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Talk about dreaming. Today we talk about some of the homes that made the Electronic House of the year list for 2008.
These home are amazing and make us drool just looking at the pictures.
This is a highly visual feature and you really have to you to the site
and follow along with us. We won't be talking about all the homes on
the list. There are 14 categories and a Gold, Silver, and Bronze winner
in each. The categories are:
As
you would imagine being a close friend of the HT Guys comes with some
benefits. We have a friend that just bought the SONY KDLXBR4 46 inch
LCD and a SONY Blu Ray player. He asked for some help setting the TV up
and of course we said yes. Well, we said yes because it provides good
material for our show. Our friend uses Cox cable, OTA and Blu Ray for
his HD material.
Features:
1080P
10-bit Processing and 10-bit Display
Motionflow™ 120 Hz with Full HD high frame rate capability
Deep Color Support
24p True Cinema (24p Input Capability)
DMex - Ready (Digital Media Extender) - Sony's
Digital Media Extender (DMex) ready televisions offer a digital
connection path for the addition of the optional modules like the new
BRAVIA Internet Video Link. 6 With innovative DMex expansion
capabilities featuring the Emmy® award winning XMB user interface,
these models are not merely TVs, but powerful entertainment platforms
that not only meet your needs today, but extend to add new features
seamlessly.
Impression:
The
TV looks visually appealing and has a high build quality. There is a
clear plastic frame that goes around the the TV. The TV weighs 84
pounds (38 Kgs) with the pedestal and measures 49.7" (126 cm) wide by
31.3" (79.5 cm) high by 17.7" (32 cm) deep (4.8" (12 cm) without the
pedestal). We immediately took the TV off the default setting and
changed it to cinema. Cox cable looked very bad. So bad that we
recommended switching to satellite. Braden has Cox as one of his
sources so his impression was that Cox does not look that bad on his
TVs. It could be that this TV does not do well with compressed sources.
OTA HD looked much better. In general OTA digital channels looked
better than the SD coming from the Cox cable box.
We
then popped in a Blu Ray disc (Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver
Surfer) and were quite impressed with the picture. We saw great detail
in the picture and found that the skin tones looked very natural. Color
representation was highly accurate. The TV has very good black levels
for a an LCD. We found that computer generated scenes looked fake for
some reason. The skiing scene looked very good. There was a lot of
contrast between the white snow and the blue sky. The TV has a Contrast
Ratio of 2,000:1 We liked the off angle viewing of this TV. While not
on par with Plasmas its much better than most LCDs we've seen.
Next
we started playing around with the settings to dial the TV in. Our
friend was happy with the pre-configured cinema settings and was
getting antsy about us spending so much time at with his TV. In the end
our quick calibration made the picture even better. Our calibration
settings are included at the end of this review. Please use them as a
starting point only. We ened up turning the all the special processing
off. You can play around with those to see if you like what you see.
With HD film based material we felt the Motion Enhancer took away from
the viewing experience. With SD material it actually improved the
picture. This is very subjective so if you plan on buying this TV or
you already own one experiment with these settings.
Once
we had it dialed in we went back and watched the Fantastic Four Blu Ray
Disc. It was clear to all that we had indeed improved the picture. Our
friend was happy we came by. It was everything we said before about the
clarity, color, and detail but improved. We also watched Standard
Definition DVDs (Spider Man 3, 27 Dresses, and Enchanted) after
calibration. We were pleasantly surprised at how good the picture
looked. The motion enhancer actually improved the picture. Our
recommendation is screen parts of the movie with the motion enhancer on
and then turn it off. See which one you prefer. You'll soon figure out
what types of movies this will help and what types it won't help.
Unfortunately we do not have a clear cut answer for its use.
Conclusion:
Overall,
the SONY makes for a nice TV when a good quality HD signal is present.
If you have an overly compressed signal via OTA or Cable you won't be
happy with what you see. To really show off this set you should also
consider buying a Blu Ray player. Please do not leave the set in its
default settings. At a minimum switch it to Cinema mode. Better yet
calibrate it with any of the calibration DVDs or have a professional do
it for you. This TV will really show its stuff when set up properly.
The only negatives we can find are Its Optical Output does not 5.1 for
anything other than its ATSC tuner (but this is the case with almost
all TVs) and its a bit on the pricey side.
Calibration Settings (Use only as a starting point):
HDMI Settings (Blu Ray)
Color Space: Standard
Detail Enhancer: off
Edge Enhancer: off
Everything else set to off
Motion Enhancer: off
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Blu Ray
