Sony X90L/X90CL  TV Review

The Sony X90L has good brightness in HDR, a significant improvement over the Sony X90K/X90CK. Bright highlights stand out well, and real scenes are bright and vivid. Small highlights are almost as bright as the higher-end Sony X93L, but with most real content, the X93L is brighter.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

Even though the Sony X90L is a model from 2023, it's actually brighter than its 2025 successor, the Sony BRAVIA 5.

Switching to Game Mode in HDR results in roughly the same peak brightness in HDR.

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

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 2
• HDR Tone Mapping: Gradation Preferred
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

The Sony X90L has amazing peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to easily overcome glare even in a very bright room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Custom
• Brightness: Max
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Expert 1
• Peak Luminance: High
• Auto Local Dimming: High

The Sony X90L has okay contrast, resulting in deep blacks during most scenes. However, black levels do raise a bit when very bright highlights are on the screen. Unlike the Sony X93L, this model doesn't have a wide viewing angle filter, so the native contrast is much higher. The full array local dimming feature is extremely effective at boosting contrast, but it isn't as good as the Mini LED backlight on the X93L.

The lighting zone precision of this TV is good overall. There's some noticeable blooming around subtitles and bright lights in otherwise dark scenes, but it's surprisingly good considering the relatively large size of each dimming zone. 

Although the algorithms do a good job averaging out bright highlights to reduce blooming, they're not very fast and struggle to keep up with fast-moving objects. It causes the leading edge to appear dark, as the lighting zones aren't turning on quickly enough, and a longer bloom trail behind them. With slower highlights, there's noticeable flicker as they move across the screen.

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

The black uniformity of this TV is mediocre. With local dimming disabled, the entire screen is bluish, but there are no noticeable hot spots or backlight bleed. With local dimming enabled, black areas of the screen are much deeper, but due to the relatively large size of the dimming zones and the way the algorithms spread highlights out, there's some noticeable blooming.

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 shades of color. The TV’s coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space is noticeably worse, and it struggles a lot more with all colors. 

The TV's HDR color volume is great. Dark, saturated colors look great thanks to the high contrast ratio, and bright colors are vibrant and stand out well.

With just a few settings changes out of the box, the Sony X90L has impressive SDR accuracy. There are a few slight issues with the white balance, but it's decent overall, and the colors are excellent, with no noticeable issues. The color temperature is essentially perfect, and gamma is very close to the 2.2 target used for a moderately lit room.

The TV is very easy to calibrate, and the results after calibrating it to a D65 white point are nearly perfect.

See our full calibration settings.

The Sony BRAVIA X90L has exceptional accuracy in HDR before calibration. There's some minor inaccuracies with white balance in some shades of gray, which makes the TV's color temperature a touch too cool, but it's still very close to 6500K. Color accuracy is outstanding overall, with only some very slight inaccuracies that most people won't notice. This is a TV that's incredibly accurate out-of-the-box, so calibration isn't necessary. 

After calibration, the TV is a bit more accurate in HDR. White balance is a bit better now, which brings its color temperature even closer to 6500K. Color accuracy is mostly unchanged, but some of the minor mapping errors have been reduced. 

This TV has impressive PQ EOTF tracking, ensuring that most HDR content is displayed at or close to the brightness level intended by the content creator. Near-black scenes are slightly raised, so some shadow details look a bit washed out.

The Sony X90L does a great job smoothing out low-quality content, but it's slightly worse than most comparable Sony TVs like the Sony X93L. Still, macro-blocking and pixelization issues are smoothed out well, and there's very little loss of fine detail.

The TV has superb sharpness processing capabilities. Low-resolution content is upscaled well, and lines are sharp with very little over-sharpening. Fine details in busy scenes are easy to make out, and hardcoded text looks great.

These results are with the following processing settings:

• Sharpness: 60
• Reality Creation: Auto

This TV has great gradient handling in HDR. There's some light banding in bright shades of blue and green, but everything else looks excellent.

This TV has very low input lag in Game Mode, ensuring a smooth and responsive gaming experience. It's worth noting that despite the TV having low enough input lag that you don't feel any major delay with your inputs while gaming, it's a bit higher than most similar models from other manufacturers.

Like the Sony X93L, this TV supports all common formats up to 120Hz. All supported formats also display chroma 4:4:4 or RGB signals properly, ensuring text is clear and easy to read when using it as a PC monitor. HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, so they don't support 4k @ 120Hz.

The TV supports most variable refresh rate technologies, aside from FreeSync, to reduce screen tearing in games.

The TV has subpar pixel transitions at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. There's no overshoot, so you don't see inverse ghosting. However, its response time is very slow in Game Mode, so fast motion is blurry. 

The TV has subpar pixel transitions at its maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. There's no overshoot, so you don't see inverse ghosting. However, its response time is very slow in Game Mode, so fast motion is blurry. 

The Sony BRAVIA X90L has disappointing pixel transitions at 60Hz while in Game Mode. There's a lot more overshoot at 60Hz than at 120Hz, so fast motion is blurry and has some inverse ghosting. 

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.

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 FreeSync Premium Pro. It supports Dolby Vision gaming, but only at 60Hz. 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 has stutter when watching 24p content that's most visible in scenes with slow panning shots. It's not quite as bad as it is on TVs with OLED panels, like the Sony A95L OLED, but it's still noticeable during certain scenes.

The Sony X90L's interpolation feature does a good job of reducing stutter when bringing 24fps content up to 30fps. It's not perfect, but the hold time of frames is reduced, leading to smoother motion. The feature also has outstanding consistency, so motion cadence looks even.

