Key Takeaways

• The Sony X85L offers beautifully refined picture quality, making it an excellent choice for serious movie fans who appreciate subtle details.
• Despite not being the showiest or cheapest mid-range LCD TV on the market, the X85L provides fair value for its impressive features and performance.
• The TV’s motion processing is excellent, delivering smooth and clear visuals for an immersive viewing experience. However, it lacks support for HDR10+ and has a few limitations for gaming.

While Sony has long excelled with its high-end LCD and OLED TVs, it’s struggled to really make a major splash with its mid-range LCD offering. Its X80 series have been consistently inconsistent due to its tendency to mix and match IPS and VA types of LCD panel, and while its step-up X85 series has typically been solid, it hasn’t quite had enough going on to stand out from the ultra-competitive mid-range crowd.

Perhaps fired into action by the rise of upstart brands such as Hisense and TCL, though, 2023’s X85, as represented here by the 55-inch XD-55X85L, sees Sony seriously upping its mid-range game at last.

Specs, pricing and availability

The Sony X85L is available in a choice of 55, 65 and 75-inches and is priced at £1,099, £1,299 and £1,799, though at the time of writing, all of these prices seemed to be standardly discounted by around £100. The range is currently unavailable in the US, with 2022’s X85K remaining on sale, though you can upgrade to the X90L, adding more dimming zones.

Design

More functional than fancy

The 55X85L certainly isn’t the most overtly glamorous TV in town. In fact, its main focus is almost anti-glamour; rather, it seems to want to minimalise its impact on your living room. The frame around the screen is narrow and clad in a dark, subtle finish, and it stands on a pair of straightforward metal feet that are so narrow when viewed head-on that they almost become invisible.

This is a TV that seemingly wants you to focus on its pictures rather than the hardware that’s creating them.

The 55X85L’s feet can, handily, be positioned in two different locations – either quite wide, where they sit under the screen’s corners and can accommodate a soundbar between them, or much closer together so the TV can be placed on a narrow table.

Despite being one of Sony’s more affordable TVs for 2023, the 55X85L enjoys an ‘all-round’ design where a rather deep but aggressively flattened off rear features a cute mosaic-like grid etched into it.

The 55X85L is reasonably well connected; in fact, things initially look better than reasonable, thanks to a combination of four HDMIs and two USBs alongside the now de rigueur Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless options. As I’ll explore shortly, though, the HDMIs do feature a couple of significant gaming limitations that you might want to be aware of.

Features

A big of a mixed bag

Since it’s where I left off the previous section, let’s start this one with more detail on the 55X85L’s gaming pros and cons. On the pro side, two of the HDMIs can play 4K/120Hz graphics from the latest consoles and PCs, as well as supporting variable refresh rates. There’s also support for Sony’s Perfect For PlayStation 5 system, where the console can identify precisely which Sony TV it’s attached to and adjust its high dynamic range output accordingly to get the best results.

There’s also support for automatic game mode switching, where the TV switches over to its fast-response game mode when a game source is detected, and input lag is kept to a very respectable 15.7ms in the screen’s fastest response mode. You can choose to add 1ms more in return for an anti-motion blur feature if you wish, but this also causes the picture to dim more than I felt comfortable with.

The gaming limitations concern the way the TV can’t support all the latest gaming features at the same time. So you have to choose between an Enhanced HDMI Format setting that permits 4K/120Hz but not Dolby Vision HDR, an Enhanced Format Dolby Vision setting that supports Dolby Vision HDR but not 4K/120Hz, and an Enhanced Format (VRR) setting that supports variable refresh rates but stops you from using many of the TV’s picture adjustment and enhancement features. The 55X85L also doesn’t provide a fast response Game setting with Dolby Vision game sources.

With all that gaming confusion squared away, let’s get into something more fundamental: The 55X85L’s core panel specifications. Which are that it’s a VA (high contrast) rather than IPS (wide viewing angles) panel type, lit by a regular (rather than mini) LED lighting system positioned directly behind the screen that supports 24 zones of local dimming.

While this level of specification perhaps doesn’t hold up well against the Mini LED lighting and hundreds of dimming zones found on the similarly priced (and 10 inches bigger!) Hisense 65U7KQ and TCL 65C845K, the 55X85L, is actually the first model at an equivalent level of previous Sony TV ranges that supports local dimming. And as we’ll see, even though the TV is only powered by one of Sony’s now slightly aging X1 processors rather than the latest Cognitive Processor XR brain found in the brand’s more premium TVs, it proves in no uncertain terms that how you control a screen’s dimming zones can be as important as how many of those zones you have.

Sony’s usually reliable Triluminos colour and Reality Creation systems are on hand to hopefully provide plenty of colour subtlety and fine detail to the 4K screen’s pictures, while HDR support extends to HDR10, HLG and the previously mentioned Dolby Vision systems. Sony continues not to support the HDR10+ system, though.

As ever with Sony TVs, the 55X85L depends mostly on Google TV for its smart features. This is fair enough, given the vast amounts of content sources the system supports and its improved menu design compared with its Android TV predecessor. Though it’s still a little over-complicated in its approach, it still doesn’t support the catch-up apps for all the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters.

However, Sony has solved this latter issue by equipping its TV with the Youview app in the UK, which brings all the UK’s main terrestrial streaming services together in one easy-to-browse interface.

The 55X85L also carries Sony’s exclusive Bravia Core streaming service, with its ability to stream its extensive collection of films at exceptionally high data rates (up to 80Mbps) so that they look less compressed than streamed video typically does. Buying the 55X85L gives you access to five free premium (recently released) movies on Bravia Core, as well as a one-year subscription to the service’s back catalogue.

