Sony X900E TV Review

The X900E has a very typical Sony design, with a small stand that supports the TV well and a very functional appearance. There are slots at the rear of the stand for cable management, but overall the design is quite minimalist.  

The metal stand supports the TV well and is very stable. It looks good, especially due to the tracks in each rear leg for cable management.

Footprint of the 55" TV stand: 10.2" x 19.8"

The back of the TV is very simple, with metal and plastic panels. If wall mounted, some of the ports may be difficult to access.

The borders are quite thin, and look good.

The TV has an average thickness. If wall mounted it may stick out a bit, but this isn't too much of an issue.

The X900E is a fairly cool TV, and should never feel hot to the touch. However its power brick does get warm, up to 45 °C, though this isn't hot enough to cause any problems.

The build quality is very good, all of the parts feel secure. The construction is very good with screws used to ensure good support.

The native contrast ratio is very good on this Sony TV. With a ratio of around 5400, this is much better than the X930D. A high contrast ratio is crucial for good dark scenes performance while watching movies in a dark room.

Note that this test is done in SDR with local dimming off to showcase the true native contrast of the panel used in this TV. With local dimming set to high with the same test pattern, the contrast ratio was around 6500 with black level of around 0.015 cd/m², which is even better.

The local dimming feature is average on the Sony X900E. When set side by side with last year's X930D, it is clearly an upgrade visually, and we recommend it for normal viewing. When set to maximum it can sometimes feel a bit aggressive. If you visually see that it too aggressive, you can set it to medium or low.

Excellent SDR peak brightness. With both 'Auto Local Dimming' and 'X-tended Dynamic Range' set to 'High', the X900e is able to make small areas like our 2% window very bright. The TV can't brighten larger areas as well as smaller areas but large areas are still very bright. The TV is able to maintain this high brightness indefinitely which is good.

Good all-round brightness. Even the worst cases such as sustained 100% window remain very bright. With 'Auto Local Dimming' and 'X-tended Dynamic Range' set to 'High' the X900E is able to make small areas very bright, and maintain this high brightness over time without fading.

The overall gray uniformity of the X900E is good. The 50% standard deviation is a bit higher than what would be considered a good value, and this is cause by the darker corners and the general unevenness near the frame of the TV. Luckily for sports fans there is not too much dirty screen effect, as the center of the display is pretty even.

As for the 5% uniformity, besides some brighter areas near the bottom corners there is not much to complain about which is great.

This viewing angle is bad, but is fairly typical for a TV with a VA panel. When sitting to the side of the TV and viewing it on an angle, blacks will look gray and colors will look washed out, though the brightness will stay fairly constant.

The X900E native black uniformity (whitout local dimming) is good and is similar to last year Sony X930D. Some clouding can be seen, especially near the corners, but with a standard deviation of 1.203, this is still a pretty good result.

With local dimming turned on, the result is equally good with a value of 1.014. This is a good sign that the local dimming is working well on the X900e

With local dimming turn on and with regular content, the faint clouding visible on our picture should not be noticeable.

The TV is great at handling reflections. The semi-gloss finish helps to diffuse light on the screen which reduces the intensity. Even in a fairly bright room, reflections aren't an issue.

Out of the box in the 'Custom' picture mode the calibration of the TV is excellent and could be used without any further adjustments. The white balance is slightly too warm, but even then the white balance dE is only 2.15 which is still a good score. The color accuracy is also good, with only the green tracking a bit worse than the other colors.

Calibration of the X900E is very easy and fast to do with the provided 2 and 10 points white balance calibration. The white balance was quickly brought to a negligible 0.25 dE, and the gamma curve was flattened to track more closely to the 2.2 value. The color space dE was brought down a bit, but since there is no color space management on this TV, we could not bring it down further. In any case, with a dE of 1.97 it is still an excellent result that is well under our good value of a dE of 3.

You can see our recommended settings here.

Upscaling of low-quality content such as DVDs is good. Details are preserved, but lines appear jagged. Very little haloing can be seen.

720p content such as cable looks good. The image is clear, but some moiré from the camera can be seen in the image.

Upscaling of 1080p content such as Blu-rays is very good.

1080p content is handled differently from most TVs. Find out more in our Additional Review Notes.

Native 4k content is very clear, and no issues can be seen.

The X900E has a wide color gamut which is good for HDR content. Overall, deep colors will be well represented but the TV underperforms when reproducing greens.

The X900E has decent color volume. It is able to show its wide color gamut at a range of brightness values, though it does struggle at the extreme ends of this range. Its color gamut for extremely bright colors is smaller than at moderate brightness, and its blue tinted black level also prevents it from accurately showing very dark deep color.

The performance of this TV is excellent when displaying our gradient test image. Small imperfections can be noticed in the dark green and blue, but these are almost negligible. The TV can display gradients without any banding normally seen on an 8-bit panel and should provide excellent color reproduction, especially in sky scenes for HDR movies.

