Customer Reviews

Sony Bravia V-Series KDL-40V3000 40-Inch 1080p LCD HDTV

5 star:		(93)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been buying Sony TVs for more than 30 years, and they rarely disappoint. The 40" Bravia is no exception. Last year I bought the 70" SXRD model for my living room, and the 40" is for the bedroom. Many televisions are high quality and prices are dropping, so why get the Sony?

Picture quality is excellent, especially in high def.

Sound quality is very good without a home theater setup. Not always the case with flat panel TVs with small bezels.

Remote is well laid out and easy to use (although it does lack backlighting, but I have no trouble finding the buttons I want in the dark). It's easy to change between the 4 programmable picture settings or screen aspect ratios. Sleep timer button is right up on top when your ready for bed and is in 15 minute increments.

It has 2 HDMI inputs for easy connection of compatible devices and several other inputs. You can customize the display to choose between only the inputs you are using and label them appropriately (so it's easy to switch between my TiVo, DVD player, TV and cable box, and hide the other inputs)

There's a zillion other settings that I haven't figured out all of yet, but most are relatively intuitive (except PnP, which has me baffled so far).

I got the flat panel LCD because it uses less power and generates less heat than a plasma, and won't burn-in (although plasmas have improved). The screen doesn't reflect as much, and has a wide viewing angle.

For viewing from about 6 feet, the 40" size is perfect.

Lots of other things I could say about this TV, but it's all good. You can't go wrong with this model. Also highly rated in Consumer Reports, the consumer's bible...

Amazon shopping tip: Amazon offers price protection for 30 days from date of purchase. After you buy this, put it in your cart again and check your cart regularly for a month. The price goes up and down almost daily. When you go to your cart you will be notified of price changes. If it goes down, grab the phone and call for a credit. I paid $1630 a couple of weeks ago and the price has gone as low as $1450, so I've gotten $180 in refunds. Delivery and unpacking are free, and combine with excellent customer service, making buying from Amazon a no-brainer.

I'm delighted with Sony and Amazon for this purchase.

update 3/2009: Forget my last comment. Amazon no longer, sadly, offers 30 day price protection on purchases. Advice now is to go to camel camel camel dot com (leave out the spaces). A great site for tracking Amazon price history.

Very good picture quality, no glare problems and no discernible viewing angle problems. The Amazon price was several hundred dollars less than any other place I checked, ie Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, Sony and even better than Army/Air Force Exchange service. The delivery was painless. The delivery compary called and made an appointment, delivered, unpacked, placed the unit where I wanted, helped with initial on screen setup and hauled the trash away. I recommend buying an extended warranty from Sony instead of the third party warranty available through Amazon. You have something like 30 days after purchase to get the warranty from Sony. All in all, a great TV and a great buying experince.

I've been really pleased with this HDTV. I had read that one of the weaknesses of LCD monitors is that they tend to blur fast moving images (like in action movies) so I held out for a model that had a 10 bit processor and 8ms response and I have yet to see any blurring in either movies or video games.

Another complaint I've heard about LCD is that they have difficulty producing deep blacks. Again, this has not been the case with the KDL-40V3000. To get a picture I was really happy with took a little work with the settings, but the easy-to-use controls made this a fairly painless process. I've found that the contrast is superior to my Philips 30" CRT HDTV.

I've been pleased with the playback from DVD, however I have not seen playback from a HD source other than an XBox 360.

Overall, I've been very happy with this item. The picture is excellent; it's easy to use; and my purchase price was lower to the Samsung with similar features. There are models with superior features, but for the money the KDL-40V3000 is hard to beat.

First, it's good to see that Sony has decided to go with competitive pricing and regain some of the ground it's lost to Samsung in market share. But with the 2500V and 3000V series priced so closely, a consumer could be forgiven for postponing a decision. Suffice it to say that either set is capable of delivering a stunning picture, with the differences more dependent on settings and calibration than on internal specs. A difference of 2 bits in the color processor or several thousand degrees in the contrast ratio is meaningless to the naked eye (Samsung is now touting contrast ratios of 500,000:1 and Sony 1 million:1). The significant differences to my eyes come down to these:

1. The 2500 has a swiveling stand; the 3000 is permanently affixed to its base.

2. The 2500 is a couple of inches less wide and pounds lighter than the 3000 because the speakers are on the bottom rather than appended to the sides as is the case on the 3000.

