Sony A80J OLED TV Review

The design is similar to the Sony A90J OLED, except for the back panel, which features a grid-like pattern. It's a sleek TV that should stand out in any living room.

The stand has three different setup positions. The standard position lets the TV sit closer to the table. There's a narrow position for smaller tables, and finally, a soundbar position that raises the TV to give you space for a soundbar in front.

Footprint of the 55-inch stand:

• Standard position: 41" (W) x 13" (D)
• Soundbar position: 41" (W) x 13" (D) x 2.71" (H)
• Narrow position: 27.3" (W) x 13" (D)

The panel and feet are made of metal, while the rest of the back is textured plastic with diagonal grooves in a grid pattern. It looks good, but aside from the cable tie included in the box, which we didn't use, there's no cable management. Some of the inputs face to the side, and they're easy to access, but most of them face down and aren't easy to reach if you wall-mount the TV.

The Sony A80J feels superbly well-built. The materials feel premium, and it's very sturdy with no wobble. There's a bit of flex to the plastic back, mostly on the sides, but overall it feels very solidly put together.

Thanks to its self-lit pixels, the Sony A80J has a near-infinite contrast ratio with perfect black levels. It's ideal for watching movies in dark rooms.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and 'Game' mode.

The Sony A80J OLED has decent HDR brightness. As with SDR, there's a lot of variation in brightness across different scenes, in part due to the aggressive ABL. HDR content still pops out well thanks to its near-infinite contrast ratio, but extremely bright highlights and large bright scenes don't stand out as well as they should.

These measurements are in the 'Custom' Picture Mode, with Brightness set to max, Contrast at '90', Color Temperature set to 'Expert 1', Peak Luminance on 'High', and HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Gradation Preferred'.

The backlight behaves differently depending on the Brightness Preferred setting and the Peak Luminance setting:

The Brightness Preferred setting helps increase the EOTF, but it doesn't change the peak luminance. Just like in SDR, turning Peak Luminance off dims the image significantly, but stops the screen brightness from fluctuating with different scenes.

In Game Mode, the HDR brightness is about the same as outside of Game Mode. For the most part, the difference is hardly noticeable, although real scenes appear slightly dimmer.

These measurements were taken with the same settings as the HDR Brightness measurements, but in the 'Game' Picture Mode.

Like most Sony TVs, this TV has incredible PQ EOTF tracking. The vast majority of content is displayed at the exact brightness level the content creator intended. There's a very smooth roll-off near the TV's peak brightness, preserving fine details in bright areas of the screen.

The SDR brightness is okay and is on par with other OLEDs. It has an aggressive Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL), which causes large bright areas to be less dim, which is distracting while watching sports like hockey. Overall, it performs well in moderate lighting conditions but isn't bright enough to fight glare in really bright rooms.

These measurements are after calibration, using the ‘Custom’ Picture Mode, with the ‘Expert 1’ Color Temperature, Peak Luminance set to ‘High’, and Brightness at its max.

If you find the brightness changes with different scenes, you can set Peak Luminance to off. With it disabled, all scenes are displayed at around 130 cd/m², and there's no noticeable fluctuation in brightness with different scenes. It's a lot dimmer, so most people are better off leaving Peak Luminance enabled.

The Sony A80J has an excellent color gamut, so HDR content looks great. It has full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most HDR content and decent coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space. It tone maps well in both color spaces, ensuring fine details are preserved in saturated scenes.

The color volume is good. It has trouble with colors at higher luminance levels due to its limited brightness, but it displays dark saturated colors well thanks to its near-infinite contrast ratio.

Even before calibrating the Sony A80J OLED, it has excellent accuracy. The white balance and color inaccuracies are minor and are hard to spot with the naked eye. Gamma is great too, but it doesn't quite follow the 2.2 target well with some bright scenes, so a few scenes are either over-brightened or too dark. Also, its color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a slightly blue tint.

The Sony A80J has fantastic accuracy after calibration. The white balance, gamma, and color temperature are all nearly perfect, and while there are some slight inaccuracies with a few colors, it's not noticeable at all. The calibration system is effective but sensitive, so it can be tricky to calibrate as changes to one setting may have a more significant impact on other measurements.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The Sony A80J has excellent gray uniformity. The screen is very uniform with practically no dirty screen effect. Near-dark scenes look fantastic, with no noticeable issues.

Like all OLEDs, the Sony A80J can completely turn off individual pixels to achieve perfect black uniformity, with no blooming around bright objects in dark scenes.

The Sony A80J has a great viewing angle. The image looks consistent when viewed from the sides, which is great for accommodating more people or wide seating arrangements.

