Sony X95K TV Review

The Sony X95K has a premium design with a unique checkerboard pattern on the back. It has an adjustable stand and panel covers for cable management to keep your setup clean, so you don't have too many cables dangling around.

The Sony X95K has straight metal feet that hold the TV very well. You can adjust them in three different positions: a narrow position if you have a small table, a low position if you want minimal space between the screen and the table, and a high position to accommodate soundbars. You need to unscrew the feet when you want to change positions. You can see the dimensions of the 65-inch TV below (W x D x H to the bottom of the screen:

• Narrow position (pictured above): 20.2" x 13.5" x 3.1"
• Low position: 56.8" x 13.5" x 1.9"
• Soundbar position: 56.8" x 13.5" x 4.4"

The back has a similar checkerboard design as past Sony TVs, but the squares are smaller. It's entirely plastic and it has covers to help with cable management. It also has a zip tie and clips to help route your cables to the inputs. Using the plastic covers to hide the cables is only beneficial if you have the TV on a table because they're hard to remove if you have it mounted on a fixed bracket. If that's the case, it's better to leave them off, and the side-facing inputs are easy to access, but the down-facing ones aren't.

The Sony X95K has excellent build quality. The borders and feet are metal, while everything else is plastic and feels solid, but there's a bit of flex on the back panel. The TV is very stable on the stand, and even though it wobbles a bit more with the stand in the higher position, it's still good. The biggest issue is that the cable management covers fall off at times and are hard to put in, which is why the TV doesn't feel as well-built as other premium TVs.

The Sony X95K has a decent native contrast ratio. Blacks look closer to gray with the local dimming featured disabled due to the 'X-Wide Angle' layer, but the local dimming feature improves the contrast. Keep in mind that the checkerboard pattern causes multiple dimming zones to turn on, which lowers the contrast, but it displays deeper blacks with real content.

The Sony X95K has fantastic SDR peak brightness. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare from bright light sources, and even though larger areas are dimmer, it's still very bright.

These results are from the 'Custom' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max, Contrast at its default of '90', Color Temperature set to 'Expert 1', and Peak Luminance on 'High'. If you want the brightest image possible, set Auto Local Dimming to 'High' because it gets about 40 nits brighter than 'Medium'.

If you don't care about image accuracy and want the brightest image possible, use the 'Vivid' Picture Mode with the Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma each at their max, and Advanced Contrast Enhancer, Auto Local Dimming, and Peak Luminance all on 'High'. This results in a peak brightness of 1,312 cd/m² in the 25% window.

The Sony X95K has a great Mini LED local dimming feature. The 65-inch model has a 36x12 array for 432 zones, and the 75-inch model has 600 zones, and the 85-inch model has 768 zones, so the larger sizes should perform a bit better. Even though it has many more zones than the Sony X95J, the local dimming isn't as good overall. It does a great job at deepening blacks, but there's blooming around bright objects. It's especially noticeable and distracting with subtitles. The TV gets really bright to make small highlights shine, but it's a bit too aggressive, causing the blooming. Other than that, it looks great as there aren't any uniformity issues or black crush that causes a loss of details in dark scenes. The algorithm also keeps up with fast-moving objects well. Sadly, some of its issues are more noticeable when viewing from an angle, like with the blooming. Overall, it's an upgrade over the Sony X90K, but it doesn't match up to the Sony X95J.

The Sony X95K's local dimming feature looks the same in Game Mode as outside of it.

The Sony X95K has incredible HDR peak brightness. It really makes highlights pop for a satisfying HDR experience. The EOTF also tracks the target PQ curve perfectly, which means that it displays scenes at their correct brightness. There's a smooth roll-off for content mastered below 4000 nits, so you don't lose details in bright scenes with most content.

These measurements are in the 'Custom' HDR Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max, Contrast at '90', Color Temperature set to 'Expert 2', Auto Local Dimming and Peak Luminance on 'High', and HDR Tone Mapping on 'Gradation Preferred'. Setting Auto Local Dimming to 'Medium' results in a slightly dimmer image, but it isn't enough to be noticeable.

If you find the image too dim, use the same settings but adjust Contrast to its max, Gamma to its max, HDR Tone Mapping to 'Brightness Preferred', and Advanced Contrast Enhancer to 'High'. This results in a noticeably brighter image, as you can see in this EOTF, but it doesn't change the peak luminosity.

The Sony X95K has fantastic HDR brightness in Game Mode. It's very similar to outside of Game Mode, and there visually isn't much of a difference. It was tested with the same settings as outside of Game Mode, but with the Picture Mode set to 'Game'.

The Sony X95K has okay gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are noticeably darker, which is distracting if you want to use it as a PC monitor. There's also a bit of dirty screen effect in the center, but it isn't enough to be too distracting while watching sports.

The Sony X95K has decent black uniformity. Without the local dimming feature, the screen looks blue. The local dimming helps further deepen any blacks, but it also causes blooming around bright objects.

The Sony X95K has an okay viewing angle thanks to Sony's 'X-Wide Angle' technology. It's fine for watching TV shows or sports with a few people around, but the image starts to lose consistency from really wide angles.

The Sony X95K has excellent reflection handling. There aren't too many distracting reflections coming from the screen, but the light scattering across causes a rainbow-like effect. It's noticeable in darker scenes but gets bright enough to fight glare with brighter scenes.

The Sony X95K has decent out-of-the-box accuracy in SDR. Colors are accurate, and gamma almost follows the 2.2 target for moderately-lit rooms perfectly. However, the color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a blue tint, and the white balance is off.

The Sony X95K has fantastic accuracy after calibration to the D65 white point. Any remaining inaccuracies can't be spotted by the naked eye. It's easy to calibrate the white balance, but some colors like blue are still difficult to fix.

