Monday, January 01, 2007
It's January 1st AND I have another new HDTV...
Sorry for the lack of udpates people, but I've been having fun playing with my new New Year's present to myself! Yep, on December 30th, I picked up a Sony KDL-40W2000 1080p BRAVIA from Costco (where else?). After jumping in last time to a TV I hadn't evaluated with the KDL-32V2000, and being a little stung by finding irritating edge enhancement issues in what was an otherwise great TV, I went down to everyone's favourite warehouse store with my HD DVD player and a disc full of test patterns to nip any potential problems in the bud before I put down my £1537. Needless to say this isn't the easiest price for me to afford so I'm selling my previous KDL-32V2000 in order to pay for half of the bill.
The Costco people looked horrified when I told them of my plan to actually see what the TV was like before I handed over the cash, but fortunately enough they have a great returns policy so said if I had any problems at all, I could easily return it. Fair enough, I thought, so I went home with 40 inches of 1080p fun.
Remember all the problems I told Sony about that they said actually weren't problems and that they wouldn't fix? Well, the good news is that they've fixed them! The new TV has no ugly halo issues with any video mode, which means that even through Composite video, you can get really nice looking results.
Of course, it wouldn't be a consumer TV if it was totally problem free, because they've managed to introduce a new video fault, and that is that on 480i video (and to an almost unnoticeable extent on 480p), there's a Y/C Shift error so that any red colours appear shifted too far to the right out of the lines. This is 100 times better than the halos on the last TV though and since only the lowest resolution video mode is affected, it doesn't annoy me too much. Nevertheless, it's incredibly careless and I wish Sony's engineers would find problems like this rather than me having to. Naturally I'll be pointing it out to Sony in the hope that they'll fix it (yeah, right).
So all in all, I'm delighted with the KDL-40W2000 and am working on a full review of the beast. Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone!
Posted at 5:55 PM
