Sony BRAVIA 5 98  TV Review

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has decent HDR brightness. It's bright enough for highlights to pop in content mastered up to 1000 nits, so you get impactful HDR with most content. It's not as bright in entirely well-lit scenes, like an outdoor scene that takes place on a sunny day. However, there's not a massive drop in luminance with these types of scenes, so they're still bright enough to be impactful. 

The 98-inch model has a nice increase in brightness over the 65-inch model we originally reviewed, so HDR content stands out more on this size. If you're after a large TV that gets even brighter, check out the Hisense 100U8QG instead.

Our results above are with the TV set to Professional with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred' since those settings give the most accurate image. We also used the 'Auto Local Dimming: Medium' setting since the difference between the high and medium settings barely affects contrast, but you get brighter highlights with it set to medium. Below are the results with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Brightness Preferred', which increases the brightness of scenes at the expense of accuracy.

• Hallway Lights: 729 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 476 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 185 cd/m²

The Sony K98XR50 is a bit brighter in HDR when it's set to Game Mode, but the difference is barely noticeable in real scenes. Our results are with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred' and 'Auto Local Dimming: Medium'. Below are the results with 'HDR Tone Mapping: Brightness Preferred', which increases the brightness of the image at the expense of accuracy.

• Hallway Lights: 715 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 501 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 281 cd/m²

The Sony K98XR50 has excellent SDR brightness. Like most TVs, it's not quite as bright when watching content with large areas of brightness, like hockey. However, it's fairly consistent across the board, so it still looks bright with all types of content, and the TV overcomes glare in well-lit rooms. 

The 98-inch model is noticeably brighter in SDR than the 65-inch, making it even more suitable for a well-lit room. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has good contrast, resulting in bold blacks during most scenes. The TV has slightly better contrast with the 'Medium' local dimming setting, and it's brighter with that setting than it is on 'High', so that's what we used during testing. With 'Auto Local Dimming: High', the contrast ratio is 97875:1 . 

The 98-inch model has nearly double the contrast ratio as the 65-inch size, so blacks are noticeably deeper on the bigger size. 

The TV has good lighting zone precision overall, but the TV takes a conservative approach to how it controls haloing. There's a large averaging of zones, so it isn't very precise with small highlights. This means that it often falls back to its native contrast ratio, especially during more challenging scenes. 

For example, if you're looking at a starfield, the stars aren't crushed like they can be on some TVs, but the black areas between stars aren't very deep. This is because it doesn't dim its zones for scenes like this, so you don't see any haloing, but the whole image looks a bit washed out. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has good lighting zone transitions overall. It does struggle a bit with fast-moving content, so there's some haloing and the leading edge of quick-moving objects is visibly dimmer.

There's no noticeable difference with dark scene performance in Game Mode.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has disappointing black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, the TV appears bluish and exhibits noticeable cloudiness across the screen. With local dimming enabled, blacks are deep, but there's noticeable haloing and cloudiness around some highlights.

The TV's SDR color volume is good overall. It has great coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, only struggling a bit with some lighter reds, yellows, and greens. Its coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space is generally satisfactory, but it struggles significantly with certain colors. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has very good HDR color volume. Bright colors are punchy due to the TV's solid brightness, and dark colors are well-saturated, so colors in HDR content look vibrant.

The 98-inch model offers a noticeable uptick in HDR color volume over the 65-inch, most notably in white luminance and color luminance, so HDR content is more vivid on the larger size. 

The Sony K98XR50 has very good SDR pre-calibration accuracy. Gamma is very close to 2.2 overall, but dark scenes are slightly too bright, while bright scenes are too dark. Greens and reds are underrepresented in brighter grays, while blues are overrepresented, which contributes to the TV's overly cool color temperature. Despite these flaws, the accuracy of colors is still excellent overall, with minor errors that most people won't notice. 

The Sony K98XR50 has outstanding SDR accuracy after calibration, and any inaccuracies with white balance, color temperature, and gamma are gone. The greyscale is easy to calibrate, but there's no color calibration option, so overall color accuracy is only slightly improved. However, colors are very accurate, so even enthusiasts will be pleased. 

See our full calibration settings. 

The Sony K98XR50 has decent HDR color accuracy before calibration. The TV's white balance is great overall, but blues are massively overrepresented in brighter grays, which makes the TV's color temperature incredibly cool. The overall accuracy of colors is decent, but there's mapping errors across the board that will bother people looking for the most accurate image possible. 

