Yep, it's a Sony
Pros:
Excellent color and blacks. Very customizable picture and sound. Sony quality and design. Lightweight.
Cons:
Price.
The Bottom Line:
Sony quality in a HDTV LCD 1080p TV. Supports 1080p both with HDMI(DVI) and RGB.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I've tried a variety of LCD TV's: Sharp Aquos 37", Sony 32", Olevia 37" and now the Sony KDL-40V2500. This is my first 1080p TV.
LOOKS
Looks are important. Sony is HOT. Just look at a lesser name brand (Olevia, Westinghouse or Sceptre) and compare it a Sony. Clearly some of that $$$ went into the design. The LCD is matte dark grey (almost light black) with bottom mounted speakers. The edge is fairly thin with the top being about 1" and sides at 1.5". There isn't any obnoxiously large logos or words (unless you consider the SONY smacked in the middle). I've seen some other brands with humongous "1080p" labels or super bright LEDs that need to be taped up. Sony keeps it clean and somehow manages to make it look worth the cost.
The Sony 40v2500 weighs around 55lbs with stand. Compare this to the latest Sharp 42" LCD TV at 77 lbs!
PERFORMANCE
Excellent colors and blacks are better than most LCD TV's I've seen. Sony has a feature to automatically adjust the screen's backlight based on ambient lighting. This works well to optimize the contrast and the picture. No fast image blurring is noticable. SDTV and HDTV both look good. 1080i looks much better on this TV (1080p) than TV's that only support 720p.
Playstation 3 games and blueray movies look incredible.
The TV's picture adjustments include the standard hue, color, brightness, contrast, backlight, sharpness, noise reduction level. Some of the advanced settings include mpeg noise reduction, black correction.
The speakers sound pretty good, but nothing special. The dynamic setting works the best as well as using Sony's BBE sound enhancement. One of the more useful settings is the one that normalizes the volume across all channels.
I think Sony skimped on the remote. It's large and ugly and doesn't glow in the dark. Functionally, it's good. I especially like the ability to label channels and remove inputs from being listed and switched to. Also, the favorites function is implemented pretty well: hit the middle button and a list of favorites displays which is easily selected by scrolling up/down and hitting the middle button again.
The one major flaw is the tv guide and information implementation for HDTV. I have comcast and the description of each channel does not showup. The title works, but it would be nice to see the description. This seems to be a flaw with comcast and the current generation of sony lcd tvs.
INPUTS/OUTPUTS:
2 HDMI ports (support DVI-HDMI @ 1080p).
One VGA port that supports 1080p.
Headphone jack (not very common on LCD HDTV's)
Digital Optical Audio Out
Multitude of other inputs and outputs...
