Sony Bravia 5

Price

The 65-inch Sony Bravia 5 costs £1399 at the time of review. That’s a cool £400 less than the step up 65-inch Bravia 7, raising the potential for it to be closest thing in Sony’s range to a bona fide bargain. Provided its performance doesn’t fall back too far from that of the Bravia 7. 

The 55-inch Bravia 5 costs £1199, the 75-inch is £1699, the 85-inch is £2199, and the 98-inch is £4999.

Keen rivals for the Bravia 5 would be the TCL 65C7K, which sells for a remarkably aggressive £849, or if you would like an OLED TV in the same price ball park, the Philips 65OLED760.

Design

• Ultra-thin bezel
• Feet can attach in two positions
• Remote control made from recycled plastic

There’s little if anything about the Bravia 5’s looks that gives away its affordability. The frame around the screen is particularly eye-catching thanks to the way it’s barely there. Seriously, it’s one of the slimmest frames I’ve seen.

The Bravia 5’s rear is reasonably trim and general build quality is good by affordable Sony TV standards, and while the provided desktop feet are nothing to write home about aesthetically, they can be attached in wide or narrow positions, making it possible to sit the TV on a fairly narrow bit of furniture if you wish.

The Bravia 5 ships with two remote controls: a chunky, plasticky old-fashioned one, and a sleeker, better featured modern one with an unusual green-speckled finish intended to reflect the way its bodywork features a healthy percentage of recycled plastic.

Connectivity

• Four HDMI ports
• Substantial gaming support on two HDMI inputs
• Chromecast and Apple Airplay wireless support

The Sony Bravia 5 carries a respectable set of connections for its money. Four HDMI inputs lead the way, supported by a headphone jack, a digital audio output, a Freeview HD RF tuner input, an Ethernet port, and a pair of USB ports.

Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi are on hand too, of course, for wireless support, which extends to out-of-the-box Chromecast and Apple AirPlay support.

Only two of the four HDMI inputs feature gaming support (more on this later). This is a shame, but in reality it probably won’t stop most households from being able to leave all their gaming devices permanently connected.

User Experience

• Google TV smart system
• AI Voice recognition system
• Various platform-specific picture presets

As ever with Sony TVs, the Bravia 5 are powered by the Google TV operating system. This no longer suffers with the sort of sluggishness or bugginess that once defined it, and now also allows decent customisation of its layout.

Its approach can still feel a bit cumbersome and its content recommendation choices can sometimes feel more dictated by commercial relationships than intelligent understanding of what you actually like to watch.

But the Google Assistant voice recognition system is fairly sophisticated and effective, and pretty much every streaming service most households will need is present and correct. Including, thanks to Sony integrating the YouView service, all of the UK terrestrial broadcaster catch up services Google TV traditionally struggles with.

The Bravia 5’s main remote control is pretty easy to use, with clear button labelling and a sensible layout.

If you add Sony’s BRAVIA Cam accessory to the Bravia 5, the TV can detect where you’re sat in the room and adjust its brightness, sound balance and how much it emphasises vocals accordingly.

The camera can also be used to get the TV to issue a proximity alert if anyone gets too close, and finally adding the BRAVIA Cam means you can control a few aspects of the TV by hand gestures.

Features

• Mini LED lighting with local dimming
• Three HDR formats supported
• Multiple ‘calibrated’ presets

The Bravia 5 is built on a native 120Hz VA LCD panel, which should help it produce good contrast but may lead to limited viewing angles. Crucially, it represents the first time Mini LED lighting has been used this far down Sony’s TV range, with all the extra light control potential that using smaller LEDs brings.

Further light control is offered by a local dimming system that appears by my count to be operating across around 240 separately controlled zones, while the whole lighting system, together with every other aspect of the Bravia 5 pictures, is controlled by Sony’s acclaimed XR Processor.

This processor includes XR Triluminos Pro and Live Colour analysis to enhance colour performance, XR Clarity to enhance sharpness and detail, various motion processing options, and a general approach of trying to subtly reconfigure images to make them appear more like the real world looks to our eyes.

The Bravia 5 supports the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision high dynamic range formats, but not HDR10+. Compensation for the lack of HDR10+ comes from Netflix Calibrated, Amazon Prime Video calibrated and Sony Pictures Core calibrated presets, where the TV automatically sets its pictures up to replicate the conditions each platform prefers when mastering its home-grown content.