The TV has excellent HDR color accuracy after calibration. The white balance is mostly fixed, and color accuracy has improved by a wide margin. The color temperature is closer to 6,500K than it was before calibration, but it's still noticeably too cool, so there's a slight blue tint to the image. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has remarkable PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks are slightly raised with content mastered at all luminance levels, and some midtones are bit raised with content mastered at 600 nits. Outside of that, the TV follows the curve incredibly closely with content mastered at all luminance levels. There's a rolloff right before the TV's peak brightness, which helps to maintain some gradation in specular highlights before the TV hard clips. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch does a great job of smoothing out low-quality content. Compression issues, such as macro-blocking, are smoothed out effectively without causing any significant loss of fine details. Unlike some other higher-end Sony models, there's no 'Smooth Gradation' setting, so you must use the 'Digital Noise Reduction' setting to clean up low-bitrate content. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has superb sharpness processing capabilities. Low-resolution content is upscaled well, and lines are sharp enough that the image doesn't look too soft. Fine details in busy scenes are easy to make out, and hardcoded text looks great.

This TV has good gradient handling in HDR. There's some noticeable banding in grays and bright greens, but other gradients have minimal banding or none at all. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has excellent input lag while using its dedicated gaming mode. Unlike most other Sony models, the TV's input lag is on par with what you see from competing brands, so you get a very responsive gaming experience, especially at 120Hz.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz on two of its four HDMI ports. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly with all supported resolutions when the TV's 'Content Type' is set to Game or PC, which is important for text clarity.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch supports VRR technology to reduce screen tearing. HDMI Forum VRR and G-SYNC compatibility work over the entire refresh rate range, but it doesn't support FreeSync. However, as long as you have an AMD Radeon card from the past four years or so, you can use HDMI Forum VRR instead of FreeSync. 

The TV's CAD at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz is alright. It's slower when exiting a dark state, which leads to some black smearing. There's also some overshooting with many transitions, which causes some minor inverse ghosting. However, the TV's pixel response times are pretty good for an LED model, so fast motion isn't distractingly blurry.

The TV's CAD at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz is alright. It's slower when exiting a dark state, which leads to some black smearing. There's also some overshooting with many transitions, which causes some minor inverse ghosting. However, the TV's pixel response times are pretty good for an LED model, so fast motion isn't distractingly blurry.

The TV's CAD at 60Hz is okay. Like at 120Hz, it's slower when transitioning from a dark states, which leads to some black smearing. There's also some overshooting with many transitions, so you see some subtle inverse ghosting. However, the TV's pixel transitions are pretty quick overall for an LED model, so motion blur is kept to a minimum.

With the exception of 1440p, the TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, 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.

The TV is fully compatible with almost 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. It doesn't support FreeSync Premium Pro, but it still supports HDMI Forum VRR, so you still get a nearly tear-free gaming experience. 1440p is not supported on this TV. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has some response time stutter when watching 24p content that's most visible in scenes with slow panning shots. It's not as bad as it is on TVs with OLED panels, like the Sony BRAVIA 8 II, but it's still noticeable during certain shots. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch removes 24p judder from any source, including those that output content in 60Hz, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies and shows.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has a good response time. There's some overshooting with many transitions, which leads to some subtle inverse ghosting. The TV is also slower when exiting a dark state, so there's some noticeable black smearing in dark scene transitions. However, there's minimal blur behind fast-moving objects when watching most types of content, so motion looks clear enough that you aren't distracted. 

The Sony K98XR50 uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to control the backlight intensity. It flickers at 720Hz in all picture modes except for 'Standard,' which is high enough that it isn't noticeable, but it can still bother those sensitive to flicker. In the 'Standard' picture mode, it flickers at 120Hz. 

With local dimming disabled, the TV is flicker-free at backlight settings between 6 and 50, but flickers at 720Hz with the backlight set at 5 or below. 

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), which you can enable to improve the appearance of motion. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. With the 'Clearness' slider set to '1,' the TV flickers at 120Hz, which causes image duplication with 60 fps content. With the 'Clearness' slider set to '2,' the backlight flicker pattern is very unusual, flickering at both 120Hz and an underlying 720Hz pattern.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. It works well with smoothing out motion in slower-moving scenes when you use the settings conservativity. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well with more aggressive settings, and there are very noticeable artifacts, haloing, and the TV periodically stops interpolating altogether. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has inadequate direct reflection handling. Direct light sources like a lamp or window opposite your screen are very noticeable since the TV barely reduces the intensity of those reflections.

