Sony BRAVIA 3  TV Review

The TV has just sub-par HDR brightness. Some highlights stand out a bit in darker scenes, and it's a bit better than some similar models like the Samsung Q8F 2025. Overall, the TV's HDR brightness isn't good enough to display brighter highlights with impact.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Professional
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: Max
• Color Temperature: Expert 2

There's no noticeable difference in HDR brightness when the TV is set to Game Mode.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: Max
• Color Temperature: Expert 2

The TV has adequate SDR brightness, and it overcomes some glare in a room with the lights on. Even though it's not a super bright TV, it's still noticeably brighter than the Sony BRAVIA 2 II.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Professional
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Gamma: 0
• Color Temperature: Expert 1

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has terrible contrast. Blacks are raised and look gray most of the time, and the TV lacks a local dimming feature to improve its contrast. You can get significantly better contrast by stepping up to the Sony BRAVIA 5.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no lighting zones. This means there's no blooming around bright elements against a dark background, but the entire image looks gray and washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual areas to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there are no distracting flickers or brightness changes as bright highlights move across the screen.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The TV has mediocre black uniformity; large areas of the screen are blueish and cloudy.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has decent SDR color volume. Its coverage of the wide BT.2020 color space is mediocre, and it really struggles with displaying most colors outside of some purples and blues. Its coverage of the narrower DCI-P3 color space is good, but here, it particularly struggles with fully displaying greens, yellows, and lighter reds.

The TV has passable HDR color volume, but it doesn't do a very good job of displaying dark saturated colors due to its terrible contrast. It also can't display most colors very brightly.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 Series has fantastic pre-calibration SDR accuracy. The TV's white balance is outstanding, with blues, reds, and greens just a bit underrepresented in shades of gray. The color temperature is exactly at 6500K, and it does an excellent job of displaying colors with accuracy, but there are still some minor inaccuracies with most colors. Gamma is close to our target of 2.2, but all scenes are displayed darker than intended.

The TV has remarkable SDR accuracy after calibration. There are no noticeable issues with white balance, and gamma is perfectly at our target of 2.2. There are still some minor inaccuracies with some colors, but these aren't noticeable to most people.

You can see our full calibration settings.

The TV has okay HDR accuracy before calibration. Blues, and to a lesser extent greens, are overrepresented in darker and brighter shades of gray, but not so much in mid-grays. This makes the TV's color temperature far colder than the 6500K target, giving everything a very noticeable blue tint. It has good color accuracy overall, but there are numerous inaccuracies in most colors, especially in warmer tones.

The TV has decent HDR accuracy after calibration. While the TV's white balance is improved, blues are still overrepresented in darker grays, and even a bit in mid-grays now, so the TV's color temperature is still extremely cold. Color accuracy is better now, but there are still some inaccuracies across its range of colors.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has decent PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks and near-blacks are noticeably raised, but the TV follows the curve very closely until it approaches its peak brightness. The TV has the same gradual roll-off near its peak brightness for content mastered at all three nit levels to preserve some details in highlights.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has great low-quality content smoothing. It does an impressive job of smoothing out artifacts in low-bitrate content while still preserving details.

The TV does an impressive job with upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs, standard definition cable channels, and lower-resolution streams. Details are well-defined and clear enough, but very fine details are a bit hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 60
• Reality Creation: Auto

The TV has good HDR gradient handling. There's noticeable banding in dark grays and bright greens, but all other colors have minimal banding.

This TV has low input lag at 60Hz when set to Game Mode and Graphics Mode, but it doesn't support 120Hz and above at any resolution, limiting its usability when it comes to responsive high refresh rate gaming.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 supports almost all common resolutions up to 4k @ 60Hz. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly with any signal as long as the TV is in Graphics Mode, which is important for reading clear text from a PC.

This TV doesn't support VRR to reduce screen tearing.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has poor pixel transitions at its maximum refresh rate of 60Hz. It's slow overall, and there's a lot of overshoot, which leads to noticeable blur and inverse ghosting.

This TV doesn't support a 120Hz refresh rate.

The TV has poor pixel transitions at 60Hz. It's slow overall, and there's a lot of overshoot, which leads to noticeable blur and inverse ghosting.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports up to 4k @ 60Hz on the PS5. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. The TV doesn't support 1440p.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 is a 60Hz TV, so it only supports up to 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox Series X|S. It has Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), so it'll automatically switch to Game Mode when the TV detects a game console as its input device, which gives you the lowest possible input lag for games. It also supports Dolby Vision for gaming, but it doesn't support 1440p.

Due to the TV's slower response time, there's only some minor stutter when watching movies or TV shows. It's most noticeable during slow panning shots, but even then it's subtle, and some people won't notice it at all. 

