The Sony X95L is Sony's flagship 4k TV in 2023. It replaces the Sony X95K from 2022 and sits above the Sony X93L in the U.S. Strangely, it's only available in an 85" size in North America, but there are 65" and 75" models in other regions. It offers impressive features, including hands-free voice control, the S-Center speaker input, and an ATSC 3.0 tuner for up to 4k broadcast support. It's powered by Sony's Cognitive Processor XR, which is designed to improve overall image processing and upscaling. It has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and variable refresh rate (VRR) support for gamers, so you can take full advantage of the latest consoles. Like past Sony TVs, it's powered by the Google TV smart platform, which is user-friendly and has a ton of apps available to download.
Our Verdict
The Sony X95L is an amazing TV for pretty much any usage. It's bright enough to overcome tons of glare in a bright room, making it an amazing choice for watching shows or sports during the day. It also has an okay viewing angle, so it's good for a wide seating arrangement. It has impressive gaming features, including low input lag and 4k @ 120Hz support for current-gen console or PC gamers. Its Mini LED backlight delivers one of the highest contrast ratios available, making it an amazing choice for HDR content in a dark room.
- Impressive Mini LED local dimming helps it display deep blacks.
- Bright enough to fight glare.
- Superb reflection handling.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
The Sony X95L is great for watching shows in a bright room. Its high peak brightness and superb reflection handling help it overcome glare in a bright room. It also has an okay viewing angle, so you can walk around with the TV on and still enjoy a consistent image. The built-in Google TV smart interface is easy to use and has a huge selection of apps, so you can easily find your favorite shows. With the hands-free voice control feature, you don't have to worry about finding the remote.
- No upscaling issues.
- Bright enough to fight glare.
- Superb reflection handling.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
The Sony X95L is an impressive TV for watching sports. With its high peak brightness and superb reflection handling, you don't have to worry about glare in a bright room. It has an okay viewing angle, so you can comfortably sit a large group of people around the TV without fighting over the best spot. It also has a quick response time, so fast action in sports is clear and easy to make out. It has great gray uniformity, with very little dirty screen effect in the center of the screen where the action is, and it upscales lower-resolution cable sports channels well.
- No upscaling issues.
- Bright enough to fight glare.
- Superb reflection handling.
- Excellent motion handling.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
The Sony X95L is an excellent TV for playing video games. It has incredibly low input lag, ensuring a responsive gaming experience, and it has a quick response time with very little blur behind fast-moving objects. It has a slew of extra gaming features, including VRR support, and a few PS5-specific features help optimize the picture quality for PS5 gamers. It looks great in a bright room thanks to its high peak brightness and superb reflection handling, but it's also a fantastic choice for gaming in a dark room.
- Impressive Mini LED local dimming helps it display deep blacks.
- Excellent motion handling.
- HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and VRR support.
- Low input lag for a responsive gaming and desktop experience.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
- Only two HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which is also the eARC port.
The Sony X95L is an excellent TV for watching movies. Its incredibly high contrast ratio delivers deep, uniform blacks in dark scenes, with almost no blooming around bright highlights. It gets incredibly bright in HDR, so specular highlights stand out well, and HDR content looks vivid and lifelike in general, thanks to its wide color gamut. It's also very good at smoothing out low-quality content, which is especially important if you're watching a lot of movies on streaming services, and it upscales DVDs well.
- Impressive Mini LED local dimming helps it display deep blacks.
- Removes 24p judder from all sources.
- Displays a wide range of colors.
- Bright specular highlights stand out incredibly well.
- Noticeable stutter in low framerate content.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
The Sony X95L is an amazing TV for gaming in HDR. It gets incredibly bright and combined with its incredible contrast, bright highlights in games stand out well. It delivers an incredibly smooth gaming experience thanks to its low input lag and quick response time, resulting in very little motion blur behind fast-moving objects. Finally, it supports a wide range of gaming features, including VRR and 4k @ 120Hz gaming.
- Impressive Mini LED local dimming helps it display deep blacks.
- Excellent motion handling.
- HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and VRR support.
- Low input lag for a responsive gaming and desktop experience.
- Displays a wide range of colors.
- Bright specular highlights stand out incredibly well.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
- Only two HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which is also the eARC port.
The Sony X95L is an excellent TV for use as a PC monitor. It has incredibly low input lag, resulting in a responsive desktop experience, and it has a quick response time, so there's very little motion blur behind fast-moving objects. It displays chroma 4:4:4 properly, which is essential for clear text from a PC. It has good uniformity and an okay viewing angle, but since it's only available in large sizes, it's important you sit at a comfortable viewing distance; otherwise, the sides of the screen appear non-uniform.