The TV removes 24p judder from any source, including those that output content in 60Hz, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies and shows. It also removes 25p judder from external sources that can send a 25Hz signal, like an Apple TV. However, it doesn't completely remove 25p judder from the native apps or from 60p signals, but since frame times are fairly consistent, motion is just a bit jittery.

To remove 24p judder from 60Hz sources, Motionflow has to be enabled, with CineMotion set to 'High' and both sliders at 'Min'. This combination of settings removes judder without adding any soap opera effect.

The Sony X90L is free from micro-judder with both 24p and 25p content if you're using the TV's native apps or an external device that can send a 24Hz or 25Hz signal, like a blu-ray player. However, there's apparent micro-judder present in 24p and 25p content when it's being sent to the TV via a 60p signal, so scenes with complex motion aren't as smooth as they should be. 

The TV has a very good response time in the 'Custom' picture mode when watching content. Fast motion in most movies and sports has minimal motion blur behind it. However, it's slower when coming out of dark states, so there's some black smearing in dark scene transitions.

The Sony X90L does a great job of avoiding transition artifacts in movies and shows. There are only some very subtle edge artifacts, so the edges of fast-moving objects and characters remain very crisp in fast-paced scenes. There are some unintended intermediate colors in fast-paced scenes that do slightly affect consistency, but these are subtle and hard to notice for most people.

This TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) at all backlight levels. It always flickers at 720Hz, which is high enough that it'll only bother you if you're extremely sensitive to flicker.

There's an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI), which you can enable to improve the appearance of motion. This TV can only flicker at 120Hz, which causes image duplication with 60 fps content. The backlight flicker pattern is very unusual, flickering at both 120Hz and an underlying 720Hz pattern, similar to the Sony X90K/X90CK.

The Sony X90L has poor direct reflection handling. It barely reduces the intensity of lamps, wall lights, or windows opposite the screen when watching content or playing video games, which is distracting. 

The TV has exceptional black levels in a bright room. Black levels are barely raised in a room with ambient lighting, and they remain deep and punchy.

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

The Sony X90CL has very good color saturation in ambient lighting. Colors shown at all levels of luminance are still vibrant and saturated in a bright room, even after they lose some saturation from ambient sources of light.  

The TV has an acceptable viewing angle. The image looks mostly consistent from a slight angle, but there's gamma shifting, the black levels raise, and there's color washout that worsens the further you move off-center. The image is noticeably degraded at an aggressive angle, so the TV isn't a very good choice for a large group setting.

Unfortunately, the gray uniformity is unremarkable on this TV. The corners are slightly darker than the center, but this isn't noticeable with most real content. The bigger issue is the noticeable dirty screen effect in the center, and there are dark vertical columns across the entire screen, which can be especially noticeable in content with large bright areas. The uniformity in near-dark scenes is much better and looks good overall.

This TV 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.

The TV 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 48 Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, while HDMI 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth. However, because HDMI 3 is an HDMI 2.1 and eARC port, you lose an HDMI 2.1 slot if you connect a receiver, so you can only use HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on multiple devices simultaneously if the receiver also supports it. Also, the tuner supports ATSC 3.0, allowing you to stream over-the-air channels at up to a 4k resolution.

The TV supports eARC, which lets you 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 X90L has a premium design that looks great in any room. The bezels are thin and aren't distracting at all, and the minimalist design of the feet looks great and doesn't take up much space.

The Sony BRAVIA XR X90L has diamond-shaped metal feet that hold the TV very well. The feet can be mounted either in the normal position shown above or in a raised position to leave room for a soundbar. In Europe, there's a third option to mount the feet in a narrow position, but the U.S. models don't have this option. Confusingly, the back of the TV still has arrows to indicate the narrow position, but the bottom of the TV lacks the necessary mounting points.

Footprint of the 65-inch model: 47.2" x 13.6"

With the feet mounted in the normal position, there's about 1.8" between the table and the first row of pixels. Mounting it in the raised position increases this to about 3.3", so most soundbars fit without blocking any portion of the screen.

The back of the TV is entirely plastic and has a checkerboard pattern similar to that of other Sony TVs of this generation, like the Sony X93L. One difference between the Sony X90L and higher-end models is that this model doesn't include covers to hide the inputs, and there's nothing for cable management.

Sony TVs are usually well-built, and the Sony Bravia XR X90L is no exception. There's some flex on the back panel, but this is pretty common and doesn't cause any issues. It's a well-built TV made of premium materials.

The Sony BRAVIA XR X90L runs version 10 of the Google TV smart platform, similar to past Sony models like the Sony X95K.

Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the entire Google TV interface. 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.

The included remote is small, as it doesn't have a numpad. There are mics in the remote and built into the TV, and they let you ask it to search for content, change settings, and open apps. The remote included with the Sony X90L doesn't have a backlight, but the Costco variant Sony X90CL does.

There's a single button on the bottom of the TV near the center and a switch to enable or disable the mic. With the main button, you can power it on or off, change channels, adjust the volume, or switch inputs.

• Remote
• 2x AAA Batteries
• VESA adapters/screws
• Manuals and user guides

The Sony X90CL's frequency response is decent. Like most TVs, it lacks deep bass or rumble, but the sound profile is well-balanced at moderate listening levels, and dialogue sounds good. It also gets loud enough even in a moderately noisy environment.

The stand position impacts the overall sound profile, and lifting it to the raised position reduces the bass response of the TV. The low-frequency extension (LFE) in the raised position is at 119.87Hz.