You can see the settings for our calibration here.

The Sony X95K doesn't have any trouble upscaling lower-resolution content like from DVDs.

720p content, like from HD cable channels, looks great.

The Sony X95K displays 1080p content from Blu-rays almost as well as native 4k content.

There aren't any issues with native 4k content on the Sony X95K.

The Sony X95K is a 4k TV that can't display an 8k input.

The Sony X95K uses a BGR subpixel layout. It doesn't affect picture quality but can cause blurry text in some applications when using it as a PC monitor. You can read more about it here.

The Sony X95K has an impressive HDR color gamut and is much better than the Sony X95J. It has incredible coverage of the commonly-used DCI-P3 color space, and it's somewhat future-proof as it has decent coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space as more content will start to use it. Tone mapping is good between both color spaces, meaning colors look accurate in HDR, but some cyans and blues are off in Rec. 2020.

The Sony X95K has a good color volume. It displays colors as bright as pure white, and it displays dark colors well, but it's limited by the incomplete color gamut. Although its overall color volume is slightly worse than the Sony X90K, it has a higher absolute color volume, meaning it can display brighter colors better.

The Sony X95K has amazing gradient handling. There's minimal banding with most colors, but there's a bit more in darker grays and greens. The Smooth Gradation setting helps reduce banding. However, it also causes a loss of fine details in high-quality content.

There are no signs of temporary image retention on the Sony X95K after displaying a high-contrast static image for 10 minutes.

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

The Sony X95K has an impressive responsive time. There's minimal blur trail behind fast-moving objects, but because it has a slow response time with dark transitions, there's a bit of black smearing.

The Sony X95K uses pulse width modulation to dim its backlight. It always flickers at 720Hz in all picture modes, which is high enough that it isn't noticeable or distracting.

The Sony X95K has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. It only flickers at 120Hz, which causes image duplication with 60 fps content. The BFI score is based on the flicker frequency and not the actual performance. Also, you can't enable BFI at the same time as VRR.

The Sony X95K can interpolate lower-frame-rate content up to 120 fps. Like most TVs, it works well with slower scenes, but there are noticeable artifacts with fast-moving scenes. Even though the images above have a red tint with the motion interpolation feature enabled, it isn't noticeable with real content.

The Sony X95K has some stutter because of the quick response time as each frame is held on longer, but the motion interpolation feature can help reduce that.

The Sony X95K removes 24p judder from any source, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies.

The Sony X95K supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. HDMI Forum VRR and G-SYNC compatibility work over the entire refresh rate range, and it supports Low Framerate Compensation to continue working with low frame rates.

VRR works with 1440p @ 60Hz signals, but the TV is upscaling 1440p to 4k, so it's not a real 1440p signal, which is why we left the 1440p VRR range as Unknown. Also, 1440p @ 120Hz doesn't work at all on the TV.

The Sony X95K has low input lag in Game Mode for a responsive feel. You can enable the motion interpolation feature in Game Mode, but it also increases the input lag too much for gaming.

The Sony X95K supports most common signals up to 4k @ 120Hz with HDMI ports 3 and 4. It displays proper chroma 4:4:4 with 1080p and 4k signals, which helps with text clarity when using it as a PC monitor, but it doesn't do it with 1440p signals. Keep in mind that HDMI ports 1 and 2 are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, so they're limited in the signals they support, and if you want to take full advantage of the TV's HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, use ports 3 and 4.

The Sony X95K works well with the PS5 and Xbox Series X. You need to use HDMI ports 3 and 4 for HDMI 2.1 bandwidth if you want to take full advantage of the consoles. It only supports Dolby Vision up to 4k @ 60Hz on the Xbox Series X. It has an Auto Low Latency Mode that switches the TV into Game Mode automatically for low input lag, and you don't need to change any settings for it to work with the PS5. It also supports Auto HDR Tone Mapping with the PS5 that optimizes the HDR picture settings.

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't use HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on multiple devices at the same time unless the receiver also supports it. Also, the tuner supports ATSC 3.0, allowing you to stream over-the-air 4k channels.

Unlike the Sony X95J, the Sony X95K doesn't have an analog audio output, so you can't connect headphones.

The Sony X95K supports eARC, allowing you to pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver through an HDMI cable. You can also connect a compatible Sony soundbar to the S-Center speaker input and use the TV's speakers as a center channel.

The Sony X95K has a good frequency response. It has a well-balanced sound profile that makes dialogue sound clear, but like most TVs, it doesn't produce much bass.

The Sony X95K has good distortion handling. There aren't too many distortion artifacts at moderate listening levels, and even if there's more at the max volume, it isn't too bad.

The Sony X95K has the same Google TV smart platform as past Sony models. It's user-friendly, and navigating through the interface feels smooth.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, there are ads throughout the interface. You can opt-out of personalized ads, but that means you'll get non-targeted ads instead.

The Google Play Store has tons of apps available to download, and they run very smoothly. It has Google Chromecast built-in, meaning you can cast content from your phone. You can also connect the Bravia webcam for video calls.

The redesigned Sony remote is small as it doesn't have a numpad, but you can bring up a virtual numpad on the screen with the '123' button. There are mics in the remote and built into the TV, and they allow you to ask it to search for content, change settings, and open apps.

There's a single button on the back left side to turn it On/Off, change channels, adjust the volume, or switch inputs. There's also a switch to turn off the mic on the TV if you're concerned about privacy. However, these controls are set into the TV and hard to access with it wall-mounted, especially if you have the wall-mounted, and the plastic covers block access to the buttons.

• Remote
• 2x AAA Batteries
• Manuals and user guides