The first thing I watched on this was a 4K rip of Blade Runner 2049, because of course it was, and within the first ten minutes I had stopped looking at the TV and started looking at the movie. That is the entire pitch for a Sony OLED, and the Bravia 8 delivers it. The color science Sony has been refining for two decades shows up in the way skin tones hold together across a scene's lighting changes, in the way black-and-white footage actually looks like film stock instead of like a setting, in the absence of the slightly-cartoon quality that cheaper panels can't quite shake.
What Sony got right is the part of the picture you stop noticing. Motion handling is the best in its class. I'm one of the people who turns motion smoothing all the way off, and even with everything disabled, the panel's native handling of 24fps content is the most cinema-like I've used. The XR processor does a good job at upscaling streaming content from 1080p, which still makes up most of what most people watch, and it does it without the over-sharpened halos cheaper TVs add.
The catch is brightness. The Bravia 8 is a WOLED panel, not the QD-OLED that LG and Samsung's top tiers use, and peak HDR brightness is meaningfully lower than the competition. This is a dark-room TV. If you watch with the blinds open or in a kitchen with skylights, buy something else — the Hisense U7N at a third the price will look more impressive in those conditions, and you'll resent the Bravia 8 every sunny afternoon. The reason to own this panel is what it does after sundown.
Gaming is good but unremarkable for an OLED. HDMI 2.1 at 4K/120 on two of the four ports, VRR, ALLM, Auto HDR Tone Mapping for PlayStation 5. There is no DTS audio support, which matters if you've built around an older receiver. The Google TV interface is fine, ad-laden, and the same one you've used elsewhere.
The small things I noticed in the first month. The remote is a step backward from Sony's previous generation, and the backlit version costs extra, which is the kind of nickel-and-dime that makes a $2,000 purchase feel slightly worse. The center-mount stand is excellent for soundbar clearance. The bezels are as thin as a TV bezel can be without becoming structurally suspicious.
The Bravia 7 sits below this with a Mini-LED panel and is brighter for less money. The Bravia 9 sits above with the same panel and Sony's premium processor for considerably more. The Bravia 8 is the one that gets you most of the way to the top of Sony's lineup without crossing into furniture-class purchase territory.
Verdict: Buy this if you watch movies in a dark room and care about how they look.