The Sony BRAVIA 3's motion interpolation feature does a great job of reducing stutter in 24fps content. When bringing that content up to 30fps, slow camera movements have good fluidity. It also has outstanding consistency, so the cadence of motion is nice and even.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 automatically removes judder from 24Hz and 25Hz sources, like a Blu-ray player or a modern streaming device that has a 'Match Frame Rate' feature. It doesn't remove judder from any content being sent in a 60p signal, like when using an older streaming device or cable box. Unfortunately, it also doesn't remove judder from the native apps, so it requires a modern streaming device like the Apple TV for the best motion. 

The TV is completely free from micro-judder, regardless of the source. 

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has a mediocre response time, so there's some noticeable blur behind fast-moving objects.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 does a great job of avoiding any severe transition artifacts in movies, shows, and sports. The TV is completely free from edge artifacts, so the edges of objects remain consistent with the center as transitions occur. However, there are some color artifacts present, like the trail of yellow around the edges of blues and the trail of blue around the edges of reds, which impacts color consistency in fast-paced scenes and sports. 

The TV is flicker-free in all pictures modes and at all brightness levels, which is great.

The TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion, to reduce persistence blur. It only flickers at 120Hz, which causes image duplications with 60 fps content.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 does a poor job of handling direct reflections. It barely lessens the intensity of bright light sources, so the reflections on the screen are bright and distracting.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 TV does an excellent job retaining its black levels in a bright room. Blacks are barely raised as more light is added to your room, so you get very similar blacks regardless of your lighting. That said, the TV has terrible black levels to begin with, so you never see deep blacks on this model.

The amount of total reflected light is decent. It reduces the intensity of reflections, but they're still quite noticeable in a room with more than one or two lights on, especially during dark scenes. Fortunately, there's no artifacts like rainbow smearing or light banding.

The TV has mediocre color saturation when used in a well-lit room. There’s barely any difference with the vibrancy of colors whether you’re in a dark room or a bright one, although brighter colors look slightly more washed out.

The TV has a very good viewing angle. Colors wash out, and there's some brightness loss the further you move off-center. However, the image remains mostly consistent when viewed from the sides of the screen. This makes it a good option for a wide seating arrangement.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 has decent gray uniformity, although the corners are darker than the rest of the screen, and there's some dirty screen effect towards the center. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is very good, with only the edges being slightly lighter than the rest of the screen.

The TV has an RGB sub-pixel layout, so it doesn't have any issues rendering text when used as a PC monitor.

Note that there are reports that the 50-inch, 65-inch, and 85-inch models use a VA panel with a BGR subpixel layout, which can affect text clarity.

The TV uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light, with high peaks on reds and blues. This model does have good separation between colors, giving it solid color purity and a wide color gamut.

The TV is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth on all four ports, but it does support Dolby Vision. Unfortunately, this model only has an ATSC 1.0 tuner, so 4k over-the-air isn't possible.

The TV has eARC support, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The TV is very reminiscent of the Sony A80K/A80CK OLED, with a basic design that looks good overall.

If you want a Sony TV larger than an 85-inch, you need to step up to the Sony BRAVIA 5 98.

The TV comes with two metal feet. They're set wide apart and can't be adjusted, so they take up a lot of space, and you'll need a large cabinet for the larger sizes. The feet lift the TV about 3.86 inches above the table, so most soundbars fit underneath without blocking the screen.

Footprint of the 75-inch model: 52.28" x 16.14".

The back of the TV is made entirely of plastic and has the familiar checkerboard pattern similar to many other Sony TVs. The inputs are on the far left side of the TV when facing the front, but they're in a recessed cutout, so they're a bit hard to reach if you have the TV mounted flush to the wall. Clips on the feet can be used to help with cable management.

The TV has decent build quality overall. It's mostly made of plastic, so it's light and feels a bit cheap, but the two metal feet hold the TV well enough that there are no major issues with stability. The build quality is nothing special, but there's no issue with quality control, which is great.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 LED uses version 12 of the popular Google TV operating system, and the interface is smooth and easy to use.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can't disable them.

The remote has a matte finish with blue speckles. Outside of that, it's identical to the remotes included with most of Sony's 2023 models. It has buttons for popular streaming services, and you can use the built-in microphone to switch inputs, change apps, search within apps, and ask for the weather and time.

There's a single button on the bottom of the TV that can be used to switch inputs, adjust the volume, change channels, and power the TV on/off. There's also a small button that you can use to turn on/off the TV's built-in microphone.

• Manuals
• Remote (with 2x AAA batteries)
• Power cable
• VESA mount extenders

The TV has an alright frequency response. Like most TVs, there's almost no bass. Dialogue is clear at most listening levels, but the sound becomes quite unbalanced at the TV's maximum volume. Since the speakers don't get very loud, it's best suited for a quiet environment.