Sky Glass Gen 2 review: A major upgrade but other TVs are better value

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Key specifications

Screen sizes available:43in (small); 55in (medium); 65in (large)Panel type:Quantum Dot VA-type LCD with local dimmingResolution:4K/UHD (3,840 X 2,160)Refresh rate:60HzHDR formats:HDR10, HLG, Dolby VisionAudio enhancement:Integrated Dolby Atmos 3.1.2 speakersHDMI inputs:3 x HDMI 2.1 (inc 1 x eARC)Freeview Play compatibility:NoTuners:Terrestrial, streamingGaming features:ALLMWireless connectivity:802.11ax (2.4GHz and 5GHz)Smart assistants:Hello SkySmart platform:SkyOS

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: What you need to know

Like the first Sky Glass, the Gen 2 TV uses a VA-type LCD panel with a quantum dot filter and a direct LED backlight, which at the prices Sky is asking, looks a little uncompetitive, especially since the refresh rate is a mere 60Hz. The TV comes with an Atmos “soundbar” built in, however, which softens the blow somewhat. If you already own a soundbar, you may be interested to know that Sky is releasing a cheaper TV – the Sky Glass Air – later in the year that comes without the audio hardware bolted on.

The build quality is better than most TVs at around this price, and Sky has made some fairly major improvements to the design of the TV, reducing the heft of the panel and the size of the stand, making it a lot easier to relocate.

As before, one of the big draws of Sky Glass Gen 2 is that it delivers most of Sky’s content offering in one sleek, well-designed internet-connected box with no requirement for a satellite dish or complicated installation.

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Price and competition

Convenient though it is to have Sky’s TV content dish-free, the most attractive aspect of the Sky Glass Gen 2 is that as well as buying it outright, you can spread the cost – without having to go through a third-party financing company like Klarna or using your credit card.

For the 43in model, you either pay £699 up front, £28/mth over 24 months or £14/mth over 48 months. For the 55in model there’s a big step up in price to £949, £38/mth over 24 months or £19/mth over 48 months. Finally, for the 65in TV you’ll be paying £1,199 up front, £48/mth over £24 months or £24/mth over 48 months.

There’s no premium to pay for spreading the cost, so you’ll eventually end up paying the same for the TV as you would if you paid a lump sum for it, but do remember you’ll also have to pay for a Sky subscription for TV content on top of that.

The cheapest package at time of writing is Sky Essential TV. This costs £15/mth and delivers the standard “Free TV” streaming platform capabilities (see below), plus the Sky Atlantic, Netflix Standard (with ads) and Discovery+ channels.

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Design, connections and control

When I reviewed the first Sky Glass, I was a big fan of its boxy, minimalist design and the fact you could buy it in a range of different colours, but not so much its huge weight and how difficult its low-slung frame made getting at the ports at the rear.

Fortunately, Sky has addressed these shortcomings. The old stand, which attached to the centre of the rear housing like a giant monitor stand, has been redesigned. The stand now slides up into the body of the TV on a pair of prongs and is locked in place with a pair of clips. This, along with a repositioning of the power cubby to the right side of the TV, reduces a lot of the bulk and the weight and makes Sky Glass Gen 2 far easier to lift and carry around.

I’d still advise owners of the larger models to enlist the help of a friend or family member when moving it around, and the TV is still pretty low slung, so you’ll need to reach around the side or over the top to reach the port cubbies. There’s no chance of placing anything in front of it unless you’re happy obscuring the speakers.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is connectivity. You still have a mere three HDMI 2.1 ports, one of which is eARC enabled, plus one Ethernet port for connection to your home Wi-Fi if you don’t fancy using the on-board, dual-band Wi-Fi 6 wireless. There’s an antenna connector so you can watch Freeview TV via terrestrial digital signals if your internet goes down for an extended period, although there’s no recording hardware in the TV or the ability to attach external storage. Rounding off the selection of connections is a pair of USB ports (one USB-C, one USB-A), which are mainly used for powering external devices such as the Sky Live camera and third-party streaming devices.

As far as controls go, you have the same curvy Bluetooth remote as before, powered by a pair of standard AA batteries. This is perfectly adequate. It’s comfortable to hold, colour matched to your TV, is equipped with backlit buttons and comes equipped with shortcut keys for SkyOS’ main functions (Home, Playlist, Voice command), plus a five way directional pad for navigation. In a nice touch, it’s motion sensing, too – pick it up and the TV will automatically spring to life. You can also set up the TV to come on when it detects motion.

It could do with a search key, however, for those times when the (not very reliable) voice search doesn’t find you what you’re looking for. Yes, you can bring this function up by pressing the three dots shortcut key and selecting Search from the sub-menu, but this isn’t particularly obvious. I also think it could do with a button for accessing the main settings menu directly.

