Customer Reviews

Sony BRAVIA KDL40NX700 40-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'll start this review now but maybe update it in future months, as I've noticed that the real test of any HDTV is how well it performs after it's a year old. As it is, we've had our NX700 for two months now, and I'm very pleased.

Some other reviewers can probably judge picture quality better than I can, and that's fine. I researched enough to know that this Sony model generally gets high marks for its picture. Someday I'm going to try out some picture adjustments I found during my research - but for now, it's still on its factory settings, and we all agree that it looks great for the kind of viewing we do.

What made me pick this TV, and the reason I'm glad I did, are its capabilities for component connections and internet features, particularly how well it does wirelessly. This is our bedroom TV, a place where we want to minimize external components, wires, generally all A/V clutter other than this wall-mounted HDTV. So the more it can do on its own, the better.

I consider the following features of the NX700 most important. And I couldn't find another HDTV in this price range that had everything below, besides other Sony models.

1) Analog audio out. Why is this so rare? The NX700 also has an optical digital audio output, but often the easiest way to bypass the tinny internal speakers (and all thin HDTV's have tinny speakers, not just this one) is to run its audio through anything you have nearby - a set of computer speakers, boombox, whatever. It shouldn't be a requirement to have a dedicated audio system near every TV in your house, you know?

2) PC (VGA) input. Most HDTV's have these but some do not (like most Panasonics). The NX700 also puts an separate analog audio input jack right near this input for convenience. And it all works well, we've used it few times already.

3) Wireless internet, and applets for NetFlix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, Pandora, Slacker (and a bunch of others that we probably won't use much if at all). Actually, this is the most meaningful feature of this TV for us right now, because we didn't know what to expect from wireless streaming in a location that gets a somewhat weak signal from the router. On the contrary, this TV does just fine - we've been streaming Amazon VOD regularly now, and even took a chance on streaming HD movies. With those, we did have one instance where the movie stopped and restarted a bit due to a weak signal, but it was only for a few minutes, and then it was fine. I think streaming HD in wireless with current technology is going to be dicey at best, but considering our not-perfect router signal, I was impressed with what it could do regardless.

4) DLNA capabilities. I never set up a computer to be a DLNA server before, but I found the instructions online and did it in 20 minutes. It really was that easy. After that, the TV was immediately able to play my music and view some pictures, just the ones I had enabled DLNA access to. Now I have to spend some time figuring out how I want to use this feature, since I never expected it to work so easily.

5) Other connections. We need a combination of HDMI, Composite and Component video inputs for our living room TV, and this TV was initially set up there. The NX700 has 4 HDMI inputs, including one apparently for PC-HDMI (why would that be any different?), and we're using two, plus the Composite and Component inputs. Other TV's do have more inputs, or the same, but some have less - and that would be a deal-breaker for our living room TV. As it is, everything we needed to plug into this Sony got plugged in and worked. No unplugging over and over, so no hassles switching between sources.

6) Built-in QAM tuner. All things told, this didn't work out to be a big deal after all. We'll probably always use our cable box, but it's nice to know there's an alternative if the need arises.

I considered and compared HDTV's in 37-to-42-inch sizes from Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. Sony had the only ones with every feature we needed. Also important is that it looks good off or on, and has some features you don't really notice, like automatically adjusting the brightness based on the room's current lighting. Again, I'll hold off skywriting its praises until after it's lasted for a few years but for the moment, I'm very happy we picked this HDTV.

After researching ALL sets in the 37" to 40" size, I'm 100% satisfied I made the right choice with the KDL-40NX700.
Strolling through Fry's Electronics (retailer on west coast) I studied the Panasonics and Samsungs and kept returning to the Sony's with the Bravia Engine and deciding they do have the best picture (in all regards; Black Level, Detail, Color reproduction...). So I'm leaving the store and I see a Sony TV without a price tag. But I'm so drawn to the TV I study it for a few minutes. (The picture was never on). I'm entranced by this gorgeous, clean-looking statement of a television! There isn't any cheesy plastic bezel; instead it's aluminum. Dubbed the MONOLITHIC DESIGN. The front glass extends right up to the bezel and the result is a clean, attractive face in a super-slim design. That's just the cosmetic fit and finish... wait 'till you turn this baby on!

