This review is now outdated. Since I'm now a hardware reviewer for DVD Times, a cleaned-up and revised version of this review is available at that site.

The following review is left here for completeness only.

Video Performance

I'm going to be honest - I'm not going to get scientific here. I don't have the means to give you full number-crunching details - I'm just going to tell you what I see with my (irritatingly sensitive) eye.

Out of the box of course, the thing looks dreadful. My first port of call was to enter the Features menu and turn the Power Saving feature on. Not only does this save power, but it dramatically improves the black level performance of the screen by dimming the backlight. Once this was done, I corrected the aspect ratio (out of the box, it defaults to "Smart" mode which distorts the edges of 4:3 video to try and fake a widescreen picture) and toned down the Sharpness, as well as fixed the colour setting. Wow - what a difference!

Yes, don't let the out of the box picture quality scare you. Just about every LCD looks terrible when its first turned on and this one is no different.

For all of the inputs, my results weren't that surprising. Noise Reduction is usually best left off, and in most cases the Advanced Video options are too. Sharpness is best set extremely low.

DVD pictures from my upscaling Panasonic S97 turned out really well. This is the first 32" LCD HDTV that I'm actually keeping (the last one got boxed up after 30 hours) so I still have to get used to sitting back from the screen a bit more, otherwise I get a face full of MPEG flickering. Careful Brightness and Contrast tweaking can minimise this. I have the player hooked up using HDMI set to Y/Cb/Cr 4:4:4 colour mode and outputting 720p. As far as I can tell, there is no edge enhancement or other unnecessary picture oddities forced on the viewer.

Component gave similarly great results to HDMI, with, unsurprisingly, a light sprinkle of noise that you'd be hard pressed to see. What's weird though is that in the "Vivid" mode, there's more on-screen noise in comparison to the Custom mode - even when you have the exact same picture settings on both. This showed itself to me straight away in the main menus of Halo 2 on the Xbox (480p). I don't know why this is, but it goes to show that there's some subtle behind-your-back stuff going on. "Standard" mode behaved properly and didn't mess up the picture in any way when the same settings were used on both. So, avoid the Vivid mode even if you've tweaked it. Very odd. Otherwise, pictures from Component, and all other inputs for that matter, are spectularly free of electronic video noise.

RGB SCART performance was similarly excellent, should you be wanting to hook up, say, a satellite or cable decoder, or an older games console. On the default "Vivid" mode, it had the terrible "bleached-out nuclear glowing" look, but lowering the settings to more realistic levels gave as brilliantly natural, detailed, and un-interefered-with RGB SCART image you're likely to get.

Composite Handling - wow

This TV handles Composite Video - particularly of the NTSC type - in a way that's out of this world. Why should you care? Unless you're using analogue TV or a Laser Disc player - or for some other reason are using Composite video connections (although I can't think of any other valid reasons) - then it won't mean much to you. But the reason I'm mentioning it is because I think this is a sign of attention to detail and a great TV.

The Comb Filtering - that's the part that removes dot crawl from Composite pictures - is astonishing. Seriously. The comb filtering on this TV is better than most studios seem to be using in their professional equipment. Almost no dot crawl gets through and no detail is thrown away during the process. Don't believe me? Well here's the Ren & Stimpy Show laser disc, hooked up via Composite video.

Look at the nice, bright colours - exactly the sort of things that would highlight dot crawl. None in sight! Only on very fast moving scenes does any trace of dot crawl remain. The fact that Sony have gone to the bother of cleaning up an old fashioned video format that a lot of people might not use, to me is very reassuring that this is a class act from start to finish.

Deinterlacer Torture Test

Simply put, the deinterlacer is that part of the TV that fakes progressive scan pictures out of non-progressive scan (interlaced) ones. It has to use a variety of tips and techniques to turn what looks to it like a mess of jagged patterns into a natural, visible picture that doesn't look strange to us.