Sky Glass Gen 2 is also equipped with voice control, which as I’ve already hinted at isn’t great. You can activate this by pressing and holding the microphone button on the remote control and speaking into the microphone in the handset, or by saying “Hello Sky” or “Hello Glass” and hoping the far field microphones in the TV pick up your voice.

Alas, I found the TV’s mics lacked sensitivity; even in a small, quiet room, I had to speak quite loudly for it to recognise my commands. And even using the more reliable mics in the remote, keyword searching for content was patchy at best. I did find myself using the voice facility for shortcuts to menu sections and launching apps, though, a task at which it is more effective.

READ NEXT: Sky Glass Gen 2 vs Sky Stream 

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Smart TV platform

I’m a fan of the SkyOS Sky Glass user interface. I find it simple to navigate, responsive, and if you’re coming from Sky Q or an older Sky platform, then you’ll find the learning curve pretty shallow. It isn’t, in truth, all that different from most other platforms – such as Fire OS on an Amazon Fire TV stick or Google TV – but it is easy to understand and get to grips with. Like those platforms, Sky OS is organised in a series of horizontal rails, split across themed sections.

On the home page, you have what’s playing now in the top left corner, with a bunch of suggestions sitting immediately to the right of it, while channels you’ve watched recently sit just to the left. The rail just below this links to your Playlist and your main content categories – TV Shows, Movies, Sport, Kids, News, Audio and music, Fitness and International.

Below this is the rail for the TV guide and your favourite channels. Next up is Continue Watching, which is handy for picking up where you left off last time you used the TV, followed by “Top 10 this week”, then the Apps and inputs rail, for direct access to your HDMI devices and apps.

The list of supported platforms is pretty comprehensive and all the major operators are supported. For TV there’s Apple TV+, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Discovery+, YouTube and Paramount+, in addition to terrestrial staples such as BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4 and my5. There’s also support for Spotify and Amazon Music, the Global player and Radio player radio apps and a smorgasbord of specialist streaming platforms such as Crunchyroll and U.

All this is good, and easy to use. I particularly like the way you get a standard EPG-style TV guide that lets you browse linear TV content as you would on Freeview and digital terrestrial TV. The only thing I don’t like about it is how SkyOS handles the overlap between this and the streaming portion of the SkyOS.

This is what Sky Glass’ Playlist function is aimed at. It’s designed as a substitute for Sky Q’s hard drive recording system but, in truth, it will never truly serve that function quite as well. The problem here is one of transparency: when you hit the Plus button on the remote control to add a programme to your playlist, you’re never really sure whether it’s going to be recorded to Sky’s online cloud-based DVR recording system or whether it’s just going to add a link to the location on the streaming platform in question, as it does with BBC content.

This can lead to confusion about how fast content becomes available once it has been broadcast, with some content available immediately and some disappearing after broadcast only to reappear some time later. With Sky Q there was no waiting around: if you recorded something, it was available straight away, unless you’d had a power cut halfway through, of course.

There are other inconsistencies related to this problem, too. For example, if you drop in to watch a programme halfway through using the TV Guide, it’s only possible to rewind to the point you started watching from, even though you can usually choose to “watch from start”.

I use Sky Stream as my day-to-day TV system, so I know that, in time, it’s possible to learn your way around its various foibles, but there’s no doubt it can be infuriating and confusing at times.

READ NEXT: Sky Stream vs Sky Q

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Image quality

Sky sent me the 55in model for review, which costs £949. At that price it’s thrust into competition with some seriously good TVs, including one of our favourite model from 2024 – the LG C4. This is an OLED TV that delivers stunning picture quality and impressive gaming capabilities for (currently) around £980.

Admittedly, it doesn’t have a built-in sound system like Sky Glass Gen 2, but it delivers better image quality, has better viewing angles and superior contrast. For the money, it’s a superior TV to Sky Glass Gen 2.

The main problem Sky’s TV has is that it employs a fairly humdrum VA panel with direct LED backlighting. This means that viewing angles aren’t great – colours and contrast change when viewed at an angle and the panel is limited to 60Hz, when most TVs around this price these days are at 120Hz or even higher.

But Sky Glass Gen 2 does get some things right. It is much brighter and, thanks to the increased number of dimming zones, there’s far less evidence of blooming around dark objects. I measured peak brightness in HDR playback at an impressive 1,227cd/m² on a white window representing 10% of the viewable surface of the TV’s panel; that’s a major uplift on the original TV’s maximum brightness of 704cd/m² and up there with some modern OLED TVs like the Sony A95L.

The TV ships in Auto mode, which is supposed to adapt to the content displayed on screen. So for movie playback, it will adopt a Filmmaker-style profile with “cinematic colour grading”, and when you switch channel to watch the football, it will change, adopting a cooler white point, more vivid colours while dynamically adjusting gamma to brighten darker areas so you can see what’s going on in the shadows. This process relies on metadata, though, so when the data isn’t present, the TV will fall back to the default Entertainment mode.

