Tests started with a digital television signal and DVD reading.  The image is still slightly vulnerable to aliasing, but not excessively so. Step back 6 to 8 feet (either way a minimum for a screen of this size) in order that scaling defects disappear.  The Bravia Engine EX then shows its fine potential despite slightly noticeable and random noise. This is nevertheless the best result obtained with a Full HD panel.

We continued with our standard HD DVDs and the result was cut and dry. The image was outright exempt from defects (even from 6 feet) and curves were very finely rendered.  We haven’t seen an image as precise as this on a Full HD LCD and the depth was even more impressive than that which we saw on the Sharp LC46XD1E.  This screen is definitely destined for the more demanding user. Our test model wasn’t subject to banding or clouding.  Right after startup, corners were a bit too bright, but like with the KDL46W2000 after a few hours this phenomenon disappears. This precision was also aided by a superior color space (gamut), assuring nuances not found on classic LCDs and which normally are subject to solarization in difficult areas. For example, this TV displays clean sunsets similar to a plasma TV when other LCDs show uniform blocks of color instead of the many gradations of red.

In PC mode as well, this is the dream screen. The image is always perfectly sharp and web pages are easily read. In addition, Sony integrates an "All Pixels" mode, which allows displaying the Windows desktop completely and without cutting the edges.

Its major defect is its colors, like on all Bravias.  They are truly unbalanced with our sensor showing dominance in red, except on the darkest colors, and inversely in the lightest colors they lean towards blue. In short, color fidelity is poor. These are settings which are meant to lively up skin tones and blues particularly don’t do justice to movie rendering. Our colorimeter actually reported an average difference of 11.5 for the standard 18 color patches when this figure should be ideally less than 3. For comparison, the LG 32LB2R is only at 2.1 showing that true colors are indeed possible on LCD screens. Conclusion : you will have to go into the television’s OSD menu to salvage this Sony’s rendering in this domain.

In the OSD menu, we find a variety of very impressive options including a white balance adjustment which only exists on the X2000 line.  First of all, by going into expert mode we can lower the color temperature to 6700°K.   Furthermore, we can adjust to almost the same recommended parameters of the KDL46W2000 with a backlighting value of 10 (activating the light sensor), a contrast of 55, brightness of 60, colors at 48 in verifying that color temperature is on "Warm 2". 

For advanced settings, everything was set to "No", natural color to "medium", colorimetric space to "widened", and white balance set to "-1" for gains in green and blue. Contrary to Toshiba LCDs, the gain on each color channel does indeed correct the characteristic we are trying to change (see our test of the 32C3030DG). After going through all of these steps, color temperature is reduced to a much more pleasant 6503°K (on our test model) and the average difference in base colors was only 4.2.  The improvement was obvious and here are the grays before and after these adjustments: