Sony Bravia KDL32EX403U 32-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p LCD TV with Freeview HD Review
Fantastic Tv Picture Quility is great SD Freeview for me seems fine, I currently have an Xbox Connectedvia HDMI Colours look great, a WII Via Component again Great.
I cannot comment on the Quality of Blu-ray But HDDVD'S Play and look fantastic.
The Other Feature that this TV has is its Ability to act as a Media Player,Just Connect an External Harddrive and then you can watch Movies, Listen to Music or View Photos. All in all for me this is a Fantastic Telly with Loads of features.
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Customer Reviews
Brilliant! - D. Armstrong - UK
Can't fault it. SD Freeview and Hd work a treat for me. The network functionality of this TV is fantastic, and I would recommend hooking it up to your PC via HDMI to use BBC iPlayer and whatnot, as the built in Bravia Internet Video feature is still a little limited, though developing well.
Very pleased with my purchase - BL - Sutton Surrey
I managed to assemble this product quickly and easily. TV set-up is very straightforward. This is my first flatscreen and HD tv and the difference in picture quality is remarkable. Lovely vivid colours. I use the EPG and Favourites a lot. I think that the product is very good value and would recommend it without hesitation.
Beware...standard definition performance is worse than CRT - John W - Berks, UK
After having held off buying a flat screen TV for a number of years, I was finally lured in by the 'watch the world cup in HD' adverts and Sony trade in deal (from a high street seller, not Amazon). After just over a week of direct comparison to my old CRT TV I have taken the Bravia back and will be happily living with my old CRT for another few years, safe in the knowledge that for what I watch most of the time, CRT is superior.
I have a Virgin cable V+ box that outputs both scart and HDMI, so it was possible to set up both TVs side by side to compare. For standard definition broadcasts, the CRT was far superior...the Bravia had terrible picture processing artefacts around the edges of things; this was particularly noticeable on fast moving sport and in cartoons, where you could see a clear 'bleed' of colours from one area to another. The CRT picture was pin-sharp and much brighter at all times. Somewhat bizarrely, this effect was slightly lessened if you turned the Bravia's picture processing 'off' by selecting the 'Game' or 'Graphics' mode scene selection...I cannot understand why Sony standard picture processing actually makes the picture worse and not better; if you have bought this TV I recommend you change to game or graphics mode for the best picture. In my test the picture went from unacceptably poor in comparison to the CRT, to just about acceptable (but still not as good). If you watch a lot of SD sports, it is still unacceptably poor...maybe this is helped by 100Hz on more expensive models, but I couldn't comment.
HD performance was amazing...really great crystal clear picture. So if most of what you watch is this, then add a star. I would say, however, that when watching the England-Mexico friendly in HD, I found the picture great as long as the camera wasn't moving...on any tracking shots the picture just turned to a blur before settling down when the camera stopped. I personally found this slightly nauseating. My overall impression of watching sports was that I wasn't sufficiently blown away with the HD to compensate for the poor motion performance...I preferred watching in SD CRT.
One of the reasons I bought this particular TV was the networking abilities. This does seem to work really well (although it will cost you another £80 or so if you want to go wireless) and is really intuitive. I connected it up to my network and it was able to pick my DNLA hard drive up very quickly so I was displaying pictures and playing music in no time at all. Beware, however, unlike many other Sony products, this TV doesn't play WMA files (rendering most of my music collection obsolete), and it plays such a limited selection of video formats that I didn't have a single file it would play in my collection. My cameras take videos in .mov and .avi formats and most of my downloaded videos are in divx, so this was a fairly major flaw for me. The internet widgets things were interesting, but the only one most people would use regularly is the BBC iPlayer, which wasn't available for me to try out when I had the set...if it's anything like the freesat implementation this will be a truly amazing feature if you don't have any other way of getting iplayer to your TV. One of the reasons I took this set back is that I realized that you can now buy blu-ray players for around a hundred pounds with all the networking/internet abilities of this TV (including iplayer, etc) and that will play a far greater variety of file formats (some are even wireless). So, for me at least, I would be better off buying a cheaper TV and good blu-ray box than a TV with imperfect DLNA and file playback.
One feature I found of interest to cable customers, is that this TV (and I presume most Sonys that state they can decode DVC signals) can decode digital cable signals without the need for a separate cable box. I can confirm that you can plug the TV directly into cable (you might need to buy a co-ax adapter for a couple of quid) and it will receive all the BBC and ITV channels (including such delights as ITV4+1), C4, FIVE and a few others, but not some other channels you might see on freeview such as E4 and More4. It cannot decode cable HD, so no BBC HD or ITV HD (through cable anyway...haven't tested freeview HD as it's not in my area and I don't have an aerial!). Not too sure about the legality of this, but there is a socket for an adapter to put your cable subscription card in for a more complete service; no idea if Virgin give these out. The picture quality was noticeably poorer than through the Virgin box on some channels, however, implying that the V+ box does do a certain amount of upscaling...I would have thought that this doesn't bode well for those who receive freeview direct to the TV, however.
In summary, don't be put off this TV in particular because of what I have said about the SD performance...I suspect this is actually common to most LCDs and this Sony is no worse than most. If you, as I do, intend to watch mostly SD content for the next couple of years, it's probably not worth retiring the old CRT just yet.