This is the mode our initial measurements were taken in, and here I saw reasonably good greyscale tracking. There was a touch too much blue, but performance was pretty decent with an average Delta E (error) of 4.1; not great but not too far from the visible threshold of 3. Gamma tracked the target of 2.4 reasonably tightly, too, and colour performance was solid, too, delivering an average DeltaE of 3.9.

Switching to Movie mode, with its “cinematic colour grading” didn’t improve the situation. Again, I saw a little too much blue in the greyscales, and a similar average DeltaE of 4.2, while colour performance hit a Delta E of 3.9. Out of the box accuracy is reasonable, then, but it seems to have taken a step back from the Sky Glass 2022 update, where I saw Delta E of around 1.3 for greyscale and 0.8 for colours.

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: HDR performance

As highlighted above, peak brightness and contrast are the biggest improvements with Sky Glass Gen 2. With HDR content, this TV delivers nice bright highlights and convincingly dark black response levels.

This is bolstered by decent greyscale and colour accuracy again, with average DeltaE results of 3.3 and 5 in Auto mode and 1.6 and 4.5 in Movie mode. We’re not talking about groundbreaking results, probably because the panel is only capable of producing 90% of the DCI-P3 colour space, but it is much better than the original Sky Glass, which was only capable of 79% DCI-P3 coverage.

The local dimming appeared to be working better than on the first Sky Glass, too, with considerably less obvious blooming around specular highlights than the previous Sky Glass. I did witness quite a lot of clipping in the highlights, though, and you’re still not getting anything like the resolution of backlight that you do with a Mini LED TV.

Sky Glass Gen 2 uses a grid of only 8 x 14 LEDs on the 55in model tested here, and do bear in mind that since Sky Glass Gen 2 uses a VA panel, if you view the TV from any other direction than head on, then blooming becomes more obvious around highlights on screen.

To test the Sky Glass Gen 2 we used Portrait Displays‘ Calman colour calibration software.

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Gaming

As with the original, the Glass Gen 2 is not a TV made for gaming. The panel is limited to 60Hz, while input lag was measured at 66ms, which is well behind our favourite gaming TVs. There is support for ALLM (auto low latency mode), however, which kicks in whenever a games console is connected.

There’s no Game mode to speak of, either, and there isn’t even anywhere in the settings to tweak the motion compensation. Fortunately, the picture isn’t afflicted by the dreaded soap-opera effect that over-enthusiastic motion interpolation applies, but it would be nice to have the option.

READ NEXT: Sky Glass Gen 2 vs Sky Glass

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Sound quality

As for the audio improvements, that’s a far less dramatic upgrade for Sky Glass Gen 2 than picture quality. The TV still has a 3.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos system, with three drivers at the front (left, right and centre), a pair of up-firing speakers for height effects built into the top corners of the chassis and a woofer at the rear for the bass channel. And this remains an impressive spec for an integrated TV sound system. What’s new is that the woofer is now a twin-driver affair that supposedly delivers richer, deeper bass.

I didn’t have an original Sky Glass with which to compare the Gen 2 back to back and it may well be slightly better, but I can’t say I was particularly blown away by it, either way. I used the TV to listen to a few hours of music via the Spotify app while writing this review, and it was acceptable – I didn’t immediately turn it off – and sounded particularly good with simple acoustic live tracks. The bass lacked any kind of low-end impact and drive, despite the upgrade, but there was plenty of volume and clarity on show.

With TV and movies, the audio system performed reasonably well, too. Voices remained clear and locked front and centre, and effects were positioned to the left, right and above the TV reasonably effectively. It can’t compete with a standalone soundbar such as the Sonos Beam 2, though, or even the cheaper Sonos Ray for either clarity or at the low end. Sky Glass Gen 2’s audio system is better than most TVs in its price bracket, but I’d recommend you invest in a decent separate soundbar or speaker system if you want the best bang for your buck.

Sky Glass Gen 2 review: Verdict

Sky Glass Gen 2 is going to appeal to the same type of TV customer as the first model. That’s anyone who likes the idea of spreading the cost of buying a TV over two or four years and doesn’t want the hassle of connecting external streaming boxes, soundbars or speaker systems. For those people, the Gen 2 is a great choice. It is brighter than before, delivers better overall picture quality and its built-in audio means that, for many, there’s no need to add extra speakers.

With prices starting at £949 for the 55in and 65in models, however, I’d advise you to think long and hard about your priorities. With its 60Hz panel and lack of gaming mode, the Sky Glass Gen 2 doesn’t cater for hardcore console gamers at all and, notwithstanding the Sky Glass Gen 2’s upgrades, home theatre enthusiasts will still want to look elsewhere, too. A Mini LED or OLED set at the same price will almost always deliver superior picture quality, and a separate soundbar or surround sound system will treat your ears to more impactful audio.

Ultimately, a TV like Sky Glass Gen 2 would make a lot more sense at a lower price. Perhaps the cheaper Sky Glass Air will prove more persuasive when it arrives later in the year.