The Bravia 7 is the second most high-end Mini LED TV in Sony’s current (and ever-expanding) TV range.
As such, it inevitably loses some of the eye-catching headline specifications of the flagship Bravia 9.
For instance, it has fewer local dimming zones, isn’t as bright and it has a less powerful sound system.
It’s also, though, substantially cheaper than the Bravia 9 – and, as we’ll see, it retains enough of Sony’s Mini LED picture quality mastery to make it arguably the best value option yet from the brand’s current range.
Price
The 55-inch Bravia 7 was £1899 / $1900 / AU$2935 at launch, but it is now available for significantly less – just £1299 / $1300 / AU$2495.
That still puts it in mid-range TV territory – maybe slightly towards the top end of mid-range territory, given the sort of aggressive pricing the likes of TCL and Hisense are applying to their mid-range and even high-end models these days.
It backs this status up with plenty of on-paper promise, including a Mini LED backlight with local dimming and an uncompromised version of Sony’s dependable XR processor.
Design
The Bravia 7 unsurprisingly isn’t as opulently well built as the Bravia 9. It still retains plenty of the combination of subtle elegance and flexibility that seems to be built into Sony’s TV design DNA at the moment, though.
For starters, the screen and its frame are both designed to finish on the same flush level, which always instantly creates a premium impression. The frame is trim, too, and while the rear panel sticks out a little further than today’s TV trendsetters, it could still make for an effective wall-mounting option.
Sony Bravia 7 55-inch tech specs
Screen size 55 inches (also available in 65, 75 and 85 inches)
Type QLED
Backlight Mini LED
Resolution 4K
HDR formats HLG, HDR10, Dolby Vision
Operating system Google TV
HDMI inputs x 4 (2 x 48Gbps HDMI 2.1)
Gaming features 4K/120Hz, VRR, ALLM, Dolby Vision game mode
Input lag 17.9ms (60Hz)
ARC/eARC eARC
Optical output? Yes
Dimensions (hwd, without stand) 71 x 123 x 5.6cm
If you’re going to place your Bravia 7 on a piece of furniture, there’s more good news.
For starters, its feet slot into place without the need for any screws. Also, the feet can be placed in no less than four different configurations: out wide under the bottom corners with the screen either sitting flush down on them or raised up an inch or three, or closer together towards the middle of the screen, again either with the screen sitting low on the feet or raised slightly.
The option to place the feet close together means you can put the 55-inch Bravia 7 on a piece of furniture much narrower than the TV, while the option to raise the screen gives you room to put a soundbar underneath.
The Bravia 7 ships with a tidy-looking smart remote control boasting a tactile, stripped-back button count, but which still finds room for a selection of direct app access buttons and a mic button to activate its Google Assistant voice control features.
The handset is apparently made from approximately 80 per cent recycled plastic, too, and it’s finished in an easy-to-clean polyurethane coating.
Features
Even though there are two TV series sitting above it in Sony’s current range, the Bravia 7 still boasts a Sony XR Backlight Master Drive panel that combines a Mini LED lighting system with local dimming that operates, in the case of the 55-inch model we’re testing, across more than 300 separate zones.
This combination promises tight control over where the TV delivers its available light – especially considering how effective Sony’s backlight control systems have tended to be over the years. Even with TVs that have far fewer dimming zones than the Bravia 7 at their disposal.
The Bravia 7 also boasts a Quantum Dot colour system, driven by Sony’s Triluminos technology. This is part of the latest version of Sony’s XR processor, which extends its tendrils into just about every aspect of picture quality – including delivering automatic HDR conversion of SDR with some of its picture presets, and subtly adjusting multiple picture facets to make the resulting images more closely resemble the three-dimensional way our eyes perceive the real world.
Its relative affordability doesn’t stop the Bravia 7 from adopting Sony’s policy of pursuing the picture endorsements of multiple third-party AV industry big guns.
So there are ‘calibrated’ modes for Netflix, Prime Video and Sony’s own high quality (up to 80Mbps streams) Sony Pictures Core streaming service. These are designed to automatically adopt picture settings that get as close as possible to the different studios’ preferred video mastering conditions.
