According to half a dozen sources, Accel, the global venture firm, is in advanced discussions to lead a funding round of $30 million to $40 million in Truemeds, an Indian online pharmacy that’s focused on providing customers with more affordable generic alternatives to costly branded medications.

The talks are currently centered on a proposed valuation of about $330 million for the six-year-old, Mumbai-headquartered startup, per these same sources, who requested anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private.

The deal hasn’t finalized, so it may still not materialize or the terms can change, the sources cautioned. Accel and Truemeds didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The potential round for Truemeds comes amid a period of consolidation and upheaval in the online pharmacy industry. Pharmeasy, backed by Prosus Ventures, has seen its valuation plummet from a peak of $5.6 billion to below $600 million after struggling to repay a loan to Goldman Sachs. 

Janus Henderson, the British American global asset firm, implied a valuation of about $458 million for Pharmeasy at the end of June, according to its most recent mutual fund disclosures. In 2021, Tata Digital acquired 1mg, another major player in the space.

Unlike its competitors, Truemeds is taking a slightly different approach. The startup aims to disrupt the supply chain of how medicine reaches customers, eliminating middlemen that inflate the final price. After customers upload their prescriptions, Truemeds doctors recommend generics with the same active ingredients, produced by Indian manufacturers. This service aims to reduce medication costs, particularly for those with chronic conditions requiring ongoing treatment.

The platform operates entirely online, with consultations, ordering, and delivery all handled digitally. This eliminates the need for patients to visit physical pharmacies and allows Truemeds to reach customers in remote areas. 

If the new funding materializes, it would more than double Truemeds’ valuation, which was $132 million in an extended Series B round last year. The startup originally raised the Series B funding from investors including WestBridge Capital and Info Edge Ventures at a valuation of $76.7 million, according to Tracxn, a venture insight platform. 

Monstrous hurricanes Helene and Milton caused so much complex havoc that damages are still being added up, but government and private experts say they will likely join the infamous ranks of Katrina, Sandy and Harvey as super costly $50-billion-plus killers.

Making that even more painful is that most of the damage – 95% or more in Helene’s case – was not insured, putting victims in a deeper financial hole.

Storm deaths have been dropping over time, although Helene was an exception. But even adjusted for inflation, damages from intense storms are skyrocketing because people are building in harm’s way, rebuilding costs are rising faster than inflation and human-caused climate change are making storms stronger and wetter, experts in different fields said.

“Today’s storms, today’s events are simply vastly different from yesterday’s events. One of the things that we’re seeing is the energy content that these systems can retain is significantly greater than it used to be,” said John Dickson, president of Aon Edge Insurance Agency, which specializes in flood coverage. “The weather seems to be, in many cases, moving faster than we as a society are able to keep pace with it.”

In the last 45 years, and adjusted for inflation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has counted 396 weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage. Sixty-three of those were hurricanes or tropical storms.

The $50 billion mark for direct losses is a threshold that differentiates “truly historic events,” said Adam Smith, the economist and meteorologist who runs the list out of NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information in Helene-hit Asheville, North Carolina.

Only eight hurricanes reached that threshold. Smith said he thought Milton and Helene have “a very good shot” of joining that list.

The first $50 billion hurricane was Andrew in 1992. The U.S. went 13 more years before Katrina topped the damages chart, then seven years until the third costly whopper, Sandy. Helene and Milton would make seven in the last seven years.

Calculating damages is far from an exact science. The more complex and nastier storms are – like Milton and Helene – the longer it takes, Smith said. Damage is spread over different places and often a much larger area, with wind damage in some places and flood damage elsewhere. Helene, in particular, caused widespread flooding and in places not used to it. Estimates for those storms from private firms in recent days vary and are incomplete.

There’s three categories of damage: insured damage, uninsured damage and total economic cost. Many risk and insurance firms only estimate insured losses.

Homeowner insurance usually covers wind damage, but not flood. Special insurance has to be bought for that. Flood insurance coverage rates vary by region and storms differ on whether they cause more wind or water damage. Helene was mostly water damage, which is less likely to be covered, while Milton had a good chunk of wind damage.