3. The 2500's frame and screen itself is brushed and non-glossy. A true geek (i.e. HD purist or connoisseur) deeply resents either a distracting shiny frame or a reflective screen, one of the reasons that Samsung's newer but super-shiny 6500 series can occasionally be seen underselling and underpricing the older 6100 series). The 3000's glossy and "fashionable" piano-black frame is therefore not seen as a point in its favor by most videophiles.

For me, there are two compelling points in the 3000's favor:

1. It comes with "Theater-Synch," Sony's one-touch, single-control solution to operating the TV and all of its peripherals (providing it's all Sony equipment) with a single convenient switch. (Of course, Sony's Universal Remote for twenty bucks extra will do much the same.)

2. The remote switch that comes with the 2500 inexplicably preempts the "Normal" setting when the set senses a 720 or 1080 signal even if the source material is 4:3, thus stretching and distorting aspect ratio. It's really a minor inconvenience since the desired aspect ratio can be set through the TV's menu system as well as at the level of the DVD player and/or set-top box. Nevertheless, it's an annoyance to a few of us, suggesting that at the time the 2500 was designed, Sony was overly optimistic about the amount of HD 16:9 source material that would be available in the near future (still comparatively meager). This is not to suggest that the 2500 series is "older" technology: the set I saw showed a manufacture date of late fall 2007.

So the choice is not a no-brainer--nor is it a decision to lose sleep over. The discussion threads at AVForums for both of these sets show about the same number and kinds of praises and criticisms (with a disproportionate amount of obsessing about "clouds," leakage, etc. for both models). My hunch is that the controversy about Sony's alleged "clouds" is what has led to the recent price break as a way for Sony to rival Samsung in sales--so I won't complain). But there's also plenty of griping about Samsungs, including the very latest ultra expensive model with LED lighting. If you're not a stock analyst but someone who lets a mutual fund manager sweat the small details, I'd recommend going no further than Cnet or Consumers' Reports and, based on your findings, simply pulling the trigger on one 1080p set or the other.

I already have a 25 year old Sony 27" tube that still works beautifully. I also have a 35" Sony tube that has a gorgeous picture, but is huge and heavy. This unit is replacing the 35" (it will be sent to the basement for the kids to enjoy movies). I've had great success with Sony television products, with only one repair in the past 25 years!

Just amazing. In side-by-side comparisons with the major LCD competition (Sharp, Samsung IMHO), all members of my family felt the Sony just had that extra edge. The crispness of the image is amazing. The colors are vibrant. You are simply pulled into to the image. With the HD feed from Comcast the television was stunning.

Pay a few extra bucks and it will be will be worth your investment.

I recently bought this like several other reviewers for a few hundred less than the current price a few weeks ago. The Eagle delivery shipping time and handling was superb (about 4 days to ship). The shipper volunteered to stick around while I set it up, but I let him go.

I originally was going to buy this at local retailer, but the price difference was over $500 at Amazon. I compared this model to several other models and picked this one because it has the best screen quality IMO (even compared to the plasma models. It also had a better picture with standard TV than other models. Samsung has some real good 40" LCDs also.

I should point out one thing that this model has which is a slight amount of glare on the screen - not much but a bright light can be seen reflecting in the display. The glossy screens of some TVs like the Samsung have better contrast and colors. I find it a good trade off between the full anti-glare screens (which are somewhat duller) and the 'glossy' screen (that reflect external light like a mirror).

Setup was simple. The tuner found several digital / high def channels on the cable that the cable company doesn't advertise which was interesting. The picture quality is great like other reviews state. The sound was good IMO - just don't expect what a good theater system would produce.

There are a few things that could be improved.

The first is the remote could be better for a $1500 TV. Why do some companies skimp on this?

The second is another higher zoom level would be nice to zoom in on the wide aspect movies (in 'normal' TV).

And finally there is only one coaxial input. It would have been nice to have two coaxial inputs, one for cable, and another for an external antenna (to get over-the-air signals).