The Bravia 7 is also certified by IMAX as being up to the job of doing justice to the special, ultra-clean IMAX Enhanced mastering system – as well as allowing you to take advantage of the IMAX Enhanced titles provided on Disney+ and the aforementioned Sony Pictures Core.
There’s plenty of Dolby cooperation, too, in the form of Dolby Atmos sound and support for the Dolby Vision dynamic HDR format. Dolby Vision appears alongside the more basic HDR10 and HLG systems, but as ever with Sony TVs, there’s no support for HDR10+.
The Dolby Atmos (and DTS:X) sound is delivered courtesy of a multi-channel audio system that also features a 5.1.2-channel ‘upmixing’ system to embellish stereo or 5.1-channel soundtracks.
There’s also the option to have the TV’s speakers join forces with various Sony soundbars, home theatre speaker packages and personal listening systems to take advantage of Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping technology, which creates a hemisphere of virtual speakers all around your seating position.
Connections on the Bravia 7 include four HDMIs, two of which can handle the 4K/120Hz, VRR and ALLM gaming features deliverable by the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and some PC graphics cards.
There’s support for a low-latency Dolby Vision game mode, too, as well as a special game-specific onscreen menu system, and compatibility with the Perfect For PlayStation 5 feature, where the console can automatically recognise the TV and output some pretty accurate HDR settings accordingly. You can even stream PlayStation games to the TV via the PS Remote Play app.
It’s a pity that only two of the HDMIs can handle all these gaming features, but this limitation is slightly easier to accept on the Bravia 7 than it is on Sony’s flagship TV ranges. Still, similarly priced LG and Samsung TVs have four top-spec HDMI sockets.
Smart features are provided by Google TV. This brings with it the usual extreme plethora of video streaming, gaming and information apps, bolstered in the UK by the YouView platform, which adds the catch-up services for the UK terrestrial broadcasters that Google TV does not typically cover.
Google TV also brings with it both compatibility with Google Chromecast for streaming from your smart devices, and the Google Assistant voice recognition and control system. There’s compatibility with Apple AirPlay 2, too, and if you’re not a fan of Google Assistant you can use either Alexa or, if you own an Apple Home device, Apple’s Siri voice recognition system.
One last unusual feature of the Bravia 7 is the Bravia Cam. This optional extra attaches magnetically behind the screen’s top edge, providing a camera that introduces the ability to control the TV via gesture; a Proximity Alert to warn children not to get too close; a facility to reduce brightness if the camera detects nobody is present in the room; video conferencing; and even the ability to detect where you are in relation to the TV and adjust the brightness, contrast, sound balance and volume accordingly.
Picture
The Bravia 7’s picture quality is clearly built on the same DNA as Sony’s spectacular flagship Bravia 9, delivering more of that TV’s in some ways groundbreaking picture quality than you’ve any right to expect.
At the heart of the Bravia 7’s picture charms is its outstanding backlight control. At the bright end of the spectrum, Sony’s TV delivers exceptionally bright and intense HDR whites and colours that blaze off the screen with more intensity than they do on many much more expensive flagship TVs.
Just as impressively, though, the Bravia 7 also delivers startlingly deep, dark, convincing, and at times quite OLED-like blacks.
Even better, the Bravia 7 doesn’t deliver these light extremes in isolation – as in, it doesn’t only deliver convincing blacks with exclusively dark shots, or only deliver outstanding brightness with exclusively bright shots. Rather, its backlight controls are so astute and powerful that they’re able to retain most of the brightness punch for bright highlights and most of the black level depth and uniformity for dark areas even with shots that contain a mix of dark and light content.
As well as producing a level of contrast that’s exceptionally rare if not unique to find on a mid-range TV, the Bravia 7’s ability to maintain so much brightness and black depth with the sort of mixed brightness images that make up the vast majority of what we watch means that it delivers a fantastic level of consistency across bright and dark scenes.
And wherever you’ve got consistency, you’ve got a more immersive experience, where nothing the TV does throws you out of what you’re watching.
