In the past, I have always had good luck with Sony TV's, and during the 1990's I had a Sony 32" Trinitron that provided a picture and sound that was superb in every respect, the state of the art for the time. It was with some disappointment, therefore, that I found that the TV industry's venture into the Brave New World of HD has saddled an entire generation of TV viewers with substandard sets that are in many respects far worse than the non-HD sets they have replaced. The Sony Bravia series is, unfortunately, no exception to this rule.
The Sony Bravia KDL-40V5100 is best when viewing live sports events. If you like to watch golf, basketball and football, and little else, this is the TV for you. Unfortunately, the Bravia does not do as well in other situations. Here are some of the flaws I have noticed:
(1) Picture problems. The only settings that produce an acceptable picture are in the Vivid range. Turning off the automatic contrast enhancer helps, but the picture quality in most cases is still unacceptable. At its best, the picture is sharp and crisp, giving great definition, but even on many HD channels there is considerable degradation of picture quality, with feathering and blurring quite noticeable.
The less said about non-HD channels the better. The picture performance in non-HD is abysmal, with dark scenes turning black and light scenes whiting out.
Similarly, no matter what the player, non-HD DVDs upconvert poorly. Using an ordinary non-HD TV to play DVDs is a far better choice, and an important one if, like me, you have a large collection of these now obsolete items.
Moreover, for anyone who has a multi-system non-HD TV set (i.e., one that can play PAL and SECAM in addition to the inferior NTSC format used in the USA), the picture quality for DVDs is so much better than on the Sony Bravia that there is really no comparison.
In addition, of course, the Sony Bravia series has significant fading problems when viewed from the side, and it is grossly inferior in this respect to Plasma and normal non-HD TV sets.
(2) Screen. The high gloss screen and plastic borders are totally unsuited to TV viewing. A Matte screen and non-glare borders would provide far more comfortable viewing in all but a darkened theater situation. Any light source reflects off the screen, and is worse than for a regular non-HD TV. In this respect, Plasma TVs are vastly superior.
(3) Sound. The sound is OK most of the time, but there are periodic and inexplicable dropouts, as well as hissing and popping, problems that are not helped by changing the connections to HDMI. There is something fundamentally wrong with the sound system on the Sony 40V5100, and Sony better fix it fast if they don't want a class-action lawsuit. Sound levels also vary markedly from channel to channel for reasons that are not immediately apparent.
(4) Controls. The remote control is awkward to operate, with switching from TV to DVD to PC taking up to 15 seconds. Similarly, it takes about 15 seconds for the TV to turn on, once you have pressed the "on" button for a sufficiently long time to persuade the little green "power on" light to finally put in an appearance. When changing channels, the lengthy handshake procedure results in a two-second delay from HD to HD, and five seconds from HD to non-HD, and often a green screen before the next channel displays. Once again, why am I supposed to view this as an improvement over a regular non-HD TV, where channel changing is virtually instantaneous?
In sum, the Sony Bravia series is a big disappointment. Its one indisputable advantage is that, in comparison to Plasmas and non-HD TVs, it is very light, so when the time comes to throw it away, it won't present a heavy lifting problem. I still have a couple of serviceable Sony WEGA non-HD TV's. They aren't as good as the old Trinitrons from the 1990's, but at least they are tolerable. I'm going to see how long I can keep them going. The Sony Bravia is going too, right out the door.
I have a request for anyone reading this review: please let me know when someone finally produces a decent HDTV. As far as I can tell, no one has accomplished this feat quite yet.
Get more detail about Sony BRAVIA V-Series KDL-40V5100 40-Inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV.
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