The Sony X900E has some image retention, which is pretty unusual for a TV with a VA panel. The retention is really faint and not as strong as seen on some IPS TVs. It is the first time we've seen image retention on a VA TV. Note that image retention is not a deal breaker in any way, but more a temporary annoyance, since it is not permanent.

Update 10/05/2017: We have retested the image retention on our replacement unit (see here) and there is only very faint retention. The result has been updated, but note that there may be some variance on a unit-by-unit basis.

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

The response time of the X900E is outstanding and results in only a short trail following moving objects. The 20%-80% and 80%-20% transitions take a bit longer than ideal, resulting in the blur visible in the moving logo image. Overall, this TV shouldn't have any problems with fast-paced content.

The backlight does use PWM to dim, but only at very low backlight levels (at a setting of 8/50 or below). It flickers at a relatively high frequency of 720 Hz so content appears quite smooth.

Update 04/18/2018: Note that with 'Local Dimming' and 'X-tended Dynamic Range' enabled, the TV always flickers (no matter the 'Brightness' setting.

It is possible to reduce the flicker frequency to 120Hz by increasing the 'Motionflow' -> 'Clearness' slider. This does help to clear up motion, but not as well as the 60Hz flicker available on other TVs.

The TV has a 120Hz panel and is able to interpolate lower frame rate content to produce a very strong 'Soap Opera Effect' (SOE). To do so, adjust the 'Motionflow' setting and increase the 'Smoothness' slider. The 'CineMotion' option changes the threshold for interpolation. Set it to 'High' for the most SOE.

The Sony X900E is decent at displaying content smoothly, but for low frame rate content such as movies it does appear a bit stuttery, especially for wide panning shots, as each frame is static for ~30ms during periods of motion. For 60 fps content motion is smooth.

The X900E can play movies from Blu-ray players, native streaming apps and cable/satellite boxes without any judder. Note that when playing the movie from a 60p/60i source like cable TV, the 'Motionflow' option must be set to 'True Cinema' and 'CineMotion' set to 'High' to have a judder-free experience without any motion interpolation.

The X900E doesn't support variable refresh rate features such as HDMI Forum VRR or FreeSync.

Very good input lag overall. In game or graphics mode the input lag is always lower than 35 ms, which should be good enough for all but the most competitive gamers. Outside of game or graphics mode though the input lag is quite high, making this TV unsuitable for gaming with interpolation enabled.

Update 05/23/2017: The TV has been retested after the update to Android TV 7.0 Nougat, and the input lag is unchanged.

Update 07/18/2017: The TV has been tested with the newest firmware update (PKG6.2648.0065NAA). The input lag remains the same.

Update 09/20/2017: Tested 1080p @ 120 Hz input lag using our new input lag tool. It is much faster than the 1080p @ 60 Hz input lag, likely due to the TV bypassing some processing when it detects such an unusual signal.

Update 11/10/2017: Retested input lag with the latest firmware (PKG6.2669.0070NAA); there was no significant change.

This TV supports all of the common input signals. Only HDMI inputs 2 and 3 are capable of showing 4k @ 60 Hz @ 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 color, and only when 'HDMI Enhanced Format' is enabled. 4:4:4 color is supported in both game and graphics mode.

Remarkably the TV also displayed a 1080p @ 120 Hz input without showing the vertical line artifacts seen on the X930D. However when displaying this resolution while in game or graphics mode only crude upscaling was done on the 1080p image, so the image looked almost as jagged as it would on a 1080p TV. Some people may prefer this look however because it retains most of the sharpness of the original image.

Update 06/12/2018: A note for Xbox One X and Xbox One S owners: 1080p @ 120 Hz from the Xbox is only supported on this TV when the Xbox's connection type is changed from Auto-detect (Recommended) to HDMI: (Xbox > Settings > Display & sound > Video fidelity & overscan > Display > Connection > HDMI). Unfortunately in this mode 4k, HDR, 50 Hz and 24 Hz aren't possible, so this mode is only recommended when the higher refresh rate of 120 Hz is more important to you than these other features.

Update 06/18/2018: Correction, 24 Hz and 50 Hz are in fact possible with the Xbox's connection type set to HDMI.

There is a shared component/composite port on the back, and an additional composite input on the side but an adapter is not included. An example of the correct adapter can be found here.

To enable audio passthrough, in the 'Action Menu' change the 'Speakers' to 'Audio System'.
This TV does support a variable analog audio out, which means you can control the volume of wired headphones (like the Beyerdynamic DT 770) directly with your TV remote.

Poor frequency response. Low-end cutoff of 160Hz means that this TV won't produce much bass. Additionally, even though this TV doesn't get very loud, pumping and compression is produced as the volume is increased.