The Bravia 7’s consistency whether it’s showing mostly bright or mostly dark images extends, too, to its ability to bring out pretty much every detail in even the darkest picture corners. The only exception to this is with the Movie preset, but even here the ‘black crush’ effect is pretty minor. Not enough, at any rate, to make dark scenes look hollow or flat.
Maybe the biggest sign of just how clever and effective the Bravia 7’s backlighting is, though, comes from how well it manages to keep a lid on blooming around stand-out bright objects.
In particular, the black bars above and below wide aspect ratio films remain almost completely free of either general greyness or areas of blooming, even if a bright object appears right alongside them – a really useful feat of backlight isolation engineering that precious few rivals these days even seem to attempt.
The extent and intensity of clouding around bright objects, even when they appear against nearly black backgrounds, is also startlingly limited for such a bright mid-range TV.
In fact, the only time the backlight engine struggles enough to become noticeable in a negative way is in the appearance of slight general clouding and occasional slight blue colour shift with shots that contain a particularly complex mixture of scattered extreme light and extreme dark elements.
As well as being rare, though, even during these moments the Bravia 7’s backlight ‘flaws’, such as they are, are much less likely to distract than the sort of heavy dimming of bright objects or really pronounced halos of extraneous light that many other locally dimmed LCD TVs exhibit.
The combination of high brightness and strong contrast also joins forces with Sony’s excellent XR Triluminos Pro system to deliver a sumptuously wide, vibrant, but also natural-looking and refined colour range. Sony’s TV even manages to retain full saturations in very dark picture areas, as well as, like the Bravia 9, bringing out subtle light differences in very bright areas that elude most if not all other TVs in its class.
The Bravia 7’s superb level of light and colour control for a mid-range TV unlocks an exceptional sense of sharpness and detail with native 4K pictures, too. This is delivered without any sign of the sort of exaggerated grain or ‘glowing’ object edge issues associated with heavy-handed sharpness processing, too, and remains largely unsullied by either motion blur or judder if you set the TV’s XR Motion Clarity feature to one of its relatively low-powered modes.
The Bravia 7 also upscales HD sources to its 4K resolution brilliantly, offering palpable detail and insight without introducing colour shifts or obvious unwanted digital processing side effects.
Gamers will be pleased to hear that all the attributes that make the Bravia 7 such an excellent video performer also make it a fantastically fun and immersive gaming display. The TV’s input lag of 17.9ms in Game mode is a touch higher than we’ve seen with some other Sony TVs, but not enough to affect anyone but the most hardcore competitive gamers.
It’s tough to find anything negative to say about the Bravia 7’s pictures for its money, really.
Aside from the relatively minor cloudiness and colour shifting with rare shots containing a broad mix of light and dark extremes, all we can come up with is that backlight blooming becomes more noticeable if you have to watch the TV from much of an angle.
Otherwise, it’s all good. Really good.
Sound
The Bravia 7 features one of Sony’s so-called Acoustic Multi-Audio sound systems, which in this case means 40W of power pumped into a four-speaker system comprising two full-range bass reflex drivers and two tweeters for, according to Sony, cleaner, more accurately placed detail sounds.
While not quite as potent as its pictures, the resulting sound – especially if you remember to run the provided audio auto-calibration system – is very good for a TV in this price category.
It manages to create, for instance, a soundstage that projects nicely away from the TV’s physical chassis, and then populates the large, room-filling sense of space it creates with plenty of clean and well-positioned details. Enough to do at least some justice to the three-dimensional sound fields created by Dolby Atmos and DTS:X mixes.
Dialogue emerges from the heart of the Bravia 7’s soundstage with conviction and clarity, and while occasionally the sound can feel too polite and trebly with the most explosive action movie moments, lacking a little bass heft, none of the speakers collapse into distortion under pressure.
Verdict
Much more of the groundbreaking backlight technology Sony developed for its flagship Bravia 9 range seems to have filtered down to the Bravia 7 than we would have expected for its money.
In fact, while not feeling quite as explosive and ‘next-gen’ as the Bravia 9, the Bravia 7’s images are actually a little more consistent, resulting in as good a mid-range LCD TV as we’re likely to see this year.
SCORES
- Picture 5
- Sound 4
- Features 4
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