Quick background: I used to sell TV's (the crap all the way to the best) but that was 15 years ago. At that time, SONY XBR was always the best. I've always wanted an XBR but could never afford the price tag. I really wanted an XBR now but good luck finding one. Sony doesn't have a 40" XBR in the current lineup (as of 12/2010). After doing some research, I'm almost certain the NX series contains the components of an XBR. But here's the kicker, it's a discontinued model that retailed for >$2K when it came out. Now, it's down to $799 and BLOWS AWAY anything in that price range! Why it's discontinued I don't know. My set was manufactured in April 2010 (only 7 months ago!). I think the bottom has dropped out of the LED/LCD market and we are seeing massive discounting to clear back stock.

A changing Industry: We are transitioning into a "media center" home theater market. We are seeing the melding of internet, gaming, music servers, movies and TV all being "managed" by a single device (in the main room) with accessibility throughout the house to the same content. This product is part of the transition which is cool that it has network and "internet" ability; but those features appear to be in development so when using them now, there a bit finicky and watered down (I'll explain in a minute).

FIRST: DISPEL SOME MYTHS

Analog Audio out: Yes it has it (as well as fiber optic audio out). A bunch of reviews I read said it only had fiber optic- not true! Take the analog audio out (red and white RCA jacks), and plug them into your stereo. Any stereo. I've never even tried the built-in speakers because ALL tv speakers suck.

TOO Blue: One review said all the flesh tones were blue. BS. That guy probably tweaked some settings and couldn't fix it. Yes this set is LOADED with advanced picture tweaking. If you get too far ahead of yourself, hit reset in the menu under picture settings and start over.

Crackling through speakers when turned off: This guy has a bad set. It shouldn't do that - send it back bro.

Hot Spots with the backlit LED: I've seen none. You can enhance or lower the LED with one of the adjustments in the picture settings menu.

A COOL FEATURE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT:
You can turn OFF the SONY lighted logo on the front. This is soooooo cool because that delicious black border frames each picture so elegantly and I hate staring at lighted logos on TV sets. VERY COOL SONY!

Black Level:
This set produces some of the richest and deepest blacks I've ever seen. They fade seamlessly right into the black border. This makes for such a pleasurable viewing experience. Black is one of the hardest colors for a TV to reproduce. Check out other sets and A/B the black levels. Deep blacks are the sign of accurate high-end TV's.

HOW TO USE MOTIONFLOW:
If you turn motion flow on during movies, it strips the picture of some of the post-production that was done. Watch it and see. The sets and characters almost look fake. Like you were looking through the viewfinder of a camcorder. I came across the first "Indiana Jones" and had motionflow on. I couldn't believe how young Harrison Ford was when they made that film (late 80's). Thing was, it was so clear and detailed it looked like a movie that was just made. It fooled me. Turn Motionflow off for movies, select "MOVIE" under scene selection and turn off all the lights in the room. Amazing home theater is now yours. Turn motionflow on for sports or gaming... not movies. Check out the other feature "CineMotion". Turn this to AUTO 1. That way, feature movies that were filmed at 24 frames per second are reproduced at that rate, instead of 29.9 like standard TV shows.

Bravia Internet Widgets:
Neat idea. Too slow to load. Too limited (you choose from pre-selected widgets). I think now that Apple has us accessing all our media so quickly (whether in iTunes or on an iPod), we are spoiled. Anything that takes more than 5 seconds is just too long. It needs to be intuitive, quick and reliable. You can "subsribe" to widgets like weather, news... and when you press the "widgets" button on the remote, they appear on top of whatever your watching. They load slow and are difficult to configure. Great idea, poor implementation.

