Like all OLED TVs, the A80K’s contrast is stunning. Perfect black levels anchor its incredible picture, and its colors are among the best I’ve seen this year. The A80K’s Google-based smart platform is every bit as fast and flexible as it is on the higher-end A95K, and the overall design of the TV is quite fetching.

The Sony A80K offers all the best things you expect from an OLED TV such as detailed blacks and well-saturated color, plus features like 4K 120Hz support for gaming and Sony’s Acoustic Surface Audio+ tech. It's a compelling, high-performance, though not bank-breaking, OLED TV option.

A80K is almost the same OLED TV as last year's A80J – same video processor, same MediaTek SoC, same Android version under Google TV, still only two HDMI 2.1 ports, same sizes in up to 77 inches – which was not a big upgrade from 2020's A8H, except for HDMI 2.1. It is a little disappointing that hardware development seems to have slowed to almost a standstill – we hope next year's model gets a hardware upgrade.

Sony's step-down OLED model in its range gets far more right than it does wrong, but the A80K needs brighter pictures and less bright sound to be the complete package really.

The Sony Bravia XR A 80K OLED offers the OLED viewing experience with Sony's masterful tuning and great TV to back it up

It performs best in dark rooms while watching movies because it displays deep blacks without any blooming in dark scenes. It's excellent for HDR because of that dark room performance and the fact that it displays a wide range of colors, but its HDR brightness isn't high enough for the best HDR experience. It's great for watching TV shows and excellent for sports in well-lit rooms thanks to its wide viewing angle and incredible reflection handling, but it doesn't get bright enough to fight a ton of glare. Lastly, it's fantastic for gaming as it has variable refresh rate (VRR) support with HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, a quick response time, and low input lag.

The Sony A80K offers excellent picture quality for the mid-range level that the TV competes in, with superb black levels, excellent shadow detail retrieval and natural, balanced lifelike colours. Motion and video processing is also superb, as you would expect from a Sony BRAVIA TV, and makes this set stand out.

Everything about the A80K feels like the result of a true labour of love – ensuring that you’ll love it too