Sony Bravia XR A95L Review

Sony buys the same Samsung Display panel everyone else does and then does more with it than anyone else. A heat diffusion sheet bonded into the stack lets the A95L sustain brightness where competitors pull back, so specular highlights land around 1,400 to 1,500 nits in Professional mode and past 2,000 in the punchier presets, and the XR processor maps them with a restraint that keeps skin and sky from going plastic. Motion handling, upscaling of ordinary broadcast material and tone mapping of badly mastered HDR are all a clear step ahead.

This is the set that makes a mediocre source look considered rather than smeared. The Acoustic Surface actuators drive the glass itself, which is the only built-in television audio that sounds like it is coming from the picture. Then the practical objections. Two of the four HDMI ports are 2.1, one of those doubles as the eARC output, and the panel tops out at 120Hz while rivals had already moved to 144. Google TV runs slower here than it has any right to. At $3,499 for the 65-inch it charges a real premium for a real advantage.