The 55X85L’s smart system additionally supports voice control via the Google Assistant system, can play nice with Google Homekit devices, and has the ability for content sharing via Chromecast and Airplay.

Last and definitely least on the 55X85L’s feature list is compatibility with Sony’s optional Bravia Cam accessory. Attach this £200 item to the TV, and as well as unlocking video calling, you can have the TV adjust its picture and sound in response to where the camera detects you’re sitting in response. Unless video calling is extremely important to you for some reason, I don’t see the Cam justifying its cost.

Performance

Supremely balanced

At first glance – and I do mean very first glance – the 55X85L looks set to suffer at the hands of TCL’s recently reviewed 65C845K. Despite costing around the same, Sony’s set is nowhere near as bright as that 10-inch-bigger TCL Mini LED groundbreaker. The more time you spend with the 55X85L, though, the more you start to appreciate it – and the more aware you become of the very different approaches TVs can take to satisfy the tastes of quite different target audiences.

The key to understanding the Sony 55X85L’s appeal is to recognise that it’s more interested in balance, refinement and artistic intent than it is in turning things up to 11. So, for instance, while it might not be blazingly bright – it peaks at around 760 nits outside of its bonkers Vivid mode – the way it uses that light is nothing short of beautiful.

This is especially true with its handling of dark scenes and black colours. So effective is Sony’s set at delivering convincing black tones free of low-contrast greyness, in fact, that at times it’s hard to believe it’s not an OLED TV. It’s not just that black levels are so believably rich and deep, though; they also contain excellent amounts of subtle detail and shading rather than looking hollow and empty as they might do with a cruder backlighting system.

In the 55X85L’s Standard preset, which is, for the most part, the most all-around immersive option, I was also amazed by how little backlight blooming the set displays around stand-out bright objects. This distracting issue has traditionally been a problem for Sony LCD TVs that use local dimming, but this year, the brand seems to have gotten on top of it, even, remarkably, with a TV in this case that only appears to support 24 local dimming zones.

It’s also worth saying that while the 55X85L might not be ferociously bright, its brightness holds up very nicely compared with OLED TVs when showing HDR content that fills the whole screen with brightness. Its screen soaks up reflections unusually well for a mid-range set, too and, even better, you really come to appreciate how Sony is using the actually perfectly respectable amount of brightness at its disposal to create a really wide range of light with HDR images. Unlike some of its rivals, it doesn’t bias its tone mapping towards the bright end of the spectrum for a more aggressive but ultimately less natural and balanced image – and that’s to its credit.

As well as giving you a picture that feels impressively aligned with the artistic intent of film and TV makers, this balanced approach to HDR, where appreciation for darkness is valued as much as brightness, sees the picture infused with a gorgeously subtle array of colour tones and details, creating a fantastically immersive feeling. And I use the word feeling quite deliberately, as the all-around appreciation for the finer details of the video masterer’s art genuinely contributes to the emotions a well-crafted production is out to convey.

No part of the picture, be it a particular colour tone, an overstressed peak light element or a forced area of darkness, ever dominates the rest – despite colours always looking vibrant and rich. A results of Sony’s long TV experience, impressive processing, and, I suspect, involvement in the mastering monitor market helped it achieve an excellent understanding of how every aspect of a picture relates to each other.

Or at least that’s the case with most of the 55X85L’s picture presets. There is a strange exception in the shape of a Vivid mode that pushes colours to extremes, causing noise levels and a general lack of balance that feel like they belong to a completely different TV. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to this problem – stay as far away from the Vivid preset as possible.

Inevitably, given its position in Sony’s range, there are a few small ways in which the 55X85L falls short of Sony’s step-up models. The Cinema preset, for starters, that you might expect would deliver the most all-around immersive and accurate picture, can actually suffer with a little loss of detail in dark areas and a bit more backlight blooming than the default Standard preset.

Extremely dark HDR scenes that feature very small brightness shifts in low light areas can cause the backlight to slightly exaggerate its reactions, while at the other end of the light spectrum, very bright image peaks can sometimes look a touch starved of the subtle detailing, shading and colour toning that are so present elsewhere in the 55X85L’s pictures.

The 55X85L doesn’t always deliver black levels as deep as those you can get from TCL’s 65X845K either – but as I keep pointing out, this is arguably more a factor of Sony aiming for balance over aggression than an actual weakness of the Japanese brand’s set. Though, it is also the case that every now and then, a particularly complex dark shot containing extreme amounts of shadow detail and a few bright highlights scattered around the screen can look slightly misty and soft – presumably as its light engine struggles to keep its typically excellent balance going in such tough circumstances.

For the vast majority of the time, though, provided you avoid its Vivid preset, the Sony 55X85L’s pictures are pure class.

The same can be said to some extent of its sound. Here, too, Sony seems to have focused on delivering a combination of balance, subtlety and detail with an eye on ensuring that no part of a soundtrack stands out too much or overwhelms anything else. Effects are nicely placed and cleanly delivered without harshness or brightness, despite the set only having a 2 x 10W speaker set up to work with – though I wouldn’t say it gets much value, really, out of its built-in Dolby Atmos decoding.

The bass reflex design of its two X-Balanced speakers helps it handle bass unexpectedly cleanly for a 20W setup, with no dedicated subwoofer, leaving as my only complaint a slight lack of raw volume, forward projection and movie-friendly dynamic range compared to some of the more aggressive-sounding rivals I’ve heard this year.

Verdict

The Sony X85L is an impressive mid-ranger, and considering this is a year that’s seriously spoilt us for choice from the top to the bottom of the TV market, that’s high praise indeed. If your budget is around the £1000 mark, Sony has finally come up with a mid-range set that’s not only excellent in its own right but also offers something truly unique for the more discerning AV fan.