Sony Bravia KDL-40NX803

After our look at one of Sony's entry-level televisions, the KDL-40EX503, it's time for the NX803, which uses LED backlighting instead of fluorescent tubes, to pay a visit to our lab.  It's much further up the manufacturer's range, and it isn't missing much.

It has Motionflow 200 Hz to improve the fluidity of moving images, a Bravia Engine 3 chip, a multimedia player and a sensor to help it adjust its brightness according to ambient light levels.

It also has a WiFi card to access Bravia Internet Video services like YouTube and Facebook online, as well as playing video stored on a computer elsewhere on your DLNA network.

Build Quality and Design

As well as all of these extra features, this TV stands out thanks to its use of Sony's new Monolithic design, which involves a solid pane of glass covering the whole surface of the TV.  It might look great, but it also picks up a lot of reflections, as well as greasy fingerprints.  You need to think carefully about where to put to make sure there are no direct light sources.

Sony SU40NX1 Stand

Find the best price

The range of inputs and inputs on the side and at the back is fairly cursory for such a classy television: the main options include four HDMI ports, one Composite video input, SCART, VGA and an optical audio output.  The NX803 series televisions all come with a USB port for connecting an external hard drive or USB key containing videos, music or photos.

When we tried it out, only peripherals formatted using FAT32 worked.  We should point out that we only test DivX files on TVs that can't handle NTFS drives because other video formats struggle with the limits imposed by FAT32.  We found that only SD content worked, as well, so no DivX HD.  All in all, that makes for a fairly mediocre multimedia player, which is a shame.

The remote control is one of the NX803's main weaknesses, and is a lot less impressive than those that we're used to from Sony.  It's easy enough to use, but the blocky shape makes it difficult to hold, and, incredibly, there's no backlighting.

Image Quality: Factory Settings

Unlike the EX503, the default option, 'Standard' mode, is pretty poor on the NX803.  Sony has relied heavily—too heavily perhaps—on various filters to improve the quality of the image.  As a result, the colours look unnatural, the gamma curve is unbalanced and the average colour temperature is much too blue.


Image Quality: Custom Mode

Moving to 'Custom' mode allows you to get much closer to the original quality of the films you'd like to watch, and all of the artificial filters are removed.  The only exception is Motionflow, which you can activate to improve the fluidity of movements if you like.  You can have too much of a good thing though, and if you set it to 'High', the quality is adversely affected, introducing visual artefacts that detract from the otherwise excellent quality HD display.

Upscaling SD sources to HD misses a few details, but is better than on the EX503.  An other source like a DVD player, Blu-ray disc player or PS3 will do the job better. 


Moving from 'Standard' to 'Custom' mode makes a noticeable improvement in this TV's results, without making things perfect.  The gamma curve gets back on track with an average of 2.3.  The contrast ratio we measured was good at 2840:1 with blacks at 0.08 cd/m² but the reproduction of different colours isn't faultless.  We noticed a red tinge that was visible in some shades of grey, and we didn't manage to find any way of correcting this.  The model we tested just couldn't manage to show red correctly at all, which made calibration incredibly difficult.

Audio is often the Achille's heel for a thin television, and the NX803 is no exception.  The sound quality is mediocre, especially for such a high-end product.  The speakers just aren't loud enough, and bass is entirely absent with mid-range treble sounding jumbled.  If you really want to enjoy a film on this TV, then you're going to need to invest in some real Home Cinema speakers.

Energy Consumption

On standby, the the NX803 only requires the bare minimum of 0.1 W, or about 12 p a year on your electricity bill if you leave it like that non-stop.  Our equipment showed that this climbed to 90 W, which is 10% less than the EX503 series televisions which used fluorescent tubes for backlighting in place of the LEDs found here.