Sony Bravia XR A80L OLED Review

Sony sells processing, and the A80L is the cheapest way to buy it inside an OLED. Put a mediocre stream on this and on an LG C3 side by side and the Sony resolves faces and fabric without the smearing and the ringing the LG adds to them, motion on a 24 frame film is the most convincing in the category, and the custom and professional picture modes need almost nothing done to them out of the box.

The screen doubles as the speaker: actuators vibrate the panel so dialogue comes from the mouth rather than from a downward firing driver under the bezel, and it is still a better sound than any rival's built in system. Two things hold the grade down. The panel is a plain white OLED without the micro lens array of the G3 or the quantum dot layer of Sony's own A95L, both of which shipped the same year, so this is a dim television by 2023 flagship standards and a bright room will find it out.

And of the four HDMI inputs only two run 4K120, one of which is also the eARC port, so a PlayStation 5, an Xbox and a soundbar do not all fit without somebody losing something. At about two thousand dollars for the 65 inch it asked more than a brighter C3 did. Buy it for film nights, and buy it knowing what you traded away.