Of the top 10 costliest hurricanes as compiled by insurance giant Swiss Re – not including Helene or Milton yet – insured damage is about 44% of total costs.

But with Helene, Aon’s Dickson estimated that only 5% of victims had insurance coverage for the type of damage they got. He estimated $10 billion in insured damage so doing the math would put total damage in the $100 billion to $200 billion range, which he called a bit high but in the ballpark. Insured losses for Milton are in the $50 billion to $60 billion range, he said.

With Helene, Swiss Re said less than 2% of Georgia households have federal flood insurance, with North Carolina and South Carolina at 3% and 9%. In North Carolina’s Buncombe County, where more than 57 people died from Helene’s flooding, less than 1% of the homes are covered by federal flood insurance, the agency said.

Risk modeling by Moody’s, the financial services conglomerate, put a combined two-storm total damage estimate of $20 billion to $34 billion.

Karen Clark and Company, a disaster modeling firm that uses computer simulations superimposed on storm and insurance data, wouldn’t give total damage estimates for the storms. But the company figured insured losses alone were $36 billion for Milton and $6.4 billion for Helene.

“The economic losses are going up because we’re putting more infrastructure and housing in harm’s way,” said University of South Carolina’s Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute, who added that climate change also plays a role. “Human losses and deaths are going down because people are being a little bit more vigilant about paying attention to preparedness and getting out of harm’s way.”

Much of the damage is because of flooding. Studies show that hurricanes are getting wetter because of the buildup of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Basic physics dictates that clouds hold 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit, and that falls as rain.

“There is scientific agreement that floods and flooding from these hurricanes is becoming more frequent and more severe. So it is likely that we’re going to be seeing a higher frequency of storms like Helene in the future,” said Karen Clark, who founded her namesake firm. “It’s not really an insurance issue because it’s not privately insured. This is really a societal issue and political question. How do we want to deal with this?”

Clark and several of the experts said it’s time for society to think about where it builds, where it lives and if it should just leave dangerous areas and not rebuild, a concept called “managed retreat.”

“At what point do you as an individual continue to build, rebuild, rebuild and rebuild versus saying ‘OK, I’ve had enough’,” Cutter said.

And when it comes to flood insurance, many homeowners in risky areas find it’s too expensive, so they don’t buy it, Clark said. But when a storm hits them, she said “all of us as taxpayers, we’re going to pay it because we know there are going to be federal dollars coming into those areas to help people rebuild. So all taxpayers, we’re actually paying for people to live in risky areas.”

World of Warcraft, or WoW, is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre: not only is it still going strong but it’s also somehow even bigger than you thought. World of Warcraft’s current numbers aren’t public, but one recent educated guess came in at 7 million paying subscribers, which, at $15 / month, would make the game a billion-dollar earner by itself. Its developer, Blizzard, merged with Activision in 2008, and Microsoft gobbled up both companies in 2022, but World of Warcraft remains a load-bearing spine of the newly formed corporate turducken. The game that redefined gold mining for the 21st century is still a 19th-century gold mine for its landlords. 

It’s also thriving in a subscription ecosystem that it helped to legitimize. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004, during an era when you still had to buy games in boxes from stores. The runaway success of Blizzard’s always-on portal to Azeroth proved that, for the right product, studios could charge a recurring fee beyond the initial cost of the core game’s (at the time) formidable five installation CDs. Here, in the enshittified 2020s, we’ve all grown used to renting our culture by the month, but it was genuinely pathbreaking for World of Warcraft to have 12 million subscribers at its peak in 2010. It didn’t invent the monthly model, which had already gained traction in games like Ultima Online and EverQuest during the dawn of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) genre. But World of Warcraft’s success took that recurring charge mainstream and helped popularize the unassailable business logic that having your customers pay you once was worse than having them pay you until they decided or remembered to stop. 