Bravia Internet Video:
Again, neat idea. From above, in the paragraph "A changing Industry", this is what I'm talking about. How cool to quickly switch over to YouTube and say check out this video I found? Well, you can! But what happens when your friend says, "that's cool, now search for....". HOLD ON THERE COWBOY. The screen goes into qwerty mode - you know, the way you access letters when texting on your cell phone. To spell SONY, press 7 three times, wait til the cursor moves over, press 8 to get an O.... you get the idea. TOO SLOW! If you have NETFLIX or HULU or you like to do VOD (video on demand - amazon) the video widgets are easily found, load pretty fast and work fine. NO, there isn't a full keyboard available for this TV. And no, just because there is a USB port on the side, you can't just plug in a USB keyboard or mouse. It won't work. I'll bet Sony CAN do this though. Maybe down the road...

DLNA media server:
This is so advanced I'm still trying to get it to work. Basically you can stream media content from your laptop or other computer to the TV. Even Sony's online support website is lacking in how to actually configure this.

BOTTOM LINE: At the $799 price point, IT'S THE BEST! The picture is so darn good and life-like. Often, when you've got the room lights off this TV appears 3D!!!!!!!!!! If you really want FULL INTERNET on your TV, plug in your laptop with a VGA cable (for windows press FCN 4 to send the monitor output from your laptop, after you connect the VGA cable to TV's PC input) then take the AUDIO from your laptop (standard ipod audio cable 3.5mm male on both ends) and plug that in for sound. NEXT, get a wireless USB keyboard and mouse and BAM! You've got FULL INTERNET browsing and control from your couch.

Current pricing: AMAZON direct had this for $799 a few days ago but I don't see it offered by them anymore. COSTCO has it for $799 on there website but I didn't see it at my local store. Get the set, and get ready to be stunned by such an amazing television.

I picked this set from Costco for 799 and its a great set. LED with Internet Apps and 120 Hz . Setting up the set was real easy and once you connect it to the wireless, you can enjoy netflix and the other great apps.
The Only con for this tv I would say is that its missing a keyboard to do any searches on youtube or anything. But guess Sony was keeping it for its Google TV series. 999 for 40 inc LED but 60 Hz. I think I like my 120 Hz better

I bought this at Costco yesterday for $799 and so far it's great. The picture is amazing. The sound is great. The options are great. Good price for a 40" LED Sony. Plus Costco gives you a 90 day return policy plus an extra year on the warranty.

"My face is blue
My Shirt is Blue..."

I almost love this TV. It has a bright,colorful picture. It has a nice clean stylish desgin. It has tons of extra features. But in the end I just couldn't get rid of the blue. It's the same blue that you see in "white" led christmas lights and "white" led flashlights.

I tried to deny it. I set the color temperature to warm. I used the advanced settings (nice feature) to pull down the blues, and tried the greens as well. It started to look ok for scenes saturated with reds and yellows, but for deep blacks and the bright whites the blue still showed through. Worse yet most any skin color ended up with a slight blue tint.

As far at the internet apps go, I'll say they're a nice bonus but don't make this the reason you buy a TV. The DLNA client worked nicely when you happened to have pictures or videos in an acceptable format. For Netflix, Pandora etc. a Roku, a Boxee or some other device will give you much more flexibility.

My bottom line ... this is a great TV for watching Avatar, Boise State Football, Planet Earth The Oceans, zombies and victims in CSI. Not so good for viewing living warmblooded humans.

Setting up this TV is somewhat lengthy and in a few places difficult. Here's some help, I hope.

