Sony Bravia KDL-19S5700

The Sony Bravia KDL-19S5700 is a small, backup, 19-inch TV designed for rooms with limited space.

Hardware, design and build

For the rest, features are rather limited. Resolution is of course 1360x768 pixels: it won’t always be practical for use as a PC monitor then, unless you’re not too demanding.

In spite of its low-end positioning, connectivity does stand up with 2 HDMI sockets, 2 scarts and a USB for viewing photos or listing to MP3s.

The on-screen menus are clear and easy to use. It’s a shame that you can’t go round from the last option to the first directly, without having to go back up the whole menu the other way. Settings are memorised for each source, a rare feature for this size of TV. There’s a small panel on the front on which the time is displayed when the TV is on standby.

Default image quality
This rating isn’t included in the overall rating

As so often the default image is poor with dynamic contrast too marked and colours false. It's also too hard and with artefacts. Thankfully things improve when you switch to Cinema mode, push the backlighting to a max and disactivate all the filters (NR noise reduction, MPEG and so on).

Image quality in cinema mode

Note that even when set to max the backlighting struggles to give a sufficiently bright image. We didn’t manage any higher than 180 cd/m². Black levels don’t get below 0,34 cd/m², and the contrast is a pitiful 533:1. We haven’t seen such a poor score for a long time.

The gamma curve is no better and stagnates around 1.9 instead of 2.2:


This tends to make the image seem flat and washed out. Thankfully the colours make up for this somewhat, though the viewing angles are poor. You quite simply have to place yourself right in front of the television to avoid deterioration from the sides.
The HD image lacks sharpness due to the limitations of the panel which is in HD Ready, but upscaling of SD sources (DVD, digital TV) is good quality.
All in all, we’re pretty much where we got to with the Philips 22PFL3404, in other words a model that we can only recommend for occasional use.

Audio quality

What we have here is a small TV with small speakers, so the sound lacks power and depth. Moreover it’s sketchy and of poor quality overall. This is however pretty much to be expected of a TV in this class.

Energy consumption

On standby we’re at 0.36W, no doubt because of the clock that stays on. When running, energy consumption goes up to 34W, which is a little bit high for a model this size, especially when you think that one of its major faults is a lack of brightness.