As World of Warcraft turns 20, its enduring financial success arguably pales in comparison to its cultural significance. I asked Angela Washko, a new-media artist who staged several notable performance pieces inside the game world, what she considered World of Warcraft’s biggest contribution, for better or worse. “World of Warcraft expanded the notion of what public space was,” she told me. “I saw the bonds created amongst members of my guilds moving beyond the game space, as players flew across the country to meet each other.” Everyone I talked to about World of Warcraft’s legacy seemed to mention someone or other getting married, either in the game itself or here in reality after meeting in the game. “I think the degree of immersion and dissolving of the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy’ within World of Warcraft was really a turning point in computing culture,” Washko said, adding that World of Warcraft “changed the conversation around video games from being something that was ‘an escape from everyday life’ to something that was an extension of one’s social life and happened to take place in a virtual environment.” 

Through her own work, Washko also explored the less savory side of a fantasy game populated by real people; her Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft involved traveling from town to town to educate passersby about feminism and discuss how the game’s dominant culture often created a hostile environment for its marginalized players. I recalled my own playing days, when you could be flying into a town on your hippogryph, minding your own business, only to be deluged by a wave of sewer-grade hate speech on a public text channel. We now take it for granted that online spaces reflect the social dynamics of the people who occupy them, including and especially the problematic ones, but in many ways, World of Warcraft was the kobold in this particular coal mine.

I first encountered the Warcraft universe like many ’90s computer kids: as a series of top-down, real-time strategy games about economic management and cartoon fantasy violence. The world (lowercase) of Warcraft pitted the seemingly noble Alliance (humans, elves, dwarves, your Tolkienesque usual suspects) against the villainized Horde (orcs, trolls, and other stock monster-humanoids from the trope factory) in a vicious-with-a-touch-of-slapstick conflict spanning three main titles and numerous expansions between 1994 and 2003. If no one was using the phone, you could play against your friends over a modem. The series had a rich and goofy aesthetic of exaggerated proportions, saturated colors, and sarcastic jokes. The units that ran your economy were literal simpering peons, which gave everything a barrel-shaped, vaguely comedic flavor that played well against the high-gloss cinematic interludes that would become Blizzard’s calling card.

Flush with revenues from its flagship series, Blizzard began exploring how it might expand Warcraft’s popular lore into other types of games. First, a point-and-click game called Warcraft Adventures — a late-1990s attempt at LucasArts-style vintage puzzle-solving in a cel-shaded take on the mythos — was infamously canceled for not meeting Blizzard’s internal release standards. (It also leaked, fully playable, not too long ago. Based on what I’ve seen, Blizzard was right.) Then, starting in 2001, an experimental team of a few dozen people got busy building a whole new engine that would bring Azeroth into 3D for the first time and let players meet, socialize, and slaughter skeletons together. It was a primordial example of the modern phenomenon where a corporation exploits its intellectual property by jumping genres and colonizing a new medium. It was also how they’d get me.

There are plenty of humbling ways to use Gmail’s internal search function, especially if you’ve had your account for roughly as long as World of Warcraft has existed. For one example, consider my collected personal correspondence surrounding World of Warcraft, from the peak years of its involvement in my life. When I queried “Warcraft before:2007/1/1,” it yielded about two dozen results, and together, they trace a blunt biography of that moment: landing a big new job; getting hella dumped; and “spending two months as an antisocial hermit,” as I told a friend in a Gchat in early 2006. (And how about World of Warcraft outliving Gchat?) 

Reviewing the private record, it’s clear World of Warcraft tore through my life like an experienced raiding party of max-level grinders through the Deadmines. Admittedly, it was the kind of nymph-stage young adult life that was conceptually made of crepe paper and easily shredded by a video game. But something about the predictable rhythm of ordering junk food delivery after an exhausting workday, logging onto World of Warcraft, and hopping through some lush environment searching for herbs to make into sellable virtual potions just drew me in, one night after another.

