Recs.
Updated
The Sony X900E is an excellent TV for movies, gaming, and sports. Its performance across different use cases are fairly consistent.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Excellent picture quality
The X900E looks true-to-life with really deep blacks, clear details, and captivating colors.
Pictures look realistic with lots of details. There’s a great depth to them and you’ll be able to see everything in the picture stand out.
Dark scenes are excellent with nice shadow details - they’re not overly dark to the point where some details get drowned out. This is thanks to really deep black levels, enabled by the panel’s contrast ratio of about 5500:1 - it can produce blacks that are 5500 times darker than the brightest white. This can be pushed even further to over 6500 with local dimming.
The colors are lifelike and accurate even without any calibration by the user. They will look really vibrant even in bright scenes because of the panel’s high peak brightness levels of ~500 nits for SDR & ~550 nits for HDR.
Even in a decently-lit environment, the X900E’s picture quality can still hold up - the panel is great at handling reflections and it can get bright enough to fight off glare.
Pro Excellent at handling highly dynamic content
The X900E can display fast-paced or rapidly-moving objects very well without any trails behind it. The panel only requires ~11ms to fully change the pixels color, which eliminates virtually all motion blur. It also has a native refresh rate of 120Hz that makes images look smoother.
Pro Excellent for HDR content
On top of the excellent picture quality, the X900E has everything essential to a great HDR experience: local dimming, high peak brightness level, and a wide color gamut.
Its excellent black levels are further improved with local dimming, which make parts of the screen darker when the image calls for it. This results in an increase in overall picture quality - the black levels become much deeper, so highlights will stand out further.
The wide color gamut enables the panel to reproduce the full range of colors required for true HDR playback. The screen can get sufficiently bright at a peak level of ~550 nits to light those colors up and make HDR details really pop.
Pro Great versatility
Apart from being an excellent TV for movies, the X900E is a decent choice for gaming and sports thanks to its decent input lag, low motion blur, great screen uniformity, and a 120 Hz native refresh rate that makes images look smoother.
The input lag of ~35ms is sufficient for most gamers, apart from competitive ones, to stay in sync with what's on the screen. The low motion blur of ~11ms and a refresh rate of 120 Hz ensures that everything will look smooth - fast-moving objects won't leave any trails on the screen.
It’s also viable for watching sports because the panel also has no issues with displaying large, same-color objects on screen, like football fields.
Pro Great at handling glare
Even in a decently lit room, the X900E's picture quality will remain more or less the same as in a dark room.
The colors will still look vibrant because the panel is bright enough to fight off glare. It has peak brightness levels of ~500 nits for SDR & ~550 nits for HDR, and reflections are also significantly reduced by the panel's semi-gloss finish.
Ray
Cons
Con Not suitable for group watching
The X900E has a narrow viewing angle that makes it unsuitable for group watching.
Its picture quality gets worse when viewed from off-center angles. At ≥20° away from the center, the blacks start degrading into greys and colors will start looking dull. Brightness levels start decreasing at ≥50° away from the center.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Dark scenes looks great
The X900E can handle dark scenes very well thanks to its high native contrast levels, which clocks in at 5411:1 native, and it can go up to 6534:1 with local dimming enabled. This, along with good black levels and uniformity, gives the TV the ability to achieve great representations of dark scenes beyond most expectations.
Pro Great black levels and uniformity
The black levels of a TV affects the viewer’s perception of other colors next to it. If the black levels are not deep enough and doesn’t remain uniform across the screen, the overall picture quality will look “flat” without much depth. The X900E handles this well with only <1.2% deviation (across the entire screen) from what a pure black screen should be — this results in a significant gain in its native contrast levels, thereby increasing the picture quality.
Pro Great for dark rooms
The X900E shines in dark environments — it is great at reproducing dark scenes, making it suitable for enjoying media in a cinema-like setting. It performs extremely well in movies with many black highlights/scenes where this is immediately noticeable even to undiscerning viewers (e.g. Interstellar).
Pro Great color reproduction
The color gamut of a TV refers to the range of colors the display can reproduce — the wider the color gamut, the more colors it can display, and the better the overall picture quality will be. This is extremely important for HDR content because it requires a much wider color gamut than SDR content. The X900E's color gamut is one of the widest compared to other models, it has no issues with accurately reproducing the colors necessary for true HDR.