You have to give it to Sony. While other TV makers are known for specializing in a certain picture technology (for example, LG is virtually synonymous with OLED TVs), Sony is simply known for producing the best TVs.
That’s because Sony’s Bravia TVs are differentiated by their image processing rather than their actual hardware. Last year’s award-winning Sony A95L QD-OLED TV used similar components to Samsung’s QD-OLED displays, like the Samsung S95C TV, but it offered an overall better TV thanks to its image processing.
But this may be the year Sony changes the game between the three biggest TV companies thanks to an element of material developed in-house. Sony’s microprocessor division has created a new backlight driver that the company says is the world’s smallest Mini-LED driver to date.
By reducing the size of the mini LEDs, Sony can increase the number of LEDs and the number of local dimming zones, resulting in 320% more zones than the previous generation X95L mini LED TV – and I’ll explain why that’s important in a minute.
What you need to know upfront is that, starting at $3,299, the Sony Bravia 9 with this new Mini-LED driver is by no means going to win an award. But after seeing it in action in a demo, it looks like a new frontier for Sony TVs and could help the company claim the title of best Mini-LED TV maker.
Why is Mini LED backlighting important?
This demonstration peeled back the display layers to show the role a Mini-LED backlight plays in reproducing an image. These small lights help create gradients of light in a scene and, with proper control, make bright areas sharp without blooming into darker areas.
Control comes from the number of local dimming zones that the TV’s processor can communicate with and draw power from on a more granular scale. More zones means more refined control or that the image can become brighter in the right places without risking obscuring parts of the image that it shouldn’t.
From behind the screens, I could watch Sony’s Mini-LEDs essentially recreate the desired image in the backlight with a level of detail that other Mini-LED backlights on today’s market simply cannot. This was reflected when watching some sample footage, where the brightest parts of the image really seemed to pop with an impressive degree of realism.
Sony claims the Bravia 9 can reach a peak brightness of over 4,000 nits, which could be a game-changer. Tom’s Guide uses its own HDR brightness to verify the company’s claims. So we’ll have to see if the whole thing hits such an exciting threshold.
While Sony’s next-gen driver technology looks very impressive, it’s not the only one trying to make the most of Mini-LED: TCL and Hisense showed up at CES 2024 with their own equally revolutionaries.
It remains to be seen how the Sony Bravia 9 will compare to the TCL QM89 and Hisense 110UX ULED, but if you’re in the market for a new Mini-LED display, this is the space you should be watching.
