Sony X85J  TV Review

The Sony X85J has a nice but simple design. It doesn't look as premium as the Sony X90J, and it's mainly plastic, but it looks nice in most decors. The inputs face to the side, which is nice, especially if you wall-mount it.

The stand is nearly identical to the one on the Sony X90J, and it supports the TV well, but there's a bit of wobble. Unfortunately, like the X90J, the feet aren't adjustable, but there's an alternate model known as the X89J that has two stand positions. The 43 inch and 50 inch models appear to have a different stand design, and the feet are closer to the center of the screen.

Footprint of the 55 inch stand: 41.9" x 13.3".

The back of the TV is nearly identical to the Sony X90J. It has a grid-like pattern across most of the back panel, but unlike the X90J, there's no brushed aluminum square in the middle. There's a clip on each leg for cable management. Although pretty basic, it can help to keep the back of your TV neat.

Due to the direct-lit backlight, this TV is a bit thicker than edge-lit TVs, like the Samsung Q60/Q60A QLED.

The Sony X85J has good build quality. It's entirely plastic, and there's some noticeable flex on the back panel, especially near the VESA mount and around the bottom edge. There's also a bit of concerning pull around the border. The TV leans a bit, but this isn't noticeable from the front at all. The stand supports the TV well overall, but there's a bit of wobble.

The Sony X85J has fantastic contrast, so blacks look black in a dark room. The native contrast of this TV without local dimming is similar to the Sony X90J's contrast with local dimming, but this varies between units.

Note: We've seen some reports that the 43 inch model has an IPS panel in some regions. If this is the case, we expect it to have much lower contrast but better viewing angles.

This TV has great peak brightness in SDR. It's about as bright as the Sony X90J, but not as bright as the Hisense U8G. There's no noticeable variation in peak brightness with different content, which is great.

We measured the SDR brightness after calibration in the 'Custom' Picture Mode, with Brightness at max, Contrast at '90', and Color Tone set to 'Expert 1'.

If you want a slightly brighter image, the 'Vivid' Picture Mode with Contrast at 'Max' results in a slightly brighter image, but this mode is less accurate.

Although the Sony X85J uses a direct-lit backlight similar to the Sony X90J, there's no local dimming feature. The video is for reference only, so you can see how the local dimming feature on other displays compares to one without local dimming. If you prefer something with local dimming, then look into the TCL 5 Series/S546 2021 QLED.

Unlike the Sony X90J, this TV doesn't have a local dimming feature. The video is for reference only, so you can see how the local dimming feature on other displays compares to one without local dimming.

The Sony X85J has decent peak brightness in HDR. It's bright enough to deliver an impact HDR experience with most content, but small highlights aren't bright enough to stand out the way the director intended.

Unfortunately, the TV doesn't follow the EOTF curve properly, as most scenes are brighter than they're supposed to be. It's not as bad as the Hisense U8G, but it's not ideal if you care about an accurate image. It also cuts off sharply at the TV's peak brightness, resulting in a loss of fine details in bright scenes.

If you want to make HDR content brighter and don't mind losing image accuracy, change to the 'Vivid' Picture Mode, and set Contrast to 'Max'. These settings result in a much brighter image, as you can see in this EOTF plot.

We measured the HDR brightness in the 'Custom' Picture Mode, before calibrating the TV, with Brightness at max, Contrast at '90', and Color Tone set to 'Expert 2'.

The brightness in 'Game Mode' is identical to the 'Custom' Picture Mode. The TV still doesn't follow the EOTF properly, but this isn't as much of an issue, as most games have an option to adjust the HDR brightness.

The Sony X85J has excellent gradient handling. There's some banding in darker shades, especially greens, but it's not very noticeable with most content. It has a less powerful image processor than the Sony X90J, and it doesn't have a smooth gradation feature or other options to remove banding.

The Sony X85J has very good gray uniformity, but this can vary between individual units. The sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, but there's very little dirty screen effect, great for sports fans. Near-dark scenes look even better, with no noticeable issues at all.

