Sony KD-75XE9405

Key Features

Review Price: £4900
75-inch LCD TV with native 4K resolution
Direct lighting with local dimming Dolby Vision (upcoming)
HLG and HDR10 HDR support
Multimedia playback via USB and DLNA Networks
Android TV Smart System

What is the Sony KD-75XE9405?

There are four things you need to know about the Sony KD-75XE9405 TV.

First, it’s 4K. Second, it already supports the HDR10 and Hybrid Log Gamma high dynamic range formats, with Dolby Vision to follow later this year. Third, it uses a direct LED backlighting system with local dimming. And finally, its screen is really, really big: 75 inches.

Add to this a far-from-unreasonable £4,900 price tag, and it looks like Sony might just have hit home cinema gold.

Sony KD-75XE9405 – Design and build quality

The XE9405 is all about the screen. The trim around it is impressively slender considering the acreage of screen it’s supporting (it measures W1673 x H962 x D62mm), and its black colour means the bodywork is essentially invisible in the fairly dark room conditions to which the TV is best suited.

The screen feels impressively robust and heavy-duty, despite the thin frame – a result, perhaps, of the way the black front trim is fixed to a silver rear trim that also creates a nice two-tone effect if you’re looking at the TV from the side.

Unless you’re wall-mounting it, the XE9405’s screen sits on a simple but attractive metal stand that’s sensibly fitted to the mid-section of the bottom edge. This means the TV will stand on even quite a narrow piece of furniture.

The TV also benefits from Sony’s hatred of cables. The stand cunningly provides channels into which you can tuck all external source cabling, while detachable panels on the attractively patterned rear create a true 360-degree design.

There are more overtly glamorous TVs out there, but the XE9405’s apparent design focus on just letting you get lost in its pictures is just fine by me.

The remote control is less impressive, however. Although it improves marginally on Sony’s borderline unusable 2016 handset, it still crams too many crucial buttons into too small a central area, making it easy to accidentally press the wrong button.

This is especially true if you’re trying to use the remote in a dark room – an unfortunate situation given that this is exactly the room condition where the TV performs at its best.

Sony KD-75XE9405 – Setup

Initial setup feels a little long-winded by today’s standards, chiefly due to Sony’s continued use of the cumbersome, firmware update-loving Android TV smart platform. The TV does at least guide you through everything in a straightforward manner, though.

For the most part, as with the majority of recent Sony TVs, the KD-75XE9405 does an unusually good job of automatically determining the best settings for handling different sorts of content. This is likely a function of Sony’s uniquely good sense of how to balance the demands of source material against the capabilities of each of its screens, and because of the processing power squeezed into the set’s ultra-powerful X1 Extreme chipset.

I’d recommend a few tweaks, though. First, you should turn off all of the TV’s noise reduction systems. I’d also recommend making sure the local dimming engine isn’t set higher than medium, and that you don’t set the Black Adjust feature higher than medium. Low reveals slightly more detail in dark areas, but at the expense of a little contrast.

Finally, when watching HDR I’d recommend nudging up the Black Level setting from its 50 default, for reasons I’ll discuss in the Performance section. I settled on 57-58 as the best all-round Black Level setting.

Should I buy a Sony KD-75XE9405?

If you’re willing to compromise your screen size by 10 inches, there are some big-hitting rivals for the Sony KD-75XE9405 this year.

For starters, LG’s 2017 OLED TV range is stunning, finally combining OLED technology’s always-great black levels with HDR-friendly levels of brightness. It’s not nearly as much brightness as you get with the KD-75XE9405, however.

The Samsung QE65Q9FAM, meanwhile, delivers significantly more brightness, although backlight controls are more limited.

Finally, you can now get the 75-inch version of Sony’s blisteringly good ZD9 for around £6,600. Tempting although this is, it’s still £1700 more than the XE9405 – and that adds up to a lot of 4K Blu-rays.