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.