The unit we tested has excellent black uniformity, but this can vary between units. There's a bit of cloudiness in the screen, which you can't reduce as there's no local dimming, but this isn't very noticeable in most content.

Unfortunately, as expected of a VA-type panel, the Sony X85J's viewing angles are disappointing. Colors stay accurate to a wider angle than the Hisense U8G, but dark shades look washed out at a narrow angle. A TV with an IPS-type panel, like the LG NANO90 2021, is a better choice for a wide seating arrangement.

Note: We've seen some reports that the 43 inch model has an IPS panel in some regions. If this is the case, we expect it to have much better viewing angles but worse contrast.

The Sony X85J has decent reflection handling. The semi-gloss finish reduces the intensity of direct reflections a bit without smearing them across the screen. Bright lights can still be distracting, but overall we don't expect visibility to be an issue in most environments.

Out of the box, the Sony X85J is remarkably accurate. Gamma is very close to our target of 2.2, and the white balance is nearly perfect. There are some inaccurate colors, especially highly saturated blues, but they're close enough to the targets that we don't expect most people to notice them. Note that the exact accuracy out of the box can vary between units.

Calibration improved the white balance and gamma to near perfection, but as there's no color calibration on this TV, we weren't able to correct any of the color issues.

You can see our recommended settings here.

We didn't notice any issues upscaling 480p content like DVDs.

720p content, including most cable TV stations, is upscaled well by the Sony X85J, with no noticeable issues.

Like most TVs we've tested, 1080p content looks almost as good as native 4k content.

4k content is displayed perfectly, with no noticeable issues.

This is a 4k TV that won't accept an 8k signal.

Like most TVs on the market, the Sony X85J uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional Red-Green-Blue layout. For video content, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues with some programs when used as a PC monitor. You can read more about this here.

The Sony X85J has a great color gamut. It can display nearly the entire DCI P3 color space used by most current HDR content, but it falls short on highly saturated greens, although this won't be very noticeable with most content. It also has okay coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, but it's not as good as the Hisense U8G.

The X85J we tested displays a wider color gamut than the Sony X90J, which is unexpected. This can vary between units, though, and the difference isn't very noticeable. We found that the X90J has better tone mapping, and in person, with real content, the X90J looks better.

The Sony X85J has decent color volume. It's limited by the incomplete color gamut and, like most LCDs on the market, blues aren't as bright as other colors. Thanks to the high contrast ratio, this TV can display dark, saturated colors well, but not as well as the Hisense U8G.

There are no signs of temporary image retention on our unit, but this can vary.

We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.

The Sony X85J has a great response time, resulting in very clear motion, with negligible blur behind fast-moving objects. Transitions in dark scenes look better than most VA panels, but there's still some black smearing behind dark objects. There's very little overshoot in any transition.

The Sony X85J uses direct (DC) dimming to dim the backlight. Like the Sony X850G, there's some noise at very low backlight levels, but this isn't noticeable at all, and the backlight never turns completely off. It's different from the Sony X90J, which uses Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. PWM can bother some people, as it can cause eye fatigue or headaches.

This TV has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), that can reduce the amount of persistence blur. Like the Sony X90J, it can only flicker at 120Hz, which can cause duplications when watching 60Hz content. Note that our scoring is based only on the refresh rates that support BFI and don't reflect how effective it is.

The Sony X85J has an optional motion interpolation feature that can improve the appearance of lower frame-rate content. Subjectively, it seems to perform well, but we did notice some artifacts in busier scenes.

Due to the fast response time of this TV, there is some noticeable stutter when watching movies. It's mainly noticeable in slow panning shots. If stutter bothers you, enabling motion interpolation can help to reduce it, but this can introduce the soap opera effect, which some people don't like.

The Sony X85J can remove judder from all sources.

Update 08/30/2022: With firmware version PKG6.5942.0698NAA released in July 2022, there aren't any issues with 1080p signals using VRR below 120 fps. There were some issues with the screen going black before this firmware version, so if you notice anything, just make sure to update the TV to the latest firmware.

Update 03/04/2022: Sony released an update to include VRR support with firmware PKG6.5660.0668NAA.

The VRR support works without issue on the Xbox Series X and reduces screen tearing. Sadly, it doesn't support FreeSync at all, as there's screen tearing with the AMD RX 580 and RX 6600 XT graphics cards, and because the Xbox Series X supports both HDMI Forum VRR and FreeSync, it's confirmed that it has native HDMI Forum VRR support.

It has G-SYNC compatibility with NVIDIA graphics cards, but there are some issues with it. It's tear-free with 4k @ 120Hz signals from the NVIDIA RTX 3060, but initially, the backlight flickered until the TV and PC were reset. Also, 1440p @ 120Hz works without any problem, but the TV is upscaling 1440p to 4k. The replacement for this TV, the Sony X85K, doesn't have as many VRR issues.

Update 03/04/2022: Sony released an update to include VRR support with firmware PKG6.5660.0668NAA. Like other TVs, we couldn't get proper VRR input lag readings because the TV kept crashing. We experienced the same issue with some other TVs like the Sony X90J, and we're looking into it.

The Sony X85J has outstanding low input lag, which is especially important when gaming or for use as a PC monitor. It's a tiny bit slower than the Hisense U8G but a bit faster than the Sony X90J.

Update 01/28/2022: Some users have reported that this TV occasionally skips frames when playing 23.976fps content, like Blu-rays. We tested it but didn't notice any frame skipping or judder issues.

Update 11/24/2021: We rechecked 4k @ 120Hz with chroma 4:4:4 support on this TV. Unfortunately, like most other TVs we've tested in 2021, it can't display 4k @ 120Hz signals properly. The vertical resolution is cut in half, resulting in a 3840 x 1080 interlaced signal, so text isn't displayed properly. This isn't very noticeable when gaming, though.

The Sony X85J supports most common resolutions, except 1440p, which requires a forced resolution. Chroma 4:4:4 signals are displayed properly in most supported resolutions, except for 4k @ 120Hz, which is important for clear text from a PC.

Update 03/04/2022: After a firmware update (version PKG6.5660.0668NAA) the TV now supports both VRR and ALLM support, and no settings are required for ALLM to work.

The Sony X85J doesn't support 4k @ 120Hz and Dolby Vision at once, so you have to choose between them by changing the HDMI Signal Format setting.

The Sony X85J has two HDMI 2.1 ports. Unfortunately, one of these is also the eARC port, so if you're planning to connect a home theater system, you'll only be able to take full advantage of one HDMI 2.1 source.

Unlike the Sony X850G, there's no dedicated component or composite input. Instead, there's a single composite in port, which requires a breakout adapter that's sold separately. It has a built-in tuner, which has received an update for NextGen TV ATSC 3.0, allowing it to receive over-the-air 4k broadcasts in supported regions.

The Sony X85J supports eARC on HDMI port 3. This allows the TV to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to an external home theater system or soundbar.

The Sony X85J has a decent frequency response. Like most TVs, the low-frequency extension (LFE) is high, as it can't produce any deep thump or rumble. Above the LFE, the frequency response is very balanced, resulting in clear dialogue. It can get very loud, but there's a bit of pumping at max volume.

This TV has decent distortion performance. At lower volumes, there's very little total distortion, but it increases drastically at max volume. This varies between content, though, and not everyone will even notice it.

The Sony X85J runs on Google TV instead of the Android TV interface used in previous years. The core of the smart interface is the same, but the overall layout and some functionality have changed. It's easy to use, and the built-in content store has a huge selection of additional content.

Unfortunately, like almost all TVs on the market now, there are ads throughout the interface. We noticed them in the app store and on the main page, but the exact location varies.

Through the built-in Google Play Store, this TV has a massive selection of apps.

The remote is identical to the one included with the Sony X90J. It's a bit larger than most remotes currently on the market, as Sony is one of the last brands to include a full numpad and full controls on the remote. The remote has a built-in mic for voice control, but it must be paired over Bluetooth with the TV for this feature to work. The voice commands work well, allowing you to change inputs, search for content, or even adjust some settings.

• Power cord
• Remote control
• Batteries
• VESA mount adapters
• Cable clips
• User manual