Breakthrough LCD picture quality at a breakthrough price

"It's beautiful," gasped six-year-old Stella, catching a glimpse of the yellow brick road on the remastered DVD of The Wizard of Oz — a movie she's seen dozens of times. I had just set up Sony's magnificent 32" Bravia XBR television.

As Crutchfield's Car A/V Managing Editor, it's been ages since I've written about home A/V gear. So, I was mightily intrigued when Crutchfield Advisor's home editor Julie Govan approached me about writing a review of the Bravia set. She knows that I've been considering buying a new TV for some time now; and perhaps more importantly, I think she was looking for a non-expert's perspective on a hot model. My background is home and car audio and professional music; I'm an ear-focused guy. While I love visual art and movies, the subtleties of the video experience have never held as much fascination for me.

Until now.

Overview

I don't get around to watching the household TV much and when I do, it's mostly to use it as a monitor for viewing DVDs.

Although said TV is a 15-year-old 20" Sony Trinitron, I have found past occasion to borrow flat-panel sets from my generous employer. I've also attended plenty of in-house TV trainings and watched many sets at various trade shows. So, while I'm not a total neophyte when it comes to modern television technology, I haven't spent much time with sets of the Bravia's caliber.

Another reason it made sense for me to review the Bravia: while I have generally found conventional tube and flat-panel plasma TVs to offer a significantly more natural picture than LCDs, I'm personally more interested in owning an LCD. My room's small size means that a 32" screen is about as big as we can comfortably go. Plus, I've long been a fan of LCD's quiet, "illuminated paper" look. I love the thin case, the lack of hum and tube crackling, and the evenness of lighting. I also appreciate that they're lightweight, glassless, and consume much less energy than their CRT counterparts. Finally, because I'm the king of falling asleep in front of the TV, it's nice to know I won't be inadvertently etching station logos into the phosphor coating on the back of a glass screen. The ultimate screensaver is not needing one.

Setting it up

Typically, two people can easily accomplish hauling an LCD panel out of the car and into the house. My 13 year-old daughter and I chatted casually as we walked in with this hefty 32" television. (The 1988 memory of my Dad and I schlepping a 27" Sony tube TV out of the car and into the living room still makes my back hurt.)

Elise helped me carry the box into the family room and disappeared, leaving me to fend for myself. No sweat — it was an easy hoist out of the box to the main shelf of our entertainment center.

I was immediately struck by two observations: Sony builds the stand into the TV (made for super-easy setup), and the display sports a new black trim. The black trim was a slight disappointment at first, as I dig the silver look. But now that I've come to love this television so much, I see the black trim as a distinguishing characteristic of a distinguished piece of high-performance electronics.

The first thing I did was to grab a strand of standard RCA red/white/yellow hookup cable for audio/video and apply it to the three component video connections on my Pioneer DVD player.

Roomy, recessed rear panels for easy power and signal connections.

At this point, I should note Sony's friendly connection layout. Connection was easy; I could see what I was doing. The jacks are grouped logically and with plenty of maneuvering space for cables of varing thicknesses. The array is nicely recessed — essential for wall-mounting when running wires behind sheet rock, as the display will hang flush against the wall.

Handy, side-accessible input jacks and CableCARD™ slot.

I also like the set of hidden side-panel inputs and the ergonomically friendly grouping of basic controls on the right-hand side of the panel. The inputs provide easy access for temporary plug-ins like a camcorder or laptop, and the controls are great for making that quick adjustment when futzing around the entertainment center, without having to leap back to the couch to find the remote.

I made sure to set my Pioneer DVD player's screen output to widescreen, so that any widescreen movie would take advantage of the set's 16:9 display area. I also set its component video output to progressive scan, in order to avail myself of the TV's capability to display progressive scan's sharper, deeper picture quality.

I then turned my attention to the TV's built-in tuner. I needed to set up my analog cable channels and also the two over-the-air digital channels in our area. I borrowed a colleague's Terk HDTVi antenna and connected it just below the cable connection. (Sony has two RF/coaxial input jacks well separated from the other audio and video inputs on the back panel, for easy access.) Since the set had already been on display at Crutchfield's Charlottesville store, I saw no Initial Setup screen when I turned it on. So, I had to crack the well-written and well-organized owner's manual to find out that I access channel settings via the super-handy Wega Gate control ring in the center of the remote. Channel setup up was easy and relatively quick; it took about ten minutes, though Sony is considerate to alert you that it can take up to 50 minutes for the TV to learn your channel array.

Wega Gate ring allows intuitive, powerful control.

As for audio connections, although the DVD player stays connected to my stereo, the cable and antenna feeds broadcast audio to the TV only. I could have used the Bravia's audio outputs to send TV audio to my stereo; but because my current TV has no audio outputs, I decided to forego running new wire (a project that would have required some serious behind-the-entertainment-center rewiring contortions). This means I listened to the Bravia's stereo speakers — mounted in the thin strip below the display and powered by an internal 13 watt x 2 amp — a lot. I'm happy to report that the sound is good for a TV. It's fairly full, not tinny, and the speakers play cleanly at as loud a level as I'll ever want to crank them.

Optimizing picture and sound

I generally don't like to tweak settings on my A/V gear; I'm the classic "set it and forget it" user of electronics. But the Bravia set's picture is so revealing that I find myself drawn to use the extensive picture control capability it offers. Need to back off on the hyper-realistic look of a highly stylized film like Spiderman? Snag the remote and back down the "picture" (contrast) level. Want to optimize color balance to make that football game look perfect? Experiment with the hue adjustment. The Wega Gate menu lets you do it all onscreen while you're watching.