There's only some minor black level raise in a room with ambient lighting, so you still get deep blacks with your lights turned on.

The total reflected light of this TV is mediocre. You easily see reflections on your screen during dark scenes when viewed in a bright room, and there's some obvious light banding present, which is distracting.

The TV's perceived color volume in a bright room is very good. Colors barely lose any saturation when they're exposed to light, so you still get punchy colors in a well-lit room.

The Sony K98XR50 has an acceptable viewing angle. The image looks mostly consistent from a slight angle, but there's significant gamma shifting and black level raise that worsens the further you move off-center. Furthermore, there's a loss of brightness and colors look washed out when viewed from the sides of the screen. Since image quality is noticeably degraded at an aggressive angle, the TV isn't a very good choice for wide seating arrangements. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has decent gray uniformity. The corners are bit darker than the rest of the screen, and there's some subtle dirty screen effect towards the middle of the screen, both of which are most noticeable when watching bright content such as hockey. The uniformity in darker scenes is better, but the sides of the screen are a bit lighter than the rest of the image. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause issues with text clarity in some applications when using it as a PC monitor.

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

HDMI ports 3 and 4 support the full 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, while HDMI 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. HDMI 3 is also the eARC port.

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch supports eARC, which allows you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The Sony K98XR50 is a good looking TV. It has a premium design that looks clean and modern. 

The Sony K98XR50 comes with two metal feet that are quite big and chunky to support the TV's weight. Unlike the 65-inch model of the TV, the feet can't be adjusted and are set into a wider position for increased stability. You also can't adjust the height of the feet like you can on the 65-inch model. The feet lift the TV about 3.5 inches above the table, so there's plenty of room to fit a soundbar underneath. 

Footprint of the 98-inch model: 60.5" x 19.2".

The back of the Sony K98XR50 is mostly made of plastic, but it still feels high-quality. Unfortunately, there's no grooves or clips to help with cable management, but the TV does come with a tie wrap to help keep cables tidy. 

The borders of the TV are quite thick, and are 150% thicker than the borders on the 65-inch model, so it doesn't look quite as sleek from the sides. 

Not only is the TV huge, but it's also very thick by today's standard, so it doesn't have the thin, sleek look that many other modern TVs have. Fortunately, the TV doesn't tilt forwards or backwards.

The Sony K98XR50 has good build quality. Although it's mostly made from plastic, it doesn't look or feel cheap, and the TV's feet do a great job with stability. There's some minor wobble if you push against the TV, like when you're cleaning the screen, but this is expected on a TV this large and doesn't cause any issues. 

TVs this large can be difficult to unbox and setup, but this model is packaged in a way that makes it pretty easy. The box separates from the display using plastic tabs, and the bottom portion of the packaging holds the TV securely to assist with stand installation. The Styrofoam is cut so it can be removed around the stand mounts, allowing the feet to be slid and screwed into the TV without needing to lift it. There are handles on the bottom corners to help move the display, but the TV is still quite heavy, and it requires a good amount of strength to lift and reposition it even with the handles. Still, installation is fairly straightforward for a TV this large, and it's easier to setup than other large models like the 98-inch TCL QM8K and the 100-inch Hisense U8QG. 

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.

You have the option to setup the TV using the 'Basic Google TV' option, which gets rid of ads, but prevents you from using most of the TV's smart features. 

The remote has voice control and the typical buttons for popular streaming services, but it isn't backlit. 

There's a button on the bottom to turn the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, or switch inputs. If you're concerned about privacy, there's also a switch to turn off the TV's mic.

• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• Tie wrap for cables
• Manuals and user guides

Due to the size of the Sony K98XR50, it uses a lot of power. When streaming content on Netflix, the TV hovers around 430-450W, so expect to pay more for your energy bill with this size. 

The Sony BRAVIA 5 98-inch has an okay frequency response. Unfortunately, the TV really lacks bass, so everything sounds a bit hollow. If you want good bass, you're best off pairing the TV with a good soundbar. Fortunately, the sound profile is well-balanced at all volume levels, so dialogue is easy to understand during most scenes. Furthermore, it gets pretty loud at maximum volume, which is great if you need to crank the speakers to fill your room.