Sony’s 2025 TV Lineup Reminds Image Accuracy shouldn’t Trump accessibility
Sony this week unveiled its refreshed line of Bravia televisions and soundbars for 2025. The Verge’s Sam Byford posted a good rundown of the new products. Of particular import, Sony announced the successor to its “King of TVs” in the widely acclaimed A95L OLED, on the market since 2023, with the Bravia 8 Mark II. The new model features a QD-OLED panel like the A95L and comes in 55- and 65-inch sizes, according to Byford’s report. He includes comment from Yosuke Nakano, who works on Sony’s product planning team, who proclaimed the forthcoming Bravia 8 Mark II features the “most faithful reproduction of the professional monitor look of any TV in the industry.”
No word yet on pricing, but Byford notes release will come “sometime this spring.”
I watched Sony’s introductory video for its new home theater products on YouTube last night. It’s a good watch, and struck me as extremely Apple-like in its production value and overall presentation. Like Apple, Sony seems extremely proud of its engineering prowess involving its custom silicon and panel technology for its TVs. And also like Apple, Sony’s TVs—particularly premium models like the A95L and Bravia 9—command a pretty penny, price-wise. There are ways in which Sony is technically superior to the competition, but what the company’s fans pay top dollar for is the user experience.
As an avowed home theater nerd, I have to admit I’ve never used a Sony television or soundbar in my life. In the same way Apple’s Pro Display XDR is my white whale desk monitor, the A95L (or 85” mini-LED Bravia 9) is my white whale TV. The Bravia 9 is especially fascinating because it gets damn close to OLED-level picture quality with great contrast and inky blacks all the while being bright enough to burn Icarus and in a larger-than-life size. The nerdy and disabled parts of me really wants to try this stuff.
Im the last few months, I’ve had two OLED TVs sent my way: the 48-inch LG B4 and the 77-inch LG C3. Both replaced TCL models in my office and in our living room, respectively. The larger C3 is wall-mounted and supplants the mini-LED 2020 6-Series which was itself widely praised. I watched the Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl rematch on the new C3 and it was a real treat for my eyes. It was so good, in fact, that it ultimately sold me on this idea: OLED on TVs is to what the Retina display was on iPhone 4. What Steve Jobs said about the latter in 2010 applies to OLED: “Once you go Retina,” he said, “you can’t go back.” It’s so true; while I’ve used OLED on my iPhone and Apple Watch for years, not to mention the M4 iPad Pro I got for my birthday last September, having OLED on such large screens is an entirely different experience. I don’t think I could go back to ostensibly “lesser” display technology. With the exception of brightness—more on that in a minute—the picture quality of an OLED television is unparalleled, in my opinion. A major reason for this, of course, is the aforementioned contrast and perfect blacks thanks to the pixel-level control. That’s beyond even the beastly Bravia 9’s ken.
Which brings me back to Sony’s new lineup of TVs. Part of the reverence for Sony’s TVs amongst reviewers and A/V enthusiasts is that reference standard—Sony’s a master at achieving cinematic looks with a heavy emphasis on accuracy and preserving creative intent. If you like filmmaking as art, then Sony’s TVs are right up your alley. I can empathize with those sentiments because I personally do philosophically believe TV and filmmaking is an art form. As a practical matter, however, therein lies the tension. Despite reviewers’ incessant proclivity to focus on accuracy when evaluating TVs, whether Sony’s, LG’s, or anyone else’s, the problem is accuracy is prioritized at the expense of accessibility. As someone with extremely low vision, the more “accurate” picture modes and settings are way too dim and dull for my needs. Likewise, it’s a popular refrain amongst reviewers and Reddit goers to lambast Vivid picture mode because everything is juiced up to the max and thus wildly inaccurate. What this criticism fails to consider is choosing Vivid mode isn’t merely a matter of preference; it’s a matter of necessity. The reality is, I need the image on my TVs juiced up to the max in order to get any semblance of joy from them. From an intellectual standpoint, I acknowledge the downsides in terms of accuracy and fidelity—but accuracy doesn’t do shit for me if the imagery is inaccessible in the first place. And, frankly, I have neither the time nor patience to calibrate my TV or hire a calibrator. The purists of the world may recoil in horror. The fact is, for me, accessibility matters way more than accuracy does.
In a similar vein, accessibility is why I set my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch to max brightness and turn off auto-brightness. Like accuracy in TVs, the casualty on my mobile devices is battery life. But… it’s a tradeoff I must make in the name of usability.
Granted, nobody’s going to take a battering ram to my front door and arrest me for assault against television kind. The salient point is, as with everything else within tech journalism, accessibility is a sorely undervalued and unappreciated use case. Accuracy is all empirically well and good, but there’s little context behind it. By contrast, to value accessibility is to know what truly matters is disabled people feeling included in watching content as opposed to feeling excluded because the subject matter experts clutch their pearls over accuracy. What I’m saying is, accuracy shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all in modern television reviews. There’s more to a TV’s story than sheer accuracy.
The moral? Once again, advocacy of the disability community is downright Sisyphean.
