Decided to upgrade my TV earlier this month my choice went to this beautiful smart TV from Sony. The screen size is 32″ with full HD 1920×1080 resolution. It has integrated WiFi and TV recording so we can pause live TV and seamlessly resume from automatic recording. For this TV recording to work, we need to put a USB storage device of 32 GB or more (could be USB thumb drive or USB external HDD).
When I first opened the box, I was a little bit confused about building the table top stand. There are many small parts and I wasn’t sure how to put them together. There’s not much of instruction in their guide book. After a little bit of experiments, I found one piece of paper with setting up instruction attached to the plastic protecting the TV screen. Apparently the table top stand can be used for either… table top or wall mount. All the parts that I found, some of them are used for table top, some others are for wall mount.
Once I can turn it on, setting up this TV was very easy. Sony has prepared some dialogs for us to follow, and our new TV is being set up without too much hassle. Australia already uses digital broadcast, so I could not test the analog signal quality.
Since this smart TV has built-in WiFi, I directly use it to connect to my home network (with Internet connection) and download the latest firmware from Sony. Next I tried to play around with the menu. Takes a little time to get used to (my previous TV was not a smart TV), but it’s nothing too difficult.
The picture quality is superb ! I got brilliant pictures from my free-to-air TV channels and couldn’t be happier. The screen still looks a bit glossy, but it’s significantly less reflective than my previous Samsung TV. The default setting for color, brightness etc need a little tweaking, but it was very easy to adjust those settings to produce picture quality of my liking. The sound quality was decent, but I only tested it for few minutes before plugging in my Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers.
I was excited with the on-screen TV guide where I can see what’s in every channel before opening it. Even more useful, I can set up a reminder to a particular show in a particular channel. On the right date and time, the TV will automatically open that channel so we won’t miss our favorite show. I’m not sure if other smart TV has this feature or not, but since my previous TV couldn’t do this, I am super happy.
Next, I tried using the built-in browser to browse some websites. It’s doable, but typing URL is a pain and selecting links to open is even more tedious. To make it worse, the browser crashes frequently, even after opening less than 5 pages. So I guess web browsing from a TV is still not something we would do in a daily basis.
Sony Entertainment Network is available for various types of apps and media. I browse around and some of those apps do look interesting. Didn’t actually try anything other than YouTube though.
The built-in media player automatically detects my Western Digital NAS in home network and displays some media I have stored there. Playing music is easy. Playing movies are another story. It can only play some of my collection. Some movies are played without any sound, some others are played without the picture (just the sound). Subtitle works when it’s integrated inside the single video file. External subtitles in separate files doesn’t work at all.
Next I connect my Apple TV and use it to watch some movie from streaming. Really good picture quality. Even better result is achieved with my dedicated media player (Mede8er MED500X) to play 1080p movies.
Overall, it’s a really great TV that does its main function perfectly: watching TV and watching movie. Granted the built-in media player is not working as expected, but I have my external media player to make up for that. In the end, I still get great watching experience.
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