Sony Bravia KDL-40EX713

The new Bravia KDL-40EX713 is Sony's replacement for the EX703, which relied on a display panel made by Sharp.  The newcomer, though, has a panel made by Samsung-Sony. 

The only other visible change is the thinner frame on the 713, with the edges slimmed down to make for a less imposing unit.  The rest of the specs are the same, including Edge LED, Bravia Engine 3 filters, 100 Hz, four HDMI 1.3 inputs and a pair of SCARTs ...

Build Quality and Design

As well as having its impressive feature list, the EX713 also sports a refined, well-finished design.  Anybody who hates the idea of having a sheet of glass in between them and the screen will be glad to hear that the EX713 doesn't use Sony's famous Monolithic design.  That makes it less glossy than some of the Japanese manufacturer's other recent TVs, though we still spotted a few reflections.  It's best off somewhere out of the way of direct light sources.

Like most modern TVs, the EX713 has a wide variety of inputs.  Around the outside and at the back, component, composite and SCART sockets are jointed by VGA, four HDMI ports and the TV tuner.  There's also a pair of 2 x 10 W speakers, an optical audio out and a headphone jack.  For accessing your media, the EX713 has a USB port where you can connect a hard drive or flash memory stick with films, music or photos.

Sony has updated the media player software since the last time we tested it, and it can now read drives formatted using NTFS!  Nothing else has changed, unfortunately, and while it can play AVI and SD DivX video, that's it: no other formats are supported.


As with most of Sony's competitors, the remote control is a real weak spot.  It's nothing like what we're used to from the brand, and although it's easy to know which button to press, the blocky shape makes it hard to use.  Bizarrely, the buttons don't have backlighting.

We had no problems connecting the TV to a PC, but measured an input lag of 56 ms, which gamers will find problematic.  For anybody else, though, this figure is unimportant.

Finally, we couldn't finish this section without talking about the XrossMediaBar menus inherited from the PS3 by Sony's TVs, which is attractive and easy-to-use.  All of the usual settings are available, and users have a lot of room for manoeuvre: you can even set the colour temperature precisely at different brightness levels.

Responsiveness: 8 ms

We recently started using a new test for responsiveness in our lab.  We now time how long it takes for the previous frame to disappear completely from view, and use foregrounds and backgrounds of several different colours.  The longer it takes, the more subject the screen will be to ghosting, which will leave fast-moving objects looking blurry.

The EX713's display had an average response time of 8 ms, compared to 15 ms on the Samsung C630 (remember, the lower this figure, the better).  Sony's new TV takes 7 ms to clear one frame with a light background and 9 ms if the background is dark.  To put that another way, that's 8 ms when a fast-moving object will look as if it's in two places at once.

Image Quality: Factory Settings

By default, the EX713 is in Standard mode, and as with most other TVs, the results are far from perfect.  The colours are disappointingly unnatural, and the deltaE climbs to 6.8 because of a very strong blue tinge.


Image Quality: Custom Mode

Once you switch to Custom mode, all of the automatic filters are deactivated, apart from Motionflow 100 Hz, which works at the same level as it does in Standard mode.  This removes the jerkiness caused by the 24 fps framerate used by films on Blu-ray discs and DVDs, but without introducing artificial artefacts.  On the other hand, not everybody enjoys this effect, and the 'making-of' look can put some people off.  It's up to you to decide whether you like it.


Switching to Custom mode allows the EX713 to produce a much more natural image and you don't need to adjust any of the other settings yourself.  Our tests showed it had an excellent deltaE of 2.4, and the only thing we envisage changing is the level of the backlighting according to the light levels in the room where you're watching TV.


We chose to set the backlighting to 5, where white levels are around 200 cd/m², and this gave excellent contrast.  We measured black levels of just 0.058 cd/m², which means the contrast ratio is around 3500:1, which is incredible!

Upscaling SD content loses a little bit of detail, which is perfectly standard for TVs, and turning up the sharpness by a notch sorts some of the problems out, albeit artificially.  Set to 4, we found things a lot clearer.  Then again, if you're watching native HD content, then you can forget all about that: the display is as perfect as you'd expect without the need for any artificial filters.

Sound Quality

The speakers on the EX713 are good enough to watch the nightly news or other day-to-day viewing, but you'd do better to invest in a real set of Home Cinema speakers or a sound bar if you want to enjoy your favourite film.

Energy Consumption

The EX713 only requires the bare minimum while on standby (under 0.1 W), and when we switched our 40'' test model on, consumption was just 80 W, which is impressively low.