Amazing picture quality

I have had the Sony SXRD 50 inch tv for five months now and I am very pleased with my choice of this TV. I believe it offers the most gorgeous HD picture you can buy today. I would not call myself a video expert, but as a graphic designer who works all day on a razor-sharp 23 inch LCD HD display, my eyes will pick up any noise, fuzziness and pixel artifacts. I wanted a tv with the absolute sharpest and clearest HD image. The SXRD delivers it. I have been shopping tvs for a few months and have the luxury of at least 6 major appliance and tv stores within 10 minutes of my house, so I have had plenty of opportunity to look at all the major players out there.

After looking at all the 50 inch projection and plasmas out right now, I had narrowed my choice to 2 for what I thought was the best picture quality, regardless of technology, including sharpness, color accuracy, variety of inputs and good deep blacks with detail. Many plasmas have good gutsy blacks, but some, like the Samsung seem to lose detail in the shadow areas. The Sony SXRD and the Panasonic TH-50PX50U seemed to offer the best combination of sharpness and rich blacks while holding onto the detail. It came down to the Panasonic selling for $3,999 and the Sony SXRD which I could buy for just under $3,000. To my eye, although the Panasonic displayed a beautiful picture, the Sony just looked more detailed as well as being a smoother, more natural image. It looks like a moving photograph. I was worried about the viewing angle on the Sony projection vs plasma which is uniformly bright from nearly any angle, but after putting the set in place, which is in the corner of a brightly lit room, the brightness from various angles does not seem diminished. The Sony's factory settings are far too bright for evening viewing, but the advanced iris makes changing the overall brightness easy. During the day, when a bright image is desirable, the iris can be opened up for a brighter picture.

Also, the "vivid" setting, which is the default looks too saturated. The "pro" setting looks natural yet still very vibrant. Another consideration for me was the reflective glass of a plasma vs the matte screen on the Sony. The regular glass on a plasma gives the picture the appearance of more depth, while the matte screen tends to look grey in the daylight. While viewing though, the matte screen absorbs reflections making it very easy on the eye. At night, the reflections dissapear completely. In my case, with a wall of windows in our family room, I opted for the matte glass of the Sony.

DVDs input from a progressive scan dvd player look beautiful and nearly HD. HD feeds on the big networks, such as major golf tournaments, baseball games, concerts HD movie channels are all spectacular. You get spoiled real quickly. I purchased Comcast Cable's HD package for a few dollars a month and they provide about a dozen channels in HD along with the major networks. Standard TV channels are acceptable, but you will be looking for your shows on the HD channels!

Except for the remote, which I don't use anyway since I have the Comcast box, this TV is just flat out gorgeous.