Sony BRAVIA 3 II  TV Review

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II has mediocre peak brightness in HDR. It's bright enough to deliver a fairly impactful HDR experience in moderately-lit scenes, but small highlights don't stand out at all, and specular highlight details are far too dim. It also doesn't offer any brightness-enhancing features like dynamic tone mapping.

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

The TV's peak brightness in SDR is alright. It can handle some glare during the day, and it's significantly brighter than the Sony BRAVIA 2 II.

Unfortunately, the Sony BRAVIA 3 II has terrible contrast. Blacks are raised and look washed out in all content. The TV also lacks local dimming, so it can't improve it.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there are 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.

Unfortunately, the black uniformity on this TV is bad. There's significant clouding across the screen, and blacks are very uneven.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II has decent color volume. It has excellent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, but color saturation is a bit lower in very dark scenes. Coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space is significantly worse, though, and it struggles to display saturated blues and greens.

This TV's HDR color volume is okay. It can't display dark colors well due to its very low contrast. Colors can't get very bright either, and saturated blues are slightly washed out in lighter scenes.

The pre-calibration color accuracy of this TV is great. It has a good white balance, with just a bit too much red in most shades, giving the TV a slightly warm color temperature. Its gamma tracking is excellent, and most content is only slightly over-brightened. It has excellent color accuracy, with very few mapping errors that most people won't even notice.

This TV is easy to calibrate, and it has nearly perfect accuracy after a full calibration. It doesn't have a color management system, so it's impossible to fully calibrate its color accuracy.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

This TV has good accuracy in HDR before calibration. The white balance is decent, but midtones and shadow details are slightly off. The RGB balance and color temperature are nearly perfect, and colors are mapped nearly perfect. There are some noticeable luminance errors in most colors, though.

Unfortunately, this TV doesn't respond well to calibration in HDR. it lacks a color calibration system, and calibrating it barely improves its HDR accuracy at all.

Unfortunately, the PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is sub-par. Near-black shadow details are noticeably raised due to the TV's high black levels and low contrast. Midtones are slightly raised, but are much more accurate overall. In brighter scenes, the TV cuts off sharply at its peak brightness regardless of the content mastering level. This allows highlight details to get as bright as possible, but you lose gradation in bright scenes.

This TV does an excellent job of reducing macro-blocking and other compression artifacts. It does a decent job preserving fine details in the process, but there's some loss.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II does a great job scaling low-resolution content like DVDs or low-quality cable channels. The image is sharp and clear, with no obvious over-sharpening artifacts.

The native gradient handling on this TV is decent. There's just a bit of banding in most content.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II has fantastic input lag, as long as you're in Game Mode. It doesn't offer a low-latency motion interpolation mode, which is disappointing for retro gamers. The input latency outside of Game Mode is also very high, so navigating menus on external players feels sluggish.

This TV has excellent format support. It supports up to a 120Hz refresh rate with either 1080p or 4k signals, so you can take full advantage of the latest consoles. It doesn't support a higher refresh rate for PC gamers, though. Chroma 4:4:4 and RGB signals are displayed properly with 1080p and 4k signals, which is essential for clear text when using it as a PC monitor.

This TV supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. Unlike all previous Sony TVs, it also supports FreeSync, so you can take full advantage of any console or graphics card that supports VRR.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II has a mediocre CAD at its max refresh rate of 120Hz with a 4k signal. Most motion is fairly clear, with just a bit of overshoot that can cause some inverse ghosting around fast-moving objects. Transitions out of dark shades are fairly quick, so there's barely any black smear in shadow details. It's significantly slower going from bright to dark shades, though.

The maximum refresh rate supported by this TV is 120Hz, so these results are identical to the Max Refresh Rate test.

Unfortunately, the TV's CAD is significantly slower at 60Hz, and motion is incredibly blurry. It's a bit more even than it is at 120Hz, and even shadow details are blurry.

Except for 1440p, the TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 and PS5 Pro offer, like 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

With the exception of 1440p, the TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and Dolby Vision gaming. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

This TV shows some slight stutter in slow-panning shots. It's better than higher-end OLED TVs, though, and not nearly as noticeable in regular content.

Adding low levels of motion interpolation does a very good job reducing stutter on this TV. The feature is extremely consistent, meaning the frame times are fairly even, but it doesn't entirely eliminate stutter in slow-panning shots.

This TV removes judder from most content. No additional settings are needed for 24p content like Blu-rays, but Cinemotion has to be on for it remove judder from 60p sources. The frame timing is slightly off with 25p content, like most European shows.

There's no micro judder on this TV.

This TV has a good response time when watching content. Transitions are a bit uneven, and there's some slight overshoot in some shades, but it's minor.

There are some very minor color artifacts in certain transitions, but they're extremely minor and not really noticeable.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II is one of the few TVs on the market in 2026 that's completely flicker-free. The backlight uses DC dimming alone to directly adjust the intensity of the LEDs.

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 matte coating on the 65- and 75-inch models does a great job reducing the intensity of direct reflections. The other sizes have a glossy coating, so direct, mirror-like reflections are far more noticeable.

Ambient light has barely any impact on black levels.

The total amount of reflected light is good. The screen coating does a good job of reducing bright lights, but they're still noticeable, especially if you have bright lights or windows directly opposite the screen.

Ambient light has no noticeable impact on the perceived color volume.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II has a good viewing angle. The image fades a bit as you move to the sides, but colors barely change, even at a wide angle. This makes it a very good choice for a wide seating arrangement.

The TV has decent gray uniformity. The center of the screen is very clean, which helps when watching sports or anything with a uniform area near the center. The sides of the screen are a bit darker, but it's not too bad.

The TV has an RGB sub-pixel layout, so it doesn't have any issues rendering text when used as a PC monitor. The TV uses a KSF phosphor coating to produce red light, with high peaks on reds and blues.

Unlike the Sony BRAVIA 7 II and Sony BRAVIA 9 II, this model features a more recent chipset, and it supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on all four inputs. Unfortunately, this model only has an ATSC 1.0 tuner, so 4k over-the-air isn't possible. Unlike the higher-end models like the BRAVIA 7 II, it doesn't require an adapter for its optical out port.

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 Sony BRAVIA 3 II has a somewhat simple design that doesn't look as modern as other similarly-priced TVs. It has a fairly thick bottom bezel with a somewhat dated finish, and the three other sides have a noticeable dead space between the side bezel and the first pixels.

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.

Footprint of the 65-inch model: 49.1" x 11.5" x 3.6".

The back of the TV has a very dated, cheap look, with a box in the center that houses all of the electronics and gives the TV a bulky feel. The inputs face out the side and back, so some of them are difficult to access when wall-mounted. There's no cable management.

The TV has decent build quality. There are no obvious construction or quality issues, but it doesn't feel very premium, either.

The Sony BRAVIA 3 II ships with Google TV version 14. It's fast and easy to use, and we didn't encounter any issues or bugs during testing.

Running AIDA64 on the TV shows that it's powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, the interface contains ads. You can opt out of personalized ads, but this doesn't change the number of ads you'll see; they just won't be personalized to match your search and viewing history.

During initial setup of the TV you can opt-out of signing in to Google and use the TV as a basic TV instead. This disables most smart features and removes ads.

• Remote control
• 2x AAA batteries
• User guides

The sound quality on this TV is sub-par. It's not very loud, and like most TVs there's barely any deep bass. Dialogue is clear and easy to understand at moderate listening levels.