- Bright enough to fight glare.
- Superb reflection handling.
- HDMI 2.1 bandwidth and VRR support.
- Low input lag for a responsive gaming and desktop experience.
- Only available in an 85-inch size in North America.
- Only two HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which is also the eARC port.
Changelog
- Updated Jun 14, 2024: Mentioned the newly-reviewed Sony BRAVIA 9 QLED in the Contrast section of this review.
- Updated May 27, 2024: We bought and tested the Sony BRAVIA 7 QLED, and added a few comparisons in the HDR Brightness, Reflections and Viewing Angle sections of the review.
- Updated Nov 08, 2023: Mentioned the newly reviewed Hisense UX in the Compared To Other TVs section of this review.
- Updated Sep 27, 2023: We rechecked the HDR Gradient performance of this TV, as it unexpectedly performs worse than other similar models, like the Sony X91J and the Sony X93L. In a side-by-side comparison with those two TVs, the difference is clear; no changes were made to this review.
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Differences Between Sizes And Variants
We bought and tested the 85-inch Sony X95L, which is the only size available in North America. It's available in a 65-inch and 75-inch size in other regions, and most of these results are also valid for those sizes. The smaller sizes have lower native contrast and fewer dimming zones, so they don't look as good in a dark room. Sony doesn't provide zone counts for different sizes, so we don't know how different they are.
| Size | Model Number |
|---|---|
| 65" | XR-65X95L |
| 75" | XR-75X95L |
| 85" | XR-85X95L |
Our unit was manufactured in June 2023; you can see the label here.
Popular TV Comparisons
The Sony X95L is the absolute best 4k LCD TV on the market in 2023, but it comes at a hefty price premium, especially as it's only available in an 85-inch size in North America. Its Mini LED panel delivers superb contrast, high peak brightness, and exceptional blooming control, and it's a well-rounded TV that performs well no matter how you plan on using it. Its closest competition is the similarly priced Hisense UX, which is also only available in an 85-inch format in North America. The Sony is a bit better overall due to its stability, color accuracy, and superb image processing, although the Hisense is brighter and more colorful.
See our recommendations for the best TVs for watching movies, the best smart TVs, and the best 80-83-85 inch TVs.
The Sony BRAVIA 9 is better than the Sony X95L. The BRAVIA 9 has a much higher contrast ratio with its better local dimming feature enabled, so blacks are deeper, and there's less blooming on it. The BRAVIA 9 is also brighter overall, so it overcomes a bit more glare in a bright room, and highlights in HDR content stand out more on it, although the X95L is no slouch in that regard. The BRAVIA 9 has better PQ EOTF tracking and better SDR pre-calibration accuracy, so it sticks closer to the content creator's intent.
The Sony X95L and the Sony BRAVIA 7 are very similar overall, but the older X95L edges out the B7 in some key ways. The X95L has Sony's 'X-Wide' viewing angle tech and a better anti-reflective coating, so it's the better choice if you have a wide seating arrangement or lots of lights/windows. The 85-inch X95L we bought and tested also has better contrast and a better local dimming feature than the 65-inch B7, but it also has more zones than the smaller sizes. It's hard to know for sure, as we haven't tested all sizes, but we expect the local dimming features of these two TVs to be similar overall when comparing two TVs of the same size.
The Sony X95L is better than the Sony X90L/X90CL. Outside of its slightly more accurate SDR and HDR image and better HDR native gradient handling, the X90L gets outpaced in every facet: the X95L is brighter with much better reflection handling, has a wider viewing angle, superior gray and black uniformity, and has the better contrast ratio. Otherwise, they have the same feature set.
The Sony X95L is slightly better than the Sony X93L/X93CL. The biggest difference between them is the number of local dimming zones. The X95L has more local dimming zones and higher contrast, resulting in a better dark-room viewing experience, with deeper blacks and better black uniformity. The X95L is also slightly brighter.
We buy and test dozens of TVs yearly, taking an objective, data-driven approach to deliver results you can trust. Our testing process is complex, with hundreds of individual tests that take over a week to complete. Most of our tests use specially designed test patterns that mimic real content, but we also use the same sources you have at home to ensure our results match the real-world experience. We use two main tools for our testing: a Colorimetry Research CR-100 colorimeter and a CR-250 spectroradiometer.
Test Results
Older Test Bench: This product has been tested using an older TV test methodology, before a major update. Some of the test results below aren't directly comparable with other TVs. Learn more
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