Sony M9II Review – 4K 160Hz MiniLED Gaming Monitor

Since I’m hot off the heels of my Sony M10S review – the monitor that genuinely made me question whether a £400 markup was actually worthwhile – I had I think unrealistically high hopes for this, the Sony M9 II, a 4K 27 inch 160Hz MiniLED gaming monitor, and I think that’s clouded my views on it at least slightly. To come from the utmost level of refinement and quality to this does feel like a noticeable downgrade, but it’s also nowhere near as bad as it feels to me. I say this not to complain, but to give you fair warning that, despite my best efforts, I am mentally comparing this to the M10S, and that just isn’t a fair comparison. With that said, let me do my best to remain impartial as I show you around this rather interesting monitor. 

First let’s have a look around. While this follows a similar design language to the M10S (see, there I go comparing it again…), it’s notably more plasticy, and lacking some of the finer touches. As an example, the GSYNC compatible sticker that was nicely tucked on the side of the stand on the M10S is somewhat garishly front-and-centre on this M9 II. Cable management is provided by… a branded rubber band/strap thing. I mean it’s a nice shade of purple, but still. And man is this thick. It’s a good inch thick, if not more, which means the infinite-swivel stand base needs to be larger. You do still get plenty of adjustment, like I said it has infinite swivel in either direction, and of course height and tilt adjustment too, although no portrait mode. IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 2.1 port, a two port USB 3 hub, DC in from the pretty big power brick, and another USB 3 port for firmware updates. The menu is controlled by a joystick style switch on the back, and in the menu you’ll find a bunch of interesting settings – although Sony… WHY DO YOU SHIP THESE MONITORS IN ECO MODE? That limits brightness to candle-lit mode, limits refresh rate to 60 Hz, and unless you know to dig through the menu, you’d have no idea why your 160Hz 400 nit monitor is a 60Hz midnight-special. Please, please stop shipping it in power saving mode. Anyway, once you’ve got past that hurdle, you’ll find options for response time (aka overdrive), and local dimming, both of which have three total options, and both default to their middle settings. 

The local dimming is actually a bit of a weird thing here – see most MiniLED backlights offer hundreds or thousands of zones – Apple’s devices even offer tens of thousands of zones. Sure, that’s nothing compared to OLEDs with a one-to-one pixel to backlight ratio (since, y’know, each pixel is its own backlight), but this thing offers just 96 zones. That’s less than basically all “Full-array local dimming” conventionally backlit displays! Amazingly though, looking at the panel straight on, you’d struggle to notice the lack of zones. Even in the dark with my torture-test video playing, it isn’t all that bad. I mean, sure, blacks are still grey, but there is a (slight) improvement in contrast. The weirdest thing though is that if you look at this thing off-axis, it looks truly dreadful. Like, half-the-screen-still-lit type bad. It is truly horrendous off-axis, which is a first for me. I don’t know what kind of black magic they’re using here to make it less obvious they only have 96 zones to play with, but I think it’s also the same magic that means the contrast ratio, even with local dimming set to its highest setting, is only 1100:1. With local dimming off it’s under 1000:1 which is really quite poor performance. Brightness is also around 400 nits in SDR (or “up to 750 nits” in HDR), which is also pretty middling. The colours do make up for it, at least a little, with 96% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum in my testing – although only 70% of Rec2020. The best I’ve seen there is more like 83%. Accuray is close-but-no-cigar with an average DeltaE of 2.04, with the max being 4.49. That’s really not bad, but compared to the likes of AOC and Philips who include a colour calibration report in the box and always have exceptionally good DeltaE results, this is, again, a bit more mid. 

To the eye this is a bit of a mixed experience. The colours can be really vibrant and rich, but then in other scenes it can look flat, washed out and grey. The complete lack of contrast – even with local dimming on High – can really detract from the otherwise pretty great experience of watching content on this thing. I’d argue that thanks to that lack of contrast I wouldn’t want to do any creative work with this, and I’m struggling to marry the idea that this is a £900 monitor with my experience of using it. The panel alone feels like a £300 or £400 panel at most, so to spend twice or thrice that… I don’t know if I could justify that with this viewing experience alone.

Taking a look at the response time data from OSRTT Pro CS – available at OSRTT.com by the way – on the lowest overdrive mode, “Normal”, you get a pretty naff set of results. An average of 8.5 milliseconds – and a frame time at 6.25 milliseconds – that isn’t great. That’s 117 hertz equivalent as native panel performance. There’s also weird really slow trails upwards at full-white. I suspect that’s the full array local dimming (which was set to its default middle setting to gauge the expected end-user behaviour), but even the darker ones are slow too. On “Fast”, the mid and default setting we get much better results. An average of 5.5 milliseconds brings the majority of the transitions within the refresh rate window – 70 percent of them specifically here – which is much better, and very little overshoot too. I can see why this is the default mode – and the one I’d recommend should you opt for one of these. “Faster”, the top end mode, is laughable. While the initial response time does improve to 3.5 milliseconds on average, the perceived time (including the overshoot time) actually goes UP to 8.42 milliseconds. Overdrive is genuinely dreadful, with some results being over 50 RGB values off the target. Suffice to say you should stick with the middle “Fast” mode. Happily though input lag is spot on at around half the refresh rate, so you’re all good there.

For actually gaming with it, that’s a little mixed too. On the one hand, a 4K, 160 hertz, reasonably fast response time panel makes for a sharp, smooth and fluid gaming experience, but on the other hand the lack of contrast means you’ll struggle to see the tryhards in Rose skins, and feel your otherwise impressive visuals fall just a little flat. For FPS games this is already a ropey choice. A 5+ millisecond response time isn’t amazing, let alone the contrast issues, although for racing games and other simulators I can see this being a better choice. It’s smooth enough for that, and the high resolution makes it nice and crisp. Depending on the genres of games you’d want to play on this kinda depends on how good the experience will be for sure. 

Genuinely, the fact that this is a MiniLED backlight and yet has just 96 backlight zones is frankly insane. I’m blown away by that. That, combined with the lacking contrast – even with the zones set to their highest setting – means I cannot justify the £900 price tag for this thing. There are countless other 4K 160Hz options on the market (including 27 inch) that are considerably cheaper. Even Asus’ options are between £300 and £550 right now, with plenty of other options in that sort of price range too. Like, if you can buy THREE 4K 160Hz IPS monitors for the price of one of these, this thing better be an order of magnitude better, right? Well I think it’s clear I don’t believe that’s the case here, so unlike the M10 S which still is likely my favourite monitor on the market right now, at least my favourite premium monitor anyway, this gets a pass from me. This would need to be at least under £500, and I can’t imagine Sony is interested in discounting this that far, but hey if they are that’s a much more reasonable price.