My favourite test for any TV's deinterlacer is to play a fast (60fps) video game in interlaced mode. My weapon of choice today was Sonic Adventure DX on the Nintendo GameCube. After playing through the first half of the first level, I was satisfied that the deinterlacer in the TV is up to par. Only once on a very fast moving sequence did it let through some combing artefacts. There also weren't too many jagged lines and such. The deinterlacing is exactly what I expected from a high-end consumer TV.

Also, how did the deinterlacer treat FILM material as opposed to the video example I tried above? Very well! The old LCD WEGA from 2004 that I've been used to had good 3:2 Pulldown for Interlaced NTSC movies (for example, NTSC DVDs played from an older, Interlaced only player, or NTSC Laser Discs). This has been carried over to this model. New however, is what to me looks like 2:2 Pulldown for Interlaced PAL movies too! My old LCD WEGA treated PAL movies in the same way it would treat Video material. This meant that on downward camera pans, you could see jagged lines on diagonal parts of the picture. Things are much smoother now, so no longer will you have to put up with (too many) jaggies when a good film comes on TV.

This time around, there is no colour jumping. On RGB SCART pictures (which I used to use for hooking up my old Freeview box) from the old 2004 TV, looking up close would show that colours would have a light flicker to them - most noticeable on the red "This channel starts at 7pm" screen that BBC sometimes show. The colours are completely stable this time.

1080i Deinterlacing improved over last years' models

Since last years' models in Europe were more like LCD WEGAs in BRAVIA casing - compared to the rest of the world, that is - they used the same deinterlacing method for 1080i video like my old WEGA did. It applied a "Bob" method to deinterlace 1080i video, then downscaled it to the panel, which simply put, meant that the entire screen had a slight jitter to it for 1080i material.

That's gone now. The new BRAVIAs have motion adaptive deinterlacing for 1080i so the entire screen doesn't judder constantly - instead you'll only see a slight flickering on very fine details when things move. Not shabby at all.

Digital Tuner ("Freeview" to the UK people)

The video performance from digital TV channels is very good, all things considered. Watching video content that isn't too busy and blocky such as talk and news shows, even sitting up close to the TV, looks far better than you'd expect. Of course, the quality of broadcast pictures greatly relies on the broadcaster's video equipment - and competency. What's odd though is that this time around, all of the channels - minus the shopping ones - are a lot closer in terms of quality. On all the other LCDs I've tried, the BBC channels - which seem to be broadcast using much older video equipment and are typically noisier and blockier as a result - look far worse compared to, say, SKY News. On this TV, the better channels still look great, but the poorer ones have received a definite improvement. The faults are still there lurking in the background if you look for them but careful tweaking and some veey light MPEG Noise Reduction can clean digital TV pictures up a lot. I even turned on Temporal Noise Reduction (that's the non-MPEG kind) on its lowest setting to clean up some of the analogue fuzz from BBC News 24's studio shots (it looks like they're still using analogue cameras). As I previously mentioned, the Temporal NR on the Low setting is surprisingly non-destructive. I'm very impressed.

Obviously, a mostly still newsroom shot will give good results, but look at just HOW good they are (and forgive the poor quality of the picture - it looks much better in real life):

PC input

PC input is very flexible. It supports the native resolution of 1360x768 so you can surf the web or play PC games in nice, crispy video. Unreal Tournament 2004 looks astonishing! It was definitely worth waiting 11 months for Sony to finally give us Europeans a V-Series TV with the VGA Input intact! Have a look at the lovely 1:1 mapped picture:

The manual shows the officially supported resolutions:

All of the PC resolutions give you 3 display options. You can see the pixels 1:1 mapped without any scaling - even on resolutions as low as 640x480, which gives you a tiny box in the middle of the screen with big borders all around. The second option scales to fit the panel, but preserves the aspect ratio (this is what I use to play 4:3 Sega Dreamcast games at 640x480). The final option scales to fit every available pixel and distorts the aspect ratio (eugh!)

The PC input lets you adjust the Backlight, unlike Samsung's LCD TVs. Brightness, Contrast and Colour Temperature are also adjustable. The other picture options are predictably greyed-out for the VGA input.

Next page >>

On the next page, I explain the panel performance, and some more ease of use (including the Digital Tuner's electronic programme guide).

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