This aspect of World of Warcraft — its knack for blurring the line between work and fun until the casual observer might not quite recognize it as either — often came up when I spoke to others about their experiences. “One thing WoW proved on a large scale is that people will turn a game into a job at the slightest provocation,” said Cory O’Brien, now a narrative and level designer for games like Redfall and HoloVista. “I remember spending hours and hours and hours grinding for dust so that I could enchant magic items. I remember smelting tin and copper to make bronze.” The elaborate crafting system in World of Warcraft, which often required materials gained through repetitive in-game labor, represented an explosion in the popularity of the now-ubiquitous mechanic where you, as a player, find some stuff and turn it into something else. “I still play all these more recent games like Minecraft, Project Zomboid, and Valheim that are literally just that crafting part,” O’Brien told me. “I spend so much time doing monotonous, repetitive tasks, for free, because somehow we have discovered that that’s fun.” Here, in 2024, it’s hard not to feel a vaguely sinister undertone to all of this as the rising tides of capitalistic overreach gamify the gig economy and hijack the natural human affinity for rewards for their own extractive purposes. But to Washko’s point about an expanded social life, one reason this all worked is that you were often helping out real people, with “legitimate needs” in the scope of the game. You were rarely just doing these things for yourself.

It wasn’t always exactly a waste, either. Andrew Simone, now a project manager in tech, attributes a large swath of his professional tool kit to skills he gained as a guild leader in World of Warcraft. “I actually stopped playing WoW largely because I felt like I was managing my guild more than my actual professional jobs,” he told me, proceeding to outline a frightening slate of workplace-flavored tasks that included interviewing prospective guild candidates, analyzing performance metrics from the game’s multiuser boss fights, dealing with in-guild sexual harassment, managing schedules across the world to hold meetings about all these things, writing guides for new members, and even “cultivating a kind of guild culture so people enjoyed being there,” which is an incredible thing to say about something that is already ostensibly a game. I know there are countless former guild leaders reading this and nodding along because their current workday docket has nothing on mediating a 10-way raiding party dispute over who should get the legendary enchanted pauldrons that just dropped. 

On the other hand: plenty of it was a giant waste. I can’t tell you, back in the day, how many hours I was technically playing World of Warcraft but ignoring the game itself while I sifted through, rearranged, and tested various custom add-ons for its labyrinthine, fintech-ass user interface. World of Warcraft is a persistent software ecosystem with clients and servers and all kinds of data flying between them at all times — it’s just not necessarily exposed to every player in full. An entire cottage industry of user-created UI mods sprung up to assign repeatable actions to shortcut keys, or process advanced analytics from game logs like Simone would do for his guild, or implement an “automatic goblin therapist” who answers any incoming whispers to your character with an in-game implementation of the classic ELIZA protocol. Letting players scratch their own itches for how the game felt to play was also a clever way to limit complaints about the parts of it that weren’t as polished. I never got much into the game’s advanced content myself, but for those who did, pretty much the only way to follow the expected meta of guild raids was to use externally designed UI add-ons. World of Warcraft had the audacity to make players create their own custom cockpits for the game and ended up creating a kind of recursive procrastination where you could even distract yourself from your intended leisure activity. Anyone who’s ever rearranged the app icons on their phone knows just how ubiquitous this kind of time-consuming “metawork” has become.

Recently, I engaged in a more contemporary form of networked social entertainment — sitting around a big TV with friends, watching four strangers play a game together on Twitch. Just as things were picking up, the stream cut out, and an algorithmically inserted video ad began to play: it was for World of Warcraft. This was a group of mostly game designers, and before I had a chance to say anything, someone else piped in to mention World of Warcraft was 20 years old now — and formally impactful enough that working game makers still know its birthday.

Seeing that ad, writing this piece, none of it was enough to get me to reinstall World of Warcraft. (It’s a good thing the game never stooped to making you feed your in-game pets.) I didn’t really feel I had to replay the game to measure its influence because its influence is everywhere. Every monthly subscription, in-game economy, or digital “third place” where lives bleed into online connections owes it some spiritual recognition as prior art; those things have all become inescapable. Twenty years later, we are all living in the World of Warcraft.