When you connect the TV there will be some introductory setup instructions. If you are going to wall mount it, there are no mounting screws included, so read the instructions and get metric screws/bolts of the proper size and length of 8-12 mm; if too long, they may screw into the TVs innards and damage something. Bye-bye $800.00 or more (the cost obviously depends on your shopping score).
1. If you have a cable box, be sure and select cable
2. Select automatic updates if you are going to use the internet. It didn't work for me (see below) but for you, who knows?
3. Internet setup. Router password is case sensitive. An icon in the lower right switches between upper/lower case, numbers and symbols. after setup, internet features can supposedly be available. Not so fast. From the main menu, there are icons across the top. A film strip icon identifies internet content. This is where it gets sticky. I clicked on Netflix to register my device with my subscription and got a message that a TV software update was necessary, and to turn on automatic updates. I already had done that, so I turned the TV off and on again. No luck. Went to the computer and to Sony support, selected the model number of the TV (KDL40NX70) and migrated to "firmware updates". Presented with a lengthy menu first advising me to turn on automatic updates. blah, blah-done that.
Lower on the screen instructions on how to document my firmware version and download updated firmware. Long story short, you must download a zip file, check it's length, unzip it, copy the unzipped folder to a thumb drive formatted in fat32 and plug it into your TV's USB port. The TV must be on! That worked. Took a while. Don't touch the TV or remote while updating on pain of death. The TVs, not yours-at least till it tells you it updated Ok. Migrate back to Netflix and an activation code will be displayed to enter on your computer at the Netflix site--my account, register new devices.
4. Now that you can get internet service, time to set up the TV picture. First go to audio setup. Last upper icon on the top to the left and slide down two icons to the audio setup. Turn off the obnoxious noise every time you press the setup buttons. Now one up to picture setup. The picture as the TV came was horrible, dull and smeary. I'd suggest going right to "custom" and sliding down to "advanced" so you can select the warmness (I chose low), motion blur (off is better), white, black, and color screen intensities in light and dark areas of the picture. Skip the not too helpful basic setup. I wasted about 1/2 hour without success in getting the picture the way I liked it before I went to advanced. Connect your DVD/Blu-ray, adjust it's resolution to 1080P and it's aspect ratio for your movies, and that's about it. When you adjust the specific colors, the TV displays half of the picture on the right of the setup screen, so you can monitor changes.
I probably skipped a few things, sorry. I noticed some of the reviews said the pic was too blue. That can be adjusted from the advanced menu.
After the setup, good stuff.

Good luck.

We bought this TV at Costco for $799 before Amazon matched the price. It was very easy to set up, and it found our wireless network and connected to it without a problem during the initial setup. We don't have cable, so we are using the TV connected to a Tivo HD with an OTA antenna signal into the Tivo and then an HDMI output from the Tivo to the TV. The picture quality is amazing (both HD and standard definition), and everything in HD is crystal clear (try changing the picture setting to "Vivid" if you want a brighter picture). There are many settings we still haven't played with yet, but we are very happy with the performance of the TV so far.

The other reason we chose this TV was for the Internet connectivity, and it has Wi-Fi built into the TV (a/b/g/n) without needing an additional adapter. Since we don't have cable, we use Netflix, Amazon VOD, and a lot of other streaming content all the time. Sony has an advantage in this area since they are able to provide additional content from Sony studios, and the TV comes with a lot of free content for this reason. The menu system for the Internet content works very well (it's just like a Sony PS3 or PSP), and there is so much content that we haven't even gone through everything yet. Sony has also established its own VOD (called Qriocity) that is integrated into the TV, but we haven't tried it out yet to see how it compares to Amazon VOD. So far we have been streaming over our wireless N network, and there have been no delays or quality issues, but the TV has an ethernet port to hardwire it if you prefer not to use Wi-Fi. Finally, since the TV is DLNA compliant and we have a DLNA laptop on the same network as the TV, we are able to access all of the pictures, videos, and music from the laptop on the TV without any additional connections, which is really convenient (although you can attach a USB device directly to the TV as well).

Overall, we are very happy we chose this TV, and think it is an excellent value for the quality and features. We would definitely recommend it to others, especially for people looking for a TV with Internet connectivity.

