The Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV doubles down on the company’s efforts in the QD-OLED category. As a reminder, these next-gen panels combine quantum dots with OLED for a premium viewing experience.
While last year’s Sony Bravia XR A95K OLED TV proved practically perfect, the 2023 A95L model introduces some upgrades in an effort to challenge Samsung and LG’s OLED TV offerings. It promises better brightness, a larger 77-inch display and the long-awaited adoption of a dedicated gaming menu. The A95K also comes with the Bravia Cam, the mountable webcam that can make automatic adjustments to picture and sound based on the watcher positions, among other handy features.
I spent some hands-on time with the Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV to get an early sense on how it’ll stack up against the best TVs of the year. Here are my first impressions of the set’s design, performance, new features and more.
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Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV price and availability
Sony hasn’t yet announced pricing and availability for the XR A95L OLED TV, but we’re likely to learn more in late spring. The company has revealed its 2023 lineup approximately two months later than other major TV makers, so it makes sense that we’ll see them on shelves later than the Samsung 2023 TVs and LG 2023 TVs.
The 55-inch A95K costs $2,499.99 and the 65-inch A95K costs $2,999.99. We’d be surprised if Sony deviated significantly from these prices, though as you’d imagine, the new 77-inch configuration will cost more. The new 77-inch Samsung S95C OLED TV costs $4,449.99, for comparison.
Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV design
The Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV has all the visual markings of a premium TV — a thin chassis, barely-there bezels and even a backlit remote, which very few TVs have these days.
Sony changed the stand design of the A95L to replace a large, central foot with two feet that can be adjusted based on preference. This provides the option to place a low-profile soundbar under the TV.
In terms of port options, Sony is sticking with only 2 HDMI 2.1 ports for another year, while high-end competitors offer the full 4-port array. This is perhaps the only source of early disappointment, though we’ll have to see how much it ultimately bothers us in long-term testing.
Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV performance
Compared to all the TVs we tested in 2022, the A95K had some of the highest marks across the board. In other words, there wasn’t all that much room for improvement, but Sony says the 200% increased peak brightness should upgrade the A95L’s QD-OLED performance to better rival LED TVs, including the company’s own new Sony X95K Mini LED TV.
QD-OLED promises all the best of OLED with the addition of quantum dots for brightness. This means you should get nuanced black levels on a panel that’s brighter than traditional OLED, because it doesn’t use a white phosphor sub-pixel that would otherwise impact color volume at higher brightness levels. In the brief demo, the picture looked bold even inside a lit room, with a sophisticated range from perfect black to bright white. Better yet, the contrast between the two demonstrated the excellent control of Sony’s Bravia Cognitive Processor XR.
The A95K comes with the Bravia Cam, a webcam designed to be mounted on top of the TV. The Bravia Cam is a not only a device for Zoom and Google Meet calls from your couch, but it’s also a proximity sensor. Based on the positions of viewers in front of the TV, the Bravia Cam can establish optimal picture and sound settings automatically. It can disable the TV when someone is sitting too close to the screen, too.
Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV new features
Like all the other Sony 2022 TVs, the Bravia XR A95L OLED TV has some interesting software upgrades. Sony remains loyal to the Google TV platform, but the interface has two new menus: the Eco Dashboard and Game Menu. The Eco Dashboard makes it easy to access all the energy-saving settings in one dashboard while the Game Menu is a dedicated gaming settings toolbar that borrows features from Sony’s InZone gaming monitors.
This TV can run in 4K 120Hz with VRR and Dolby Vision concurrently, so it could actually make for a very good gaming TV for your PS5 or other console. Of course, we would need to measure those lag times in the lab before we can say for sure.
Either way, the A95L should prove a versatile TV option thanks to a new Multi-View option. This is the only 2023 Sony TV with the feature, which lets you view content from multiple sources at once.
Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV outlook
The Sony Bravia XR A95L OLED TV is following up our current top TV, the Sony A95K. Considering Sony set the bar high for itself, the new A95L’s upgrades will need to impress if it wants to claim the top spot in 2023. That said, we won’t make an official recommendation until we get the TV on our bench to run a test. full set of benchmarks.
