Sony KDL-46W3000 - 46” Widescreen Bravia 1080P Full HD LCD TV - With Freeview
Sony KDL-46W3000 - 46” Widescreen Bravia 1080P Full HD LCD TV - With Freeview
with Integrated Digital Tuner
Customer Review: 46w3000
Hiya everyone,
I’m lucky enough that my parents decided to shell out for one of these this Christmas. Well, we have been living in the stone age of CRT for the last 10 years!
First thing I’ll talk about is the SD picture. Before it arrived, I knew that the SD picture wouldn’t be beautiful, but when you’re getting a TV like this, you kind of expect it to be, despite knowing that it can’t be. I would just like to warn people now that the SD picture is fairly imprecise. I would say that it is fairly similar, or even worse than the picture I used to get on our old CRT. It is susceptible to motion blur, especially when the picture is very bright or vivid. I’ve been fiddling about with the settings, and the more soft and dark I make the picture, the less motion blur there is. I don’t think we’re going to get Sky HD, so we’re living with a compromise between slight motion blur and a dark picture for the moment, with Sky +.
A couple of tips for people using it with an SD picture.
1) Immediately go to the settings menu and turn the picture type from “Vivid” to “Standard” or “Cinema”. Vivid looks horrible with an SD picture, so do this before you start to get too worried.
2)For me, the motion blur seemed to burn out a little with time, so give it a little time
However, I’ve used a couple of HDMI inputs with this, and this is what this TV is about. Really, when you’re buying a TV like this, you should factor in getting a couple of HD inputs. An HD-DVD or Blu-ray player will look STUNNING with this TV.
The HDMI inputs I used were
1)My XBOX 360. The picture on PGR4 was so, so good. The intro video was just awesome. I was so impressed by the picture. However, on Halo 3, there was a bit of motion blur. I’m going to fiddle about a bit and hopefully I can eliminate this. The TV is not 100hz, which is the only let-down on the Technology front. But at this price, you should be getting it. This may be part of the reason for the motion blur.
2)A Sony DVD upscaler, which we got with the TV. Despite the fact that it’s upscaling ordinary 420p DVDs, the picture is brilliant. That quality surprised me, I wasn’t expecting it. I watched Black Hawk Down. Colour is very rich and when using this on an HDMI input, there is NO motion blur. Obviously not quite the quality you’d get from a proper HD-DVD player, but very good. I’d recommend one of those upscalers if you’re going to get this. I watched a DVD on our old player, and I think the upscaler improves the picture by about 5 times, by eliminating Motion Blur, and delivering a picture that is about 4 times crisper.
Basically, what I’d say about this TV is that you should not get it if you don’t have any HDMI inputs, and are not going to get any. You’ll just be disappointed with the SD picture. However if you’ve got kit capable of being HDMI inputs, then it’s great. I mean really, really great. Stunning. The difference between an SD picture and an HD picture on it is huge. That’s because the TV is geared towards delivering you an excellent HD picture. There’s no point in having all this expensive HD technology in the TV if you’re not going to use any of it, and are thinking of sticking with the old SD kit for a while. I’m saying this seemed to be the view of my parents. Apart from the DVD upscaler, they don’t want to get any HD inputs. I might get one of those HD-DVD player add-ons for my 360, because I now realise that the TV is for HD, so use it for HD! Not to do so just makes the whole purchase pointless.
So when you buy this, factor in how much the HD-DVD player/Sky HD etc is going to cost.
All of this was written from my perspective, i.e moving from a 26″ CRT to this. I can’t really compare between the different HD LCD models, as I havn’t really experienced this TVs competitors. I’m just talking about what you gain/don’t gain from making that move.
I gave this 5 stars because I’ve seen what this TV can do with an HD input and it’s awesome. In the Sony shop, I saw this hooked up to a Blu-ray player (well, it would be blu-ray in a Sony shop wouldn’t it), and WOW. So that’s why it gets 5 stars. I almost knocked off a star for the SD picture and the lack of 100hz. The lack of 100hz is bad at this price. But the SD picture is bad on all these TVs from what I’ve seen, so it would be silly to knock off a star for that.
And the TV does have lots of good technology in it. It’s got 24P. That’s cool. When films are shot, 24 frames are taken every second. However, in Britain, the TVs normally output at 25 frames every second. So the film is sped up by 4%. 24P gets the film back to its original fps, so you see it how the director intended to see it. So your favorite film of all time is now 4% longer. How’s that for a service. Donnie Darko is 4% longer, that justifies the price in itself. It’s also obviously 1080P, the latest HD format to come out, so it’s up to date.
Oh and lastly, one thing I forgot to mention is that the first thing I noticed with this TV was the sound quality! You never really think of sound quality as being important when you’re watching TV, but it’s so crisp. I’m hearing things I never heard before. And it’s got this virtual surround sound system which kind of works. For me there is now NO reason to get a seperate surround sound system.
So to sum up, the pros and cons that I noticed
Pros
Awesome Sound Quality
Stunning HD picture when used with HD inputs
Good technology in there, e.g 24p
Quite future proof, with 1080P and 3 HDMI sockets
Stylish with brushed Aluminium frame
Large size
Lots of Adjustment in the settings menu
Cons
SD picture no better than on old CRTs
Lack of 100hz technology
Motion Blur with SD picture and on some HD pictures (XBOX 360 for me)
Yeh think that’s about it
SDS
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This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:01 am and is filed under Sony Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.