Excellent value, great for DVDs, just one major flaw
Written: Mar 13 '06
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Pros: Excellent picture, 16:9 anamorphic mode for DVDs, plenty of convenient audio/video-in connectors
Cons: Obfuscated menu interface for 16:9 mode; very bulky and heavy
The Bottom Line: A very good set, but with some shortcomings. Picture is amazing, especially for anamorphic DVDs in 16:9 mode. A good value for its list price.
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| robotech_master's Full Review: Sony KV-27FS120 27 inch TV |
I originally "purchased" this TV because I was getting fed up with my old set, and the price was right: free. I got this TV set by participating in one of those pyramid scheme offers for a "free flatscreen" TV, to go with the free iPod I'd gotten that way not long before. It took the longest time to meet the offer conditions, and almost as long for the TV to arrive once I had ordered it, but arrive it finally did. There was just the minor problem of the TV’s picture having a flaw because the shippers had dropped it on its face and bulged out the Trinitron grid. Happily, Sony's warranty service stepped up to the plate, and I had my fully-functional TV set in just a week or so more.
The television sits on a table near my computer, which also serves as my entertainment center. I play DVDs on my computer and pipe them out from my video card's s-video output jack, through an s-video-to-RCA converter, into a VCR (which also serves as my cable TV tuner), and from that to the TV. It's a kind of a complicated setup, but it works all right, for the most part. I might get a better picture if I went SVHS direct from the computer to the TV's s-video input, but the picture I get now is excellent as it is; certainly good enough for me.
First things first: this television has a great picture. Whether I'm playing DVDs, watching cable TV, playing a videocassette, or doing something with my computer (the TV serves as an extension of my computer desktop, for purposes of playing multimedia files and things), it's sharp and clear, unless I'm closer to it than I have any business being. Sitting at my computer is kind of too close for serious TV watching, but sitting on the sofa across the room works quite well. I never realized how much difference the flatness of a flatscreen makes in terms of picture quality (compared to the old curved-screen CRTs) until I had this one. There's substantially less glare on the picture than there was on my old set.
Another thing about the picture has to do with the TV's "16:9" mode. The TV comes with a feature, accessed from its menus, that allows you to switch it over into anamorphic mode so that it compresses its vertical resolution. It still has the complete 640x480 resolution of a normal TV picture, but it now has the 16:9 ratio of widescreen TV, rather than the 4:3 ratio of a normal television set. By no coincidence whatsoever, this is also what is done to the video of an anamorphic DVD--compressing the resolution so there are more pixels per inch vertically (which is why everybody looks so tall and thin if you mess up the settings on your DVD player when playing an anamorphic DVD on a normal TV set). When you watch an anamorphic DVD on a normal TV set, you lose resolution from the TV wasting the pixels to the top and bottom of the 16:9 zone--but on this Sony TV in anamorphic mode, there is no waste because the TV has compressed the rows of pixels on the screen to match the rows of pixels on the DVD. Thus, this TV set is capable of rendering anamorphic DVDs in their full resolution--the only way they'll look better is to view them on a computer monitor or HDTV.
I won't have as much to say on the subject of sound. I do not actually use the speakers much; my DVDs are played through the 5.1 system attached to my computer, and VCR and TV go through a pair of speakers with subwoofer attached to my other computer (I said it was a complicated setup didn't I?). The first chance I had to use the speakers for much of anything was when a friend came over this weekend with his video iPod. The speakers seem all right for their size; I didn't hear much distortion out of them even when I had the volume all the way up. They're good enough for casual use, I suppose; anyone who is serious enough about video to care about the set's fancier features will probably be using a separate surround system anyway.
I should probably say something about the remote control that came with the set; however, I rarely use it so I don't have much to say. It has large and easy-to-hit volume and channel selection controls, and a small VCR/DVD "universal" section with play and fast forward buttons, but I've never bothered to learn to set it up as I prefer to use a third-party universal remote for reasons I'll go into shortly. One drawback to the remote is that it does not either glow in the dark or have backlighting, which could be a pain if you watch TV in a dim environment.
There is no denying it: this set has some extremely handy features. Most notably, there are four separate sets of audio and video input jacks--video 1, 3, and 4 on the back, video 2 on the front behind a flip-up panel with the set's rudimentary control buttons. Thus you can plug your "main" video sources into the back to keep the cables out of the way, but if a friend comes over with a video game console, video iPod, or other gadget, the ports to plug it in are just a panel-flip away. The video sources on the back offer RCA jacks, component, s-video, and coax; video 2 is just RCA.
This extreme convenience is counterbalanced by one monumental inconvenience, however. Remember that 16:9 mode I mentioned? Given how often you could be making use of the feature (i.e., as often as you might choose to pop a widescreen disc into your player), you would expect the feature would be easy to turn on and off, right? That there would be a button on the remote control for it, to go next to other toggle buttons such as TV/Video? Well, you would be wrong. There is a "picture mode" toggle on the remote, that serves to select among the various brightness/contrast presets, like "Standard," "Vivid," or "Movie"--but in order to turn on 16:9 mode, you have to open the TV's menu manually, move over to the fifth menu on the right (though you can get there by pressing once left), move down to the sixth option on that menu (and you cannot get there by pressing once up), select it, change it, and exit. Using the minimum possible number of keypresses on the remote, it still takes all of eleven keypresses on the remote to toggle on this one simple feature. And what's more, if you turn the TV set off or switch video sources, the set drops back out of anamorphic mode into ordinary video mode and you have to go through the whole sequence all over again.
This one user-interface flaw besmirches an otherwise quite praiseworthy set, and can get to be a serious frustration if you are in the habit of watching widescreen movies very often at all. This is why this TV set gets only four stars from me, instead of five. Someone else's ePinions review mentions that turning on or off closed-captioning is similarly onerous; whoever forgot to include these useful features on the remote (it’s not as if there wasn’t room for two more buttons) should be shot, or at least fired. In the end, I went out and purchased a One-For-All brand programmable macroing universal remote, so that I could assign the string of commands necessary to engage anamorphic mode to a single keystroke. It is not an entirely satisfactory solution (as sometimes the TV set misses one of the commands and it ends up changing the menu language to Spanish instead) but it is much more convenient than doing the menu shuffle every time I want to watch a widescreen disc.
Another mark against the TV set, though a relatively minor one and unavoidable by its nature, is the immense size and weight necessitated by CRT technology. The set is a couple of feet thick from front to back, and the lead shielding makes it weigh a ton. I had to have help to lift it into place, and the table I use is a little flimsy--I sometimes worry about what might happen if it breaks.
If you would like to watch DVDs at the highest resolution possible from a standard TV set, and are only looking to spend $300-400, this is a very good set if you can deal with its shortcomings. For a standard-definition set, the picture is amazing, especially for an anamorphic DVD in 16:9 mode, and the price is right. This is a great “last” TV set to keep until HDTVs come down to reasonable prices.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): free
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Epinions.com ID:
robotech_master
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Member: Chris Meadows
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 3 members
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