The Sony A80J has a slightly matte finish, unlike the Sony A90J OLED. The reflections are duller but more widely diffused than on a typical glossy screen. The reflection handling is still superb overall, meaning glare won't be an issue in most rooms, but placing it directly opposite a window or light source isn't a good idea because it doesn't get bright. The 77-inch version has a glossy finish, which handles light differently, resulting in less indirect reflections as bright lights aren't diffused across the screen as much.

Gradients look fantastic on the Sony A80J, with very little visible banding aside from a bit in the grays and greens. The Smooth Gradation feature can help even out gradients in low-quality content.

The Sony A80J has a WRGB sub-pixel layout. All four are never on at the same time, but you can see some of the blue sub-pixels lit up in this photo.

The Sony A80J has a near-instantaneous response time, so motion looks exceptionally clear with minimal blur trail behind fast-moving objects.

The Sony A80J isn't completely flicker-free; the slight dip in brightness you see in the chart every 8ms is due to the TV's 120Hz refresh rate, which isn't noticeable.

The Sony A80CJ has a black frame insertion feature to try to improve the appearance of motion. It can flicker at 60Hz or 120Hz; the photo above is with the 60Hz flicker, and you can see the 120Hz flicker here. Note that the BFI scoring is based on the frequencies at which it flickers and not the actual performance.

The Sony A80J has a motion interpolation feature to interpolate low frame rate content like most movies and shows to a higher frame rate, improving the appearance of motion. Like most other TVs, it works well with slow-paced content and smooths out movement, but it struggles to keep up with fast-paced scenes. There are artifacts with fast-moving objects, but there isn't much haloing, which is good.

As the TV has a near-instantaneous response time, lower-frame-rate content appears to stutter because each frame is static on the screen for a long period of time.

The Sony A80CJ removes 24p judder from any source, which helps with the appearance of motion in movies. There are different settings needed for native apps and 60p/i sources, which you can learn about here.

The Sony A80J supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. It works without issue on the Xbox Series X for a tear-free gaming experience. It's also G-SYNC compatible, but there are some issues with it. It's tear-free with 4k @ 120Hz signals from the NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics card, but the screen flickered black at times like the Sony A90J OLED. Still, there wasn't any screen tearing in Destiny 2 with a 4k @ 120Hz signal, so it does its job at reducing screen tearing when it works properly.

The Sony A80J has objectively low input lag, but it's not as good as some other gaming TVs like the LG C1 OLED. You won't notice any delay, but it's not ideal for competitive gaming, especially at 60Hz.

The Sony A80CJ supports most resolutions, including proper 4k @ 120Hz. Chroma 4:4:4 is displayed properly with 1080p and 4k resolutions, which is important for clear text from a PC.

The Sony A80J OLED has good compatibility with the PS5. 1440p doesn't work, but other than that it's a great choice for PS5 gamers.

The Sony A80J supports most resolutions on the Xbox Series X. It can't do 4k @ 120Hz on the Xbox while 'Enhanced Format (Dolby Vision)' is enabled, so you either have to choose between 4k @ 120Hz games without Dolby Vision or 4k @ 60Hz with it.

The Sony A80CJ has two HDMI 2.1 ports, but HDMI 3 is also the eARC port, so if you have both an Xbox Series X and a PS5, you may have to give up one of the HDMI 2.1 bandwidth ports for audio passthrough.

This TV supports enhanced audio return, or eARC, which allows you to pass high quality, lossless audio formats from connected devices through to your home theater receiver or soundbar.

The Sony A80J has good built-in speakers, noticeably better than the Sony A90J OLED, especially concerning bass, which sounds significantly punchier. Overall, the sound profile is well balanced, so dialogue sounds clear.

There's a lot of distortion at the TV's max volume, but it's much better at moderate volume levels.

Like the Sony A90J OLED and other 2021 Sony TVs, the A80J runs on Google TV, which replaces Android TV. It's a little more streamlined than Android, and it runs very smoothly.

Google TV includes ads on the home page and app store. While you can opt-out of ad personalization, you can't opt-out of getting ads or suggested content.

The app store has a wide range of apps available to download.

The Sony A80J comes with a similar remote to the Sony A90J OLED, but it doesn't have backlighting and comes in a black finish instead of silver. It has shortcut keys, and you can use it as a universal remote.

There's a single button on the back left side of the TV, which you can use to change channels and inputs, adjust volume, and power the TV On/Off.

• Remote control
• 2x AAA batteries
• Cable tie
• User guides