Additionally, I was curious to see if I was cheating myself out of better video signal transfer, since I had used a standard set of RCA A/V cables for my initial DVD hookup. So I swapped 'em for some dedicated component video cables that our training department was kind enough to lend me. I've got to admit that I saw a noticeable, if not dramatic, improvement in image cleanliness.

Upon the suggestion of Steve Kindig (Crutchfield Advisor's resident TV expert), I also conducted an A/B test of the Pioneer's progressive scan output with the Bravia's built-in digital video processing, simply by switching between the DVD player's progressive and interlaced settings. The difference was obvious, but inconclusive as to which looked better. Letting the Sony TV do the upconverting resulted in a slightly brighter picture whose colors were a little "washed out" compared to the more saturated colors provided by the Pioneer's direct progressive scan output. This little test also made me realize that the Bravia XBR makes DVD still frames (paused images) look like works of art suitable for hanging.

So how did it look?

Color rendering. The first thing my wife (who's not easily impressed by the toys I bring home from the office) said after plopping down on the couch was, "The colors don't look phony." I think that's because the brain isn't having to accept a color that it knows isn't accurate as a substitute for the real color — you know, the mental leap that associates a weird green with a memory of the true green it's supposed to represent. Flesh tones are similarly on the money. And the blacks are much deeper than any I've seen on an LCD. Usually they appear as various shades of grey. Eye color cuts through, making people look so much more like, well, people. Other than those who have met him, who knew that Cream's Jack Bruce has penetrating dark green eyes that match the jade bracelet he sported onstage at Royal Albert Hall?

Brightness. I've always loved the evenness and into-the-corners lighting of flat-panel TVs, but the Bravia packs more luminosity than other LCDs I've seen and gives good plasma screens a run for their money.

Screen-door effect. On the LCD TVs I've brought home in the past, I could usually see the pixels ? especially at close to medium range, call it 4-8 feet. With this television, medium-range viewing is generally fine; close-range can still look slightly "pixelled," but that's only when at an arm's length away.

Dimensionality. Extraordinary depth of field and 3-D accuracy are among the hallmarks of this TV. When peering out over Clapton's shoulder at the Cream audience, the camera revealed clearly etched facial features and clothing detail on fans dozens of rows back. When fed the high-definition signal from NBC's coverage of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, I could see window detail in office buildings a couple of blocks down 34th Street. (And while we're on the miracle of HDTV, did you know that New York parade confetti is multicolored?)

Naturalness of picture. Every LCD monitor I've spent time with has had a high-contrast, hyper-realistic picture that I can only describe as "computery." Works beautifully for an animated film, but doesn't work quite as well for photographic imaging. The Bravia has no such limitations. As much of a salesperson's clich? as it might be to say, viewing a high-def source on this monitor is akin to looking out the window. And when viewing standard-definition sources, the picture again rivals that of a fine tube or plasma television.

Angled viewing. I was also surprised at how well I was able to view the screen from the side ? even at an extreme angle. I made a point of comparing it against other TVs on display at a TV expo here at Crutchfield and it fared well. Not only did it compare favorably against top LCD competition, but its side-to-side viewing stood up to a high-end plasma display as well. (That's noteworthy because plasma TVs generally perform better off-axis than LCDs and most display technologies other than traditional tubes.)

What I watched

Sitting in front of the superbly engineered KDL-V32XBR1, I find myself once again captivated by television. I must be going through a similar learning process as when I was a toddler discovering the magical moving images emanating from my parents' black-and-white Zenith. Whether it's Cream's beautifully shot reunion concert DVD, The National Dog Show in HDTV, or a cheesy local TV commercial, I'm completely drawn in to the detail and dimensionality of the picture.

This TV's color, clarity, brightness, depth of field, and other key attributes are so far advanced beyond the other LCD sets I've seen, I have to marvel that the same basic technology is at work here.

My impressions arise from viewing three main sources: 1) analog cable broadcasts; 2) DVD; and 3) over-the-air HDTV. And the Bravia's high-pixel-count accuracy reveals what a grab bag of sources they truly are. Cable and DVD signals vary dramatically; good-to-great material looks fantastic, while the flaws in fair-to-middlin' broadcasts and recordings tend to stand out.

As for HDTV, all I can say is, believe the hype. Again, I've seen countless demos of the technology over the years; but until I tuned our local NBC affiliate's HD broadcasts in on this TV, I really had no idea. It's so good that I found myself pausing the Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings: Return of the King repeatedly to skip over to the TV remake of The Poseidon Adventure, just because it was an opportunity to take in more of those stunning high-def images. How nuts is that?

Closing thoughts

Since early in this review, you've had a pretty good idea of how I feel about this TV and I should probably pick my hands up off the keyboard and stop gushing about it. Before today, I hadn't considered going through with a flat panel purchase, thanks to a prohibitive performance trade-off with LCD. (And frankly, the very best plasma displays still look a tad more natural than even this best-in-class Sony XBR.) But I can now safely assert that it's possible for LCD to outperform most tube TVs and hang with the best plasma models.

Also, until quite recently, this level of television technology came with an extraordinarily high price tag. While the very fairly priced KDL-V32XBR is still a little rich for my blood, I'm thinking that with just a little more saving up, I might soon be in a position to make this welcome houseguest a permanent resident.

Michael Sokolowski is Car Audio/Video Managing Editor for Crutchfield and pianist/composer for Soko.