Getting your hand son the brand-new DJI Air 3S – which we gave four-and-a-half-stars in our DJI Air 3S review – might be trickier than anticipated as the company is having issues importing its latest drone to the US. For the time being, it might only be possible to purchase the drone from DJI.com directly, not through any third-party stores.

This isn’t anything to do with the ban bill which passed in the US House of Representatives earlier this year. Instead, DJI claims it’s because the Department of Homeland Security incorrectly believes the drones were produced in forced labor camps and is blocking the drones using the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (via The Verge)

Sony Bravia 7

MSRP $2,299.00

“Insanely great picture quality comes with a big caveat.”

Pros

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• Bright and vivid
• Excellent black levels/contrast
• Extremely accurate HDR/Color
• Top-tier motion/upscaling
• Easy to use

Cons

• Limited viewing angle
• Poor reflection handling

The Sony Bravia 7 is a popular TV. It’s a mini-LED TV that, while still fairly expensive, costs far less than the flagship Bravia 9. And because it’s a Sony TV, we can expect that it will be pretty awesome. And in many ways it is.

But it’s also a curious TV. I don’t know if I’ve ever reviewed a TV that aced so many exams and yet still had to fight for my recommendation.

In most ways, the Bravia 7 is a big upgrade over last year’s Sony X90L. And while it isn’t quite the aggressive performer that Sony’s set-up Bravia 9 is? It is indeed an awesome TV.

Yet, the number of people I’m going to recommend the Bravia 7 to is … well, relatively small.

How do we square that up? Let’s get into it.

Video review

Sony Bravia 7 specs

Out of the box

Fit and finish

Basic day-to-day use

Dig below the surface and you’ll find a TV that is super easy to use. Sony has created a customized UI that sits over Google TV that, at least for now, is my favorite among TV manufacturers (although, to be fair, I haven’t gotten to the new Panasonics that just landed in the U.S. so whether Sony remains my favorite, it’s easily better than the competition).

This TV is so easy to set up.

Of course, you can only spend so much time rooting around in the settings, which Sony tries to minimize by automating a lot of things. And the good news here is that this TV has run Google TV darn near flawlessly for me thus far. It looks like there was a problem getting custom picture settings to stick when the TV was in its basic mode, but that was fixed with a recent software update.

The remote — which isn’t backlit — is not rechargeable like the Bravia 9. But you will notice it looks a bit different. This isn’t a new finish, per se. That’s not paint splatter. The remote is now made with Sony’s SORPLAS recycled plastics material, which Sony now uses in a bunch of its products to lower its carbon footprint. That’s a yay, from me, for the planet.

The ins and outs

TV enthusiasts already know this, but Sony doesn’t make its own system on chip (SOC), although it does program that chip with its secret sauce. But that SOC is part of a whole board that includes the inputs and outputs. That means that you only get two HDMI 2.1 inputs, and one of those is the eARC port, which for a lot of folks will be taken up by a soundbar or A/V receiver. Sony would very much like you to occupy that port with an HDMI cable leading to its Bravia Theater Quad system (a move I whole-heartedly endorse, by the way). This isn’t going to be a problem for most folks. But for anyone with both the latest Xbox and latest PlayStation, or one of those consoles and a gaming PC they want to hook up … only one of those devices can connect to the TV for full-on 4K 120Hz gaming.

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But don’t yell at Sony about this. Yell at MediaTek to make a next-gen SOC with four HDMI 2.1 inputs and a chip that is more or less the same as the Pentonic 1000 so Sony doesn’t have to rewrite all its code (again) and we don’t have to suffer the growing pains with Sony (again) just to have four HDMI 2.1 inputs.

Sound quality

Like the X90L, the sound is not good enough for me to want to set up Sony’s acoustic center sync with the Bravia Theater Quad. The Theater Quad’s phantom center is very convincing, and the Bravia and TV’s speakers will only be a distraction. So skip it.

