Sony KLV 32V550A

Walk into any mega retail showroom, chances are you will spot this Sony kept smugly separate from the lot, with its own Blu-ray system attached to it, playing back a trailer of maybe Kung Fu Panda. We like. It is a new V series model, and it’s a part of a new breed of soldiers, the Full HD 32-inch LCD TVs, which was not available until last year. In our 32 inch LCD shootout, we covered the Samsung and Philips Full HD ones of this caliber. Today this Sony is luckily getting individual treatment, not that we are biased, it’s just walked in fashionably late. So let’s see what the Sony KLV 32V550A has to offer.

Design and Features
The V series of Sony has unique bottom panels; this one too has the speaker grille clinging on to the bottom edge, under a plastic strip, transparent in the middle. This strip has touch sensitive buttons on it, etched in white. The rest of the bezel is gloss black, solid rectangular affair, no fancy contours or grooves.

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The back panel is bare with a small i/o window at the left corner, and another connection strip on the left side panel. Overall we have a healthy buffet of connectors: 4 HDMIs, 2 component, 3 composite in, one headphone out and last but not least a USB 2.0 slot. This TV has the latest Bravia Engine 3 doing the video processing, and also comes with Sony’s acclaimed XMB, or the Cross media bar user interface like they have in the PS3. Thus now, to change brightness we have to press 4 buttons instead of one, but wait a sec, we love the PS3, thus the XMB is more than welcome.

There are other nice features like Ambient Light Sensor, which is basically an auto set up mode which detects the light in your room, then sets the brightness of your TV, thus saving your eyes and wallet from strain. All the old goodies are still there like 24p True cinema, which is for watching Blu-ray discs at the correct 24 Hz frame rate, and Live color, which enhances colors.

As for rated specs the main USP is still the Full HD panel, a 1920 x 1080 resolution makes up this LCD. The Brightness and contrast ratings are not given. This model does not have 100 Hz Motionflow feature, that one is for the higher W series 32 incher.

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Performance
The first we noticed about the TV was its very good detail - this was out of the box without even going to the menu. Sailing in its native Full HD, we first ran our software tests, for checking grayscale and extreme white/ black levels. This TV does have a healthy brightness, and hardly any clipping and blooming at high whites. This is a good point.

Blacks, are decent for LCD standards, as in it doesn’t look like a faded T shirt at medium backlight and 50% brightness. It’s not deep and spectacular though. Speaking of luminance curve, or simply speaking, in the purity of black to white, we saw a bit of reddish saturation at higher whites. This will not make the image look bad, just that some people need accuracy.

Colors are vibrant , but clearly a bit amped on the red channel. This we could gauge in our RGB plugs pattern, where high intensity red bars were merging together. Thus the overall image has a warm saturated feel to it, which does not look bad really, just intense skin tones and the like. It works for drama cinema, where there are a lot of natural human and indoor shots.

Motion and detail are very good, just the sharpness setting should not be raised above midpoint (15) Then haloing starts occurring. We watched Valkyrie Blu-ray, and played Killzone (on PS3). The details in both different types of video were very impressive - sharp edges with hardly any blur, even in the game.

Conclusion
The Sony KLV-32V550A LCD TV is for Rs. 49,900 MRP, which is still expensive compared to other brands on the market. It can be availed for as less as Rs. 46,900 MOP, so then it scores more in the value for money category. The image is very much above average, with decent contrast and better than decent details and motion. Blacks are not the best, nor are the colors bang on accurate, but still this TV deserves to be an option for you.