There’s IMAX Enhanced certification too, showing the TV has been deemed capable of doing justice to the ultra-clean pictures delivered by IMAX’s special video mastering system. Handily the Sony Pictures Core streaming service supports IMAX Enhanced movies – and anyone who buys the Bravia 5 is automatically entitled to 10 free films on that exclusive Sony service.

The Bravia 5 also offers a bunch of features designed to simplify the gaming experience, but I’ll cover these in the dedicated gaming section below.

Sound on the Bravia 5 is delivered by a 4 x 10W Acoustic Multi-Audio speaker system that combines two full-range bass reflex drivers and two ‘sound positioning’ tweeters. These latter speakers are used to expand the sound stage to better deliver DTS:X and Dolby Atmos multi-channel audio support.

Other audio features include compatibility with Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound personaliser app via Bluetooth, Sony’s Acoustic Centre Sync system that lets you make the TV’s speakers the centre channel in a wider external surround sound system, an auto calibration system for adapting the sound to your room set up, and a Voice Zoom system that uses AI to separate speech out from the rest of a mix so you can adjust its relative volume.

Gaming

• Dedicated Game Menu screen
• 120Hz support with VRR
• Perfect for PlayStation 5 features

The Bravia 5 is a slightly mixed bag when it comes to gaming features. On the upside, it can support 120Hz playback, delivers a very respectable input lag speed of 13.3ms at 60Hz, supports variable refresh rates, and allows you to call up a dedicated gaming menu screen (complete with information on the gaming signal and a few gaming aids) when a gaming source is detected.

It can also auto-detect when a game source is incoming courtesy of auto low latency mode support or, if you have a PlayStation 5 console, Sony’s Perfect for PlayStation 5 system. This system also, excellently, allows the PS5 to know which Sony TV they’re connected to, and automatically adjust their HDR settings for optimal results.

On the downside, while 120Hz support is welcome, recent TVs have pushed on to offer 144 or even 165Hz support. Sony doesn’t support AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G Sync VRR. The full range of the Bravia 5’s gaming features is also only available on two of its HDMI ports rather than all four.

The good news is the Bravia 5 is really enjoyable to game on. Its 120Hz and low lag features combine to deliver a responsive feel that doesn’t leave you able to blame the TV for your gaming fails. Contrast is strong, too, while colours are bold but also nuanced, and motion feels crisp and clean. There’s plenty of sharpness and detail on show too, and the Auto HDR set up if you’re using a PS5 works very well.

Picture Quality

• Strong contrast and sharpness
• Vibrant colours
• Impressive backlight control

Extending Mini LED lighting, a VA panel and a zone-rich local dimming system down to the Bravia 5 helps it retain substantially more of the picture quality found higher up Sony’s current TV range than similarly affordable levels of Sony TV have tended to in previous years. Which is, of course, very good news.

Two things in particular immediately stand out. First, HDR images look bright. Measurements using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colorimeter show the screen hitting around 1000 nits in its Standard picture preset on a 25% window.

That’s a good result for this price point, but bright highlights actually feel subjectively even brighter thanks to the way the Bravia 5’s backlight controls retain so much brightness even when a light highlight appears against a very dark backdrop. Especially as the TV does a great job of suppressing backlight clouding and blooming around bright highlights.

Black levels look consistently deep in dark scenes for a TV in the lower half of Sony’s range, and manage to avoid flickering and backlight zone ‘handover’ distractions. In fact, the Bravia 5 provides yet another reminder of just how intelligent Sony’s local dimming controls are, even – perhaps especially, in some ways – when they’ve got a relatively limited number of local dimming zones to work with.

The Bravia 5’s strong combination of high brightness, good black levels and impressive blooming control results in a level of contrast that doesn’t fall far short of the excellent step-up Bravia 7. And as often seen with TVs that deliver strong contrast performances, especially when backed up by video processing as intuitive, intelligent and motivated by naturalism as Sony’s Bravia XR system, the Bravia 5 delivers beautifully detailed and textured 4K pictures.

The brightness and contrast helps to unlock some engagingly vivid and expressive colours – especially in the Bravia 5’s Standard and Vivid picture presets. The Vivid mode actually pushes things too far, causing some colours to ‘glow’ and stand out too much from their neighbours. The Standard mode keeps things both impeccably balanced and full of subtle nuance and blending, allowing you to just sit back and engage with what you’re watching.