Picture setup tips

A step further on this: The Bravia 7 counts a Prime Video calibrated mode as well as a Netflix calibrated mode among its features. And while it’s cool that these picture modes are available, I don’t support them being turned “on” by default. Turns out, this was Amazon Prime Video’s decision — not Sony’s — and it’s a problem for Sony TV owners.

Many of you will be happiest with the local dimming setting on “high” and the peak brightness setting on “high.” You can then evaluate whether to boost the brightness level. The TV may seem dim out of the box, but don’t worry: This TV has all the brightness you need and want, and then some. You just need to do a little work for it.

Also, I got a software update while I was reviewing the Bravia 7 — one that I think also went out to the Bravia 9. The description promises to fix, among other things, “an issue where the screen brightness may increase when subtitles are shown.” So, make sure to check for an update when you set up this TV. It should be applied automatically during initial setup, but, as I like to say from time to time: trust, but verify.

Numbers for Nit Nerds

If you are a Nit Nerd, then you already know that this TV is gonna ace almost every measurement, right? It does. But, as usual, we’ll start with brightness, which is where most of the interesting results came in anyway.

I can’t recall what this TV’s default SDR brightness setting was in professional mode — it may have been 20, but by the time I got started on it, it was up at 30. Regardless, I have numbers for the brightness set at 20, 30, and 50 with all other settings at default, which means that local dimming was at medium and peak brightness was off.

At a setting of 20, SDR peak brightness on the Bravia 7 was 265 nits. At 30 it was 375 nits. At a maxed-out 50, it measured 522 nits, which is fairly bright, but far lower than I was expecting. After turning the peak brightness and local dimming to high, I reached the 1,800 nit territory — which is absolutely insane. (I like that Sony gives you a broad range of control to dial the TV in just how you need it to be.)

White balance came in excellent. It was a little hot on the red, but that is easily fixed with a couple of clicks in the 2-point white balance menu. Stock professional mode came in with a max delta E at about 2. Respect.

It was a similar story with the 20-point grayscale. Excellent performance in the pro mode. Only the brightest whites were above a delta E of 2, and only by a touch. More respect.

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The Bravia 7’s picture quality is superb.

All colors in the color gamut test were under a delta E of 2. And the very challenging color-checker test? The Bravia 7 aced it, with a max delta E of 3.8 and an average of 1.8 — that is awesome for a stock picture mode.

Color saturation and luminance tests in SDR were also aced.

When it comes to HDR (and I may have already spoiled the peak brightness news), in a 10% window it was around 1,900 nits — it was testing 2,000 nits at one point. Bumping the window size up or down brought the peak brightness number down, often closer to 1,600 nits for me, and 1,300 at default settings, and full screen brightness can be as high as 700 nits.

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A real-life HDR test shows peak HDR highlights are probably hanging out closer to 1,100 nits, which is enough to accurately reproduce most of the HDR content you can lay your eyes on.

The Bravia 7 follows the EOTF curve like a true champion — about as perfect as it gets. You can choose picture modes that overbrighten HDR if you want, though. But, in a professional mode, this is what you wanna see. Mad respect.

The HDR color checker is also super impressive. It is so rare to see a TV get all of these right. (Sony continues to be the standard setter for color accuracy, and I am here for it!)

DCI P3 color gamut coverage came in at 97% — a passing grade, but expected. And BT-2020 coverage came in at a delightful 80%, which is great for a mini-LED TV — although a reminder: the Hisense UX hit 83%.

One other nit-nerd specific thing. I checked the Bravia 7 for near-black chrominance overshoot, which seems to be a known issue on some other Sony TVs that use the Pentonic 1000 SOC, like the A95L and Bravia 9. There may be a little here, but I really struggled to see it.

Picture quality

Here’s what you need to know about the Bravia 7’s picture quality, starting with the good stuff and ending with two problematic things.

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In short, the Bravia 7’s picture quality is superb. It’s so clean and crisp, and vibrant and accurate. The colors just look right, even without a frame of reference. (I know a Sony picture the instant I see it, and the Bravia 7 has all that swagger.) Sure, the Bravia 9 is technically better, but most folks likely wouldn’t see the difference even when it’s pointed out.

