New TV! SONY 52″ XBR4 LCD Flat Panel
September 16, 2007 by Shree Khare
Our old TV was finally on its last leg so I went out to Best Buy and bought a new 52″ Sony LCD XBR4 TV last weekend. I spent all day Saturday installing the bracket and mounting it above our fireplace. It took a lot of effort to rewire all of the cables behind the fireplace.
It has full 1080P HD compatibility. We have DirecTV and are waiting for their new satellite to come online at the end of September so we can get more HD channels. Right now their service is limited to about 8 HD channels that we watch and their best signal is 1080i. The rest come in low def.
My only complaint with the TV is that the scrolling ticker on CNBC sometimes does not scroll smoothly. I tried adjusting their new Motionflow setting to no avail (is this a marketing gimmick or what!). I tried changing the contrast and the sharpness but it too does not seem to help much - quite a shame for a $4k TV.
ESPN’s scrolling and other fast action sports look awesome so I wonder if it is a problem with CNBC that the TV magnifies? I have tried setting the picture on both wide screen and with the color bars with no success. The football, tennis and golf I have seen on HD are all outstanding in terms of color, clarity and realism. One can see the sweat beads on the athletes skin!
A major improvement on this TV is that we can watch with the blinds open and the anti-glare coating on the panel keeps the picture from getting washed out. There are no clouds on black pictures as on our smaller Sony LCD.
This TV replaced our 10 year old SONY 36″ XBR tube that weighed 200 pounds - the technology sure has improved! After watching in Hi-Def, you can see what all the fuss is about!
