Sony Bravia 9, 8, or 7?

[Herry Dunston]

The family's been thinking of upgrading our Sony x900f. It's a good enough TV when we got it for its time, but there have been a couple issues I've been having of it: first, it's the local dimming, which isn't great and it's becoming very distracting to me as I notice the bleeding blooms on dark scenes in HDR content; second, and this is the most important, Dolby Vision doesn't work on this TV, as there's a bug in the system that prevents it to work properly from external devices.

So I though about gettin' an iterative upgrade in the form of the x90L, which from what I read, does have Dolby Vision properly work on all devices. But then I look through the Rtings review for this TV, and I've come to the realization that maybe we as a family shouldn't settle for the bare minimum.

Thus, I've been looking at three of the most premium Bravia sets. The Bravia 9 looks like it counters all the issues I have with our current TV. However, it's also very expensive, and we're trying to be careful with our budget. There's also the Bravia 8, and I know people sing praise on OLEDs; I'm planning to get an OLED for my personal room. That said, OLEDs work best in a dark area, and our TV's in the living room has the sun beaming directly at our TV, so OLEDs might be a disadvantage especially if we wait HDR content; ergo, brightness is important. And thus comes the Bravia 7, which is comparatively the most affordable of the three. But remember what I said about local dimming being less than great on our current TV? Apparently from RTings, the B7 is not quite great with that as the B8 or B9.

But the Bravia 7 would at the very least be a technical step-up from the x90L, right?

I'm deciding on what TV is beneficial for our buck and our needs, so I ask you the community to provide a direction or two. We don't necessarily want the best of the best if we can help it. Of course, there's the LGs and the Samsungs that might give us what we want at a fair price, but let's focus on the Sony's for the thread.