without the aid of a colorimeter.
The TV features an auto-calibration feature, but you still need a colorimeter.
You can see our recommended settings here.
Like all other OLEDs, this TV uses a 4 sub-pixel structure, but all 4 sub-pixels are never on at the same time. This image shows the green, white, and blue sub-pixels. You can see the red sub-pixel in our alternative pixel photo.
The Sony A9G has an impressive wide color gamut. The EOTF follows the input stimulus well until it starts a sharp roll-off towards the TV's peak brightness. The 'Game' mode EOTF is almost identical as you can see here, although some brighter scenes might be slightly brighter than they should be.
If you find HDR too dim, check out our recommendations here. These settings make the TV significantly brighter in HDR mode, as shown in this EOTF.
The color volume is decent. The TV has difficulty displaying bright saturated colors, as the use of the white subpixel to boost brightness desaturates the pure colors at high brightness levels.
Exceptional gradient performance, however, there's some very minor banding when displaying gray, green, and red. The TV's Smooth Gradation feature can remove most of it, but it may cause a loss of some fine details.
The Sony A9G exhibits some very faint temporary image retention, although this isn't noticeable in normal use.
This test is only indicative of short term image retention, and not the permanent burn-in that may occur with longer exposure to static images. We're currently running a long-term test to help us better understand permanent burn-in. You can see our results and read more about our investigation here.
Although we don't expect most people who watch a varied content to have any issues, there are risks of permanent burn-in on the A9G, just like on all OLED TVs.
This TV has two features to help mitigate burn-in. We recommend enabling the Pixel Shift option and run the Panel refresh procedure once a year or less, as Sony recommends.
You can read about our investigation into this here.
Update 01/11/2021: We've retested the BFI and can confirm that the backlight flickers at 96Hz in 24p content when the Clearness is set to 'Low' or 'Medium', and 48Hz when it's set to 'High'. This is the same behavior that we noticed on the Sony A8H OLED and Sony A9S OLED.
This TV has an optional black frame insertion feature that can help further reduce the appearance of motion blur.
BFI is enabled on the A9G by setting Motionflow to 'Custom' and Clearness to 'High'. When BFI is enabled, it causes judder when playing back 60p content.
The Sony A9G can interpolate lower frame rate content up to 120Hz, otherwise known as the Soap Opera Effect. If there's too much motion, the TV stops interpolating in order to avoid causing artifacts. This sudden change in motion can cause the image to appear jerky.
See here for the settings that control the A9G's motion interpolation feature.
Due to the TV's near-instantaneous response time, lower frame rate content can appear to stutter, as frames are held on for longer. If you're bothered by it, enabling motion interpolation and BFI can help.
The Sony A9G can remove judder from any source. However, when BFI is enabled, the TV has judder when playing back 60p content.
See our recommended settings to remove judder here.
The Sony A9G has a native 120Hz panel; however, it doesn't support any variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing when gaming.
This TV has excellent low input lag. Two picture modes provide low latency: 'Game' or 'Graphics' mode. You can use either one for proper chroma 4:4:4 support, but 'Game' mode is recommended. Unfortunately, enabling motion interpolation does add a significant amount of input lag.
Note: the 1440p @120Hz input lag measurement was done using another PC, as the TV could not display the 1440p @ 120Hz resolution from our laptop. This shouldn't have a significant impact on the measured input lag.
If you want a TV with lower input lag, check out the Sony A8H OLED.