Bravo Bravia !
Wow, just wow. It's been a few weeks now and I'm still excited to turn it on and have a play, Sony makes great TV's and this ones at a great price too.
Design - minimalist, premium, beautiful. The thin bezel is the key, the screen looks edge to edge, a major and noticeable improvement over my previous 5 year old Bravia. What I also like is the very low key branding/logo on the bezel, thankyou Sony, it's understated and classy.
Even the stand legs are lovely, simple solid pieces of machined brilliance. Whats great is that they give you two mounting points edge to edge or closer to the middle if you can't fit it like in my case.
The picture doesn't show it but you also get a small camera mounted on the top/middle if you fancy a bit of Skyping with friends, a nice touch that I didn't expect.
When viewing it from the side you can see that it's a lovely thin display and would look great mounted on a wall or on display atop a TV cabinet.
Two controls come with the Bravia, the standard Sony control that we've had for years, albeit with a bit of a face lift and buttons specific to this TV's features.
The second is something I haven't seen before. It's smaller and is effectively a touch pad with a few buttons on top. Takes a little getting used to but is a quick way to scroll through features, shows and apps. Both are easy to use and make sense after a little bit of practice.
Connections - located to the back and left of the display the display connections are nice and discrete all laid out as you'd expect. It's great to see there's plenty of USB and HDMI ports to connect all you devices plus some spares. Everything's spaced nicely so no complaints here.
Just discovered this the other day, but if you connect a HDD to the second USB port, you have a dedicated video recorder, which also allows to you pause live TV. Just select record in the TV guide and you'll never miss you favorite show again.
Wifi - it's a smart TV so is at home on the internet. Will connect to both 2.4ghz and 5ghz frequencies. Would like to see the processor a little quicker as it can lag occasionally, but overall is more than capable of performing all your web based tasks with relative ease.
Menu - No issues here. If you can navigate a mobile phone you can navigate the Bravia's menu. The home menu screen has it all laid out across the top, allowing navigation to the TV, Apps, Internet, Settings and even a recording device if connected.
Display quality - this is why you buy a Bravia,for the clear and beautiful display. Colour recreation in vivid and not fake looking like you get with some TV's. Out of the box it's ready to go, but if you want to tweak things it's an easy process as well. There's different viewing modes whether is Cinema, Sport, Gaming etc and all are pretty much spot on for each experience.
3D viewing is probably the only let down. The passive glasses (x2) are comfortable and light to wear, but don't really do it for me. Maybe it's the 3D engine but either way, it's far more enjoyable watching in 2d than 3d.
Standard Definition : is passable. If you're going up a TV size you notice that SD can look average but what can you do, just hope the stations start playing more HD I guess.
High Definition : Looks great. And with the 4K upscaling engine you can really notice some amazing clarity, especially when playing Blueray movies, better than going to a Cinema.
4k (Ultra HD) : I'm yet to watch a 4k movie, but the TV does have a 4k demo that you can watch and it's spectacular, the clarity is hard to describe but something you want more of.
In summary, this TV is great in almost every way, and for the price you can't go wrong. I highly recommend and am so happy about my purchase even weeks later. Buying a 4k TV is an investment in future technology. Slowly 4k content is becoming more and more available and will be the standard someday soon, this TV covers all bases with ease.