The Bravia 7’s picture quality is noticeably better than the Hisense U8 and TCL QM8. And, I would put it above the Samsung Q90D in several respects as well.

Let’s break the picture quality down:

Brightness

The Bravia 7’s brightness capabilities are stunning. By the numbers, it doesn’t measure as the brightest TV — that honor goes to the Hisense U8 and TCL QM8. But in real life, the perceived brightness of this TV is right on par with those other light cannons. It’s truly incredible — when TV is set up to do it.

Contrast

The backlight control on this TV is very good. I sometimes wish it were a little more speedy so that any visible halo following objects moving around the screen disappeared faster. But that’s when I’m looking for that kind of error. When I relax and just enjoy content and get caught up in the story? I notice none of that. And neither will most of you. Again, the Bravia 9 is technically better, but the Bravia 7, with fewer zones, beats most of its mini-LED competition for real-life viewing.

Any halo or blooming is barely visible from dead-on. However, off-axis is another story. But black levels and contrast are superb. The one caveat: slight noise in super dark blacks. They aren’t crushed, but you get a little noise and banding in really challenging dark scenes.

Color

When it comes to color, and SDR and HDR? The Bravia 7 is an A++++++++++++++. Valedictorian. Magna Cum Laude. Sony wins, period.

Motion

As for motion, Sony is the king. LG is not far behind. Panasonic, I suspect, will give Sony a run for its money, but Sony’s processing helps ensure it is the best at motion.

Upscaling

Sony’s upscaling and low bitrate content clean-up is as good as it gets. Again, LG is close. But you aren’t going to do better than Sony. Upscaling 720p is hard — and even the great Sony can only do so much — but again, nobody else does it better.

Gaming

I’m a very casual gamer. I don’t care about 144Hz. I do care about getting VRR just because I want that feature, but most of the games I play don’t offer it. I’m playing 4K/60 most of the time, and that suits me just fine.

The cons: off-angle performance and reflection handling

Now for the bad news. The off-angle performance is not good. I’ve been willing to forgive much less expensive TVs here, but this expensive Sony Bravia 7 doesn’t get that pass. Samsung is out there with some awesome off-angle viewing tech. Sony, you can do it too. Please do.

For anyone out there who wants to criticize Sony for not using an ADS Pro panel, understand that, as far as I’m aware, BOE, the top provider of ADS Pro panels — like the one you see in some Hisense 75-inch models — is only available in 75 and (I think) 85-inch sizes. So, ADS Pro and its naturally superior off-angle viewing, while still maintaining good contrast and color, is not an option for the 65-inch size. And it could be that Sony is not a fan of that panel for other quality reasons, which is why we may not see it used in the 75- and 85-inch versions of this TV.

But, an off-angle improvement filter is something I would like to see on a TV like the Bravia 7.

For now. If you have a big enough screen size of the Bravia 7 TV, it may not be a problem. But if you are serving a big room with a sectional couch using a 65-inch TV, the folks on the side seats will get a washed-out picture. Actually, you don’t have to be that far off to the side for the picture to suffer. That’s why I am so disappointed.

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Also, the anti-glare, anti-reflection treatment on this TV? It has me bewildered, because I can see there is something in use here but it doesn’t seem like it is doing much. Anything that is illuminated behind you — not just direct light sources — is going to show up on the screen when viewing medium to dark scenes. This TV can get bright enough to battle back ambient light, but I can’t stand behind it as a daytime living room TV when it is a dark mirror like this. I’m pretty bummed about that.

One other annoyance. I know the professional mode is meant to act like filmmaker mode — that it is meant to be viewed in a pitch-black room and express the creator’s intent. But I feel like sometimes this TV is too dark. Dolby Vision Dark is especially trying. It seems like the average picture level is too low. My experience doesn’t square up with the measurements and it is too dim too often. I rarely settle on Dolby Vision Bright because it lifts the brightness across the board. But on this TV I have to, because Dolby Vision dark is just unwatchable for me.

Final verdict