When it comes to selling televisions, companies will do whatever they can to make their model stand out from the rest, especially in these tough times. Whether it's putting weird holes in or giving the TV an unmeasurable "one-trillion-to-one" contrast ratio, it's getting pretty desperate out there. Now, there's a new war afoot, and this one's going to — our apologies — Hertz.
We can't end an intro on a bad pun, so we'll elaborate and say that motion compensation is the "next big thing" according to Sony, and they've introduced their next generation of MotionFlow with 200Hz.
Design
Oh dear. This "bezel one-upmanship" has really gone too far, and too long, and there really can be no victor. In a normal room situation, the Sony Z4500 is a rather stoic black, but it has a guilty, terrifying secret. You see, with this latest television, Sony has gone all "festive", and released a finish which looks like the blue glitter-covered hats you wear on New Year's Eve. By day it's mild-mannered, by night it's Mardi Gras! Okay, to be fair, you can only see the glitz when you shine a light directly on it.
Of course, the speaker system demonstrates the company's fondness for "Floating Glass", which in our opinion saw its lowest point on the XBR45 with its flimsy mounting cheapening what was supposed to be a flagship telly. Here on the Z4500 it's not great, but in a horizontal mounting it almost looks classy.
But we've said it before, design is always secondary to performance in our opinion, and, as we'll report shortly, this frog in prince's clothing is actually pretty good.
The remote itself is a familiar design from the company, with large, easy-to-find buttons. Unfortunately, the D-Pad isn't as good as good as on previous remotes with significant lag meaning that you can overstep a selection when going up or down a page.
Features
Get ready kids, it's time for 200Hz! No longer are Sony content with plain old 100Hz — it wants something with more ... everything! Sony's latest iteration of MotionFlow inserts three extra frames into a PAL signal versus 100Hz's one, which — and don't forget to carry the four — equates to 200Hz. But it's a marketing war really, especially as Philips claims to have already created a series of TVs capable of creating up to 30 steps between frames, or 1500Hz!
Complicated picture gizmos aside, the TV keeps its specifications in top order. You get a 46-inch 1080p panel, with an 80,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and a WCG-CCFL backlight designed to give a wider range of colours than ordinary cold-cathode backlights. Pity it's not LED-backlit.
Like the XBR45, the Z4500 also does streaming from a USB port or from your network via Ethernet. Unfortunately it won't do movies, but it will display your pictures and play your MP3s. In addition, the TV includes a DMPort for connecting an iPod dock.
Connectivity is mostly standard fare with three HDMI ports, two component inputs, three composite connections, but where it differs from other TVs is that it has two optical outputs, instead of one, and no S-Video connection at all.
Performance
Like most of the full-HD screens we've seen in the past year, the KLV-46Z4500 is particularly comfortable with 1080p content — it hearts teh Blu-ray discs! We found plenty of good detail and contrast on the troublesomely grainy and dark MI:3, and also found that the TV's 24p mode worked perfectly. Almost zero judder with MotionFlow off, and none at all with it on.
You see, despite our initial cynicism about the new MotionFlow technology, it actually works quite well. At its highest setting motion can be a little too smooth — almost dizzyingly so — with the haloing artefacts we're used to. However, after testing Standard mode on many different types of content — free-to-air TV, DVD and Blu-ray — we found that it was good enough to leave on all the time. This is the most natural motion technology we've yet seen. But that said, we wouldn't buy it just for this. We believe it's up to the television stations and movie studios alike to combat judder — your TV shouldn't have to do it.
The tuner's off-air performance was impressive with bold, colourful images. Initially we found some problems with smearing, but after disabling the set's noise reduction we found that the had problem stopped.
When viewing the television off-axis, we found it performed quite well, with minimal discolouration, although it's not up to the standard as the Panasonic Viera TX-37LZD800A. There are still some rainbow polarising effects on dark scenes and a slight loss of contrast when viewed from the side.
DVD performance was very good, though we have seen better. Colours were natural, black levels high, and detail good, though there was some minor noise discolouration in King Kong in the clouds and the river in a climactic scene.
Performing our suite of synthetic HQV tests we found a familiar pattern among full-HD TVs — 1080p content passed with flying colours, while standard-def picture processing fell down when testing for jaggies.
While the speakers may look better than the ones on the XBR45, they're unfortunately not as good. The XBR's have an extra bass woofer, leaving the Zed with a muddier, less hefty sound. But when compared to other sets they're as good as you can expect from any Sony TV. We were particularly taken with the SRS surround system and its effects during the King Kong DVD in the scene where the planes circle the Empire State Building. Quite impressive.
If you have a home network, you'll find the Bravia is able to stream content quite easily. We used a PC with Windows Media Player 11 and sharing turned on. The Sony recognised the computer straight away and we were able to play MP3s and JPEGs without fuss. However, we found the TV wasn't very successful with music: playing the new David Byrne/Brian Eno collaboration left the TV a little throaty when trying to reproduce the ex-Talking Heads man's vocals. Photos, on the other hand, looked great courtesy of the TVs "Photo" picture mode.
Conclusion
Despite some misgivings about the cosmetics and dubious marketing, this is a very likeable television. It performs well, it's relatively good value for money, and is loaded with features — including the supremely efficient 200Hz mode. If you're umming and ahhing between this and the XBR45, then it's a no-brainer — get this one.
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