Good TV, nice interface for media. Can not keep the wireless signal working so I used the wired option. I finally found a way to make the video files play through the usb port. I took the video file to the PS3 and downloaded the video to the video editor. When I recopied the video to a flash drive the video was recognized and played. The TV will only play MP3 music files. Check out the Crackle app neat way to watch some old movies and shows. If your connection is slow you might have to buffer some to watch. I buffer by turning the play on then pause for a while. When I get enough ahead I hit play again usually that keeps me far enough ahead. I haven't used the qriocity yet. I think it a lot like Amazon's Unbox.

I got this for a great price, $899. Great picture. The Internet links are good, but take a little while to operate smothly. The only thing I wish was better was music sound. For regular TV the sound is fine, but playing Internet Music (not through your stero) the sound is a little thin. All in all I would recomend this TV, at a good price.

By now, you've probably reviewed this set's features and functions so to get to how it looks and sounds. Set up is fairly easy. The supplied base stand assembles quickly but be sure to read the quick instructions. There is a little plastic trim piece that must be clipped on to the vertical part of the stand before you attach it to the set. Once connected, we looked at over the air signals, blue ray, and our HD Satellite signal. Set up includes a home vs. "retail" picture mode, the latter an in store brighter setting and a little better detail clarity. There is also a "vivid" setting for video which we chose over the "standard" or "custom" modes, both of which were dim and muddy in appearance. It could be used to counter to the natural bluish colour this particular LED TV seems to project. There are two "warm" settings as well but, again, both seemed to be quite muddy. Out of the box, expect to see an out of focus, dim picture. The sharpness control is rolled all the way off for some reason. In fact, expect to take over an hour or more to get the picture setting where it looks decent. Be sure to save your settings by switching on the menu's "lock" feature.

Each viewer will have different preferences. Sound is fairly easy to adjust, there are several settings but we use an external audio system. To clarify, the built in speakers are actually not too bad and there is a choice of a user set equalizer or simple bass and treble adjustments. A treble enhancement feature is nice if your high frequency hearing spectrum is lacking as is mine. You can switch the "SONY" front panel banner on or off through the menu system. On mode is nice in that if there is an HDMI issue with other equipment, you can quickly tell whether or not the set is powered up. A strange feature, an energy saver switch on the right hand side, seemed to do nothing but switch the entire TV off and it wouldn't power back on until switched back to the "on" position. The on board OSD menu, titled "i-manual", works okay but gives only little more detail than the sparsely written paper manual. We prefer the pricey Samsung LED model for clarity and quality. Low res signals are fuzzy and not very clean though watchable but that's to be expected in the non native format. HD, on the other hand, is very good and clean once the picture is set up properly.

A word about HDMI components. Putting the TV in the "sync" mode can cause a lot of operational issues between components and menu access. You'll want to read up on what controls which function and it may take some internet searching for advanced features and their operation before they are clearly understood. Some operations are complex so you will need patience during set up. Over all, it's a good TV if the price is right. Anything over a grand is too much if you watch the sales. The next step up would be the more expensive Sharp "Quattron" quad pixel series. So, is this TV worth the money? Only if you can get it for at least 200 bucks less than the MSRP. Our 3 year old 40" Samsung LCD will match this one with more rich, warmer colours. There are better choices for LED or LED edge lit screens unless the price is right, in which case you should not be disappointed. All TVs mentioned here are NTSC/ATSC models for use in the U.S.A.

Disclaimer: This review is provided for information purposes only and is not meant for a venue for debate. Any inappropriate comments will be deleted and reported as abuse. We welcome other consumer opinions about their experiences with this product.

Pros: Bright picture, fast starting, fast signal capture on HDMI, easy menu navigation.
Cons: Picture quality is poor until proper set up, some features are annoying and time consuming.
Note: We did not try the internet features.