Actually, this sense of engagement lies at the heart of what makes the Bravia 5’s picture quality such a winner. It just doesn’t suffer with any really distracting imperfections or imbalances, despite the enjoyably aggressive stance it takes.

This immersive quality even holds up if you feel like leaving some motion processing in play with 24p movies. The True Cinema motion mode subtly reduces judder without turning films into soap operas, and it does so without generating really any distracting processing noise.

Having said all that, if you just can’t stand the idea of using motion processing, you can turn if off entirely on the Bravia 5 and still get a cleaner, less jarring image than most affordable TVs.

Brilliantly watchable though the Standard picture mode is, the Bravia 5 also, as you might expect from a brand with its own professional mastering monitor to refer to, delivers a fantastically accurate picture in its Professional preset.

Every Calman Ultimate test I threw at it recorded DeltaE 2000 average error numbers of well under the 3.0 level considered to be impossible for the human eye to detect. And this was without having to make a single adjustment to the preset’s default settings – a fantastic result with HDR for a TV at this price point.

Especially as the Bravia 5 achieved such accuracy while retaining a very punchy 900 nits of peak brightness (on a 25% window) and delivering a very credible 96% of the DCI P3 HDR colour spectrum. There’s certainly nothing flat or lifeless about the Bravia 5’s most accurate mode, in other words.

Sony is unique among TV brands at the moment for applying an automatic HDR upgrade to SDR images with many of its presets. Not being able to turn a feature like this off might sound scary to home cinema fans, but as well as it not being active with the Cinema or Professional picture presets, Sony’s HDR upgrade is actually mild and intelligent enough to work quite nicely with the Standard preset, at least, adding brightness and gently opening up the colour spectrum without making things look forced or straying too far from the ‘feel’ and balance of the original images.

The Bravia 5 isn’t perfect, of course. It can lose contrast and reveal more obvious backlight haloing around stand-out bright objects if watched from an angle. Certain (thankfully rare) red tones in dark scenes can occasionally look like they’re glowing slightly while some very dark shots can take on a slight green undertone while using the TVs’ brighter presets.

Plus, of course, there are TVs around, including Sony’s step up models, that deliver more brightness, expanded colour volume and more localised backlight control. For its money, though, the Bravia 5 is an excellently consistent all-rounder. 

Upscaling

• Enhances depth as well as detail
• Excellent noise management/suppression
• No smearing or lag

The Bravia 5’s all-round excellent video processing pays off again with its upscaling. Good quality HD sources basically end up looking at least adjacent to real 4K sources by the time Sony’s processing has done its work. Especially since as well as adding lots of detail, texture and general density the 4K upscaling manages to steer clear of classic upscaling artefacts such as exaggerated grain, colour ‘fizz’ or line doubling.

The strengths of Sony’s processing are if anything even more evident with relatively low quality, compressed-looking HD and SD images. It does an excellent job of removing the noise from such sources before applying its upscaling systems, ensuring the resulting upscale still looks clean and engaging (including suppressing lag over grain) if not quite as sharp as it gets with premium HD sources.

Sound Quality

• Strong detailing
• Large, well-crafted soundstage
• Clean but also convincing vocal handling

The Bravia 5 carries a four speaker system that includes two ‘sound positioning’ tweeters integrated relatively high up on the TV’s bodywork. These speakers are there to try and generate a larger, more detailed sound stage – and they do their job impressively well.

With Dolby Atmos and DTS:X mixes in particular the TV products a soundstage that extends nicely beyond the screen’s physical boundaries, and contains at least a sense of verticality to go with the horizontal splay. The result is a nice wall of sound effect that has a decent sense of forward throw to it as well.

Details are clean and reasonably accurately placed in the soundstage too, creating a vivid and busy sound space with movie mixes.

Dialogue is handled well, sounding clear but also nicely contextualised rather than too bright or exposed. Sony’s speaker set up does a neat job, too, of elevating speech so that it seems to be coming from the onscreen action rather than somewhere below or behind it. The speakers are able to go pretty loud without distorting or becoming harsh, too.

In a perfect world there would be a bit more bass depth and impact to go with the set’s detailed and rich mid-range. At the same time, though, what bass there is sounds consistently clean and punchy, without succumbing to nasty distortions and breakdowns with Hollywood’s heaviest soundtracks.

Should you buy it?