Sony Bravia V-Series KDL-40V2500 40-Inch 1080p LCD HDTV by Sony
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List Price: Category: Home Theater See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Sony Bravia V-Series KDL-40V2500 40-Inch 1080p LCD HDTV
Digital camera Review: Best TV I owned
Summary: 5 Stars
This TV works well with my FIOS HD. Very clear picture. Haven't seen the black round shadows yet (which some owners have commented-on) during dark scenes. Great for watching football and basketball games - it's like you're in the stadium.Some of the non-HD shows are grainy, but mostly, even the standard digital channels are clear. The clarity of the nature shows are stunning. Makes you really appreciate the beauty and majesty of God's creation. This is like transitioning from the old B/W TV into color TV.Digital camera Review: Best bang for your buck !
Summary: 5 Stars
Pros:
* Full HD (1080p) in 40" (Not too many 40" models support full HD)
* Not too pricey for a Sony
* Dual HDMI Ports
* Good Quality picture (Plasma beater!)
Cons:
* Made in Mexico
* Looks may not be that appealing
* Only available online
* Built-in tuner doesn't pick local HD channels
Digital camera Review: Best picture I've ever seen
Summary: 5 Stars
Perfect picture right out of the box. 1080 HD from Cox Cable is astounding. I couldn't be happier with this product.Digital camera Review: Best set I could find, except for the clouding
Summary: 3 Stars
First, the pros: this set looks amazing. I watched it at several stores next to several different TVs and always thought it did the best with whatever signal was fed to it, even SD. When I got it home it did a great job with every signal I fed it. I was afraid SD would look worse than our old CRT TV, but the SD from our DirecTV box looked fine, I never missed the old TV for a minute. I was watching some black and white shows and it needed some adjustment there, but everything else looked quite nice. This is a big selling point for me -- on just about every LCD you'll see complaints about SD quality -- this is mostly because SD is so low quality to start with that there just isn't a lot that an HDTV can do about it, but this Sony does the best of any set I've seen. DVDs (from a rather old player and component cables) looked amazing. And I don't need to tell you what 720p and 1080p (from my PC) looked like.
Now the cons. First, officially Sony doesn't support connecting a PC to the HDMI inputs (which makes one question Sony's basic understanding of the technologies they are using in their products). People can get it to work most of the time, but some cards/drivers won't work with it, and a lot of people give up and use the vga (at a lower resolution) which is just a crime -- it's an LCD, it should be fed a digital signal! With my Mac Mini (which serves as part of our entertainment system) the TV claimed it could only accept 1080i instead of 1080p. I got a utility that allowed me to try and use whatever mode I want, and that way was able to get it to display in 1080p, and once I got that working it looked very nice. Similarly the vga in will show an error on the screen if you try to run it at 1920x1080, it only officially supports much lower resolutions. (I didn't personally try to get the VGA input to work, I've heard mixed reports on other people's luck.) So basically however you hook it up, the TV claims to your computer that it's can't run at full resolution, and it's up to you to manually tweak your video settings to try and get it to work. This is an unnecessary annoyance, but presumably if you can get it to work with your card, once you get it to work you won't have to think about it again.
Next, I had not even heard of the clouding issue when I bought this set, but as soon as I turned ours on I thought it was the most uneven backlighting I had ever seen on any LCD of any kind. I've used LCD computer monitors for several years, recently often in dark rooms with black backgrounds, so I know what to expect -- no LCD is perfect on this count, but this was way out of bounds. I hoped maybe it had something to do with the dynamic contrast and would only show up on blank inputs, but the clouds were there in every dark scene, and were even visible and distracting the next morning when the room was sunlit. So I went searching for what I could find about that problem (hoping there was some adjustment or fix) and found lots . . . it seems to be the most common problem with these TVs. From what I found I think mine was worse than most -- if it had been a little better I probably could have ignored it. But I decided to return the TV. We explained the problem and the local retailer let us exchange it for another one, but check that TV before we took it home, and it appeared to have the same problem (visible even in a well lit store). So we just got a refund instead -- it was about a week before we were going on a trip, and I just wanted to put off dealing with it any more until after we got home.
Finally, a minor issue: the remote is not great, and switching between inputs is not trivial, it requires navigating menus every time. It's the first TV I've ever encountered that didn't have a dedicated button on the remote to change between inputs, and it really makes no sense on a TV with so many inputs!
Overall, I still think it's a great TV, clouds aside the picture is just amazing. I'm just hoping to find one without the cloud issue -- I know they exist, other people report being able to find a cloud free one although it sometimes takes a few tries, I have no way of guessing what fraction of the TVs have the problem, probably not that many or for most it's minor enough that you will never notice. I've gone back to look at the other TVs I was considering, and still came to the same conclusion -- most of the time this one just looks best!
Digital camera Review: Best up grade ever...
Summary: 5 Stars
Before this purcjas, I had a 29" CRT, that had with us roughly 10 years. Even though we are not fully exploiting the full potential of the 1080p, watching regular DVD's and regular programming has been a major upgrade. You cannot buy better quality, even paying 1-2K more dollars.