The picture is great, but there is an audible digital noise that comes out from the speakers. You would never hear this noise over the ambient noise in a retail store, but you can certainly hear it in a quiet environment. This is a constant level noise that is present from all the inputs, even is there is no source connected. It only goes away if you use the mute button, or run the volume down to zero.

I've called Sony customer support (bad experience, and one of the main reasons for this post), and eventually they had me contact an authorized Sony repair center, who will be out later this week.

I'm sure this will require them taking the set away for a couple of weeks.

So, whether this is a electrical design flaw, or a isolated experience, I'd allow the set to warm up for a few minutes, and then listen to the audio, before I'd let Eagle Delivery leave your house.

I'd rather deal with a refused shipment with Amazon, then to deal with Sony's terrible customer support.

After doing much research, just bought this 40" from Sony as part of main home theatre system. I cannot say enough about it. I was at first little skeptical about buying a 40" for a 7-8 foot viewing distance. This turned out to be a non issue. This HDTV is everything everyone says it is. It has amazing HD picture quality. The SD 480i channels are good as well. On screen menus are easy and intuitive. You'll find yourself watching programs that you would not normally watch because of the awesome picture quality. I highly recommend this TV. It's worth the extra $ to buy a Sony. You will not be dissapointed.

The value of a TV comes down to more than Price divided by Screen Size. If you have a friend who bought the biggest TV they could afford and had you over to watch a movie, only to spend the entire night pushing buttons and asking "Does that look right to you?", then you know that it *is* possible to spend a whole lot of money on a TV and still end up with a lousy picture. This isn't the TV that your friend will buy.

Aesthetically, the set is gorgeous. The piano black frame is reflective, but not shiny. It's more of a satin finish that borders the screen nicely. The front is very simple, with only a few simple status LEDs on the front, and a full set of buttons on the top behind the screen, so that you can, in a pinch, make adjustments without a remote. The base is wide and solid, yet not huge. The remote is simple and feels nice in the hand, and the Xross Media Bar (the menu system) is just another one of those things that make this set so great. You'll cringe if you ever have to use another "green block text" OSD again.

The picture is, of course, superb... once you set the screen mode to Normal from Vivid. I guess Vivid makes the reds pop out more and will make your day if you're looking at nothing but flowers and fire engines, but in normal TV viewing, it produces bizarre green shadows and garish reds. Cinema mode seems to mute the colors a bit, emulating a "film projected onto a screen" effect, but Normal is where it's at. Once you figure that out, and connect your HD cable box or whatever, the TV goes dark for a second and pops back with the screen configured properly for the signal it's being fed. It displays in the top right hand corner what resolution and aspect ratio it's displaying, which is a very nice feature. Not only does it handle HD signals great, but non-HD stuff looks nice as well. This was a huge problem with early HD sets, where normal broadcasts looked terrible, and not even just by comparison with HD. I'm not sure what three letter acronym can be attributed to that feature, but it's good to have it, because right now there really aren't that many HD stations.

The little things are what make this set great. There's a light sensor that will automatically adjust the brightness of the screen. You can offset the volume for each input in case you have a game system that's always too loud. Commonly used functions have their own buttons on the remote, which while doing nothing more than saving you two button presses, is great to have. My only complaint so far is that you can't label the inputs. The menu system lets you assign a tag to each input, so instead of it saying "Component 2" it can say "DVD". This is nice, but if you have more than one gaming system, it can get confusing, because you'll end up with three inputs labeled "Game" with the same icon, and only their order to differentiate between them. Why not just let the user put in their own labels, like you can with most Sony receivers?

I'm very happy with this TV and with the Amazon.com delivery service. I got a great price with great service, and this TV looks fantastic. Don't be like your friend who bought the biggest TV he could afford and hooked it up with composite cables. This is the TV for people who did their homework.

I did some research, but I have to admit, I am a Sony-oholic. This is my first LCD flat panel TV. I was sure the HD TV signals would look fantastic. I was skeptical about what an analog cable signal would look like. I have an early version of an HD TV that leaves much to be desired.

This TV has an absolute stunning picture no matter what the signal source. I unboxed this TV, plugged it in, and did a channel search. No adjustments, and the picture is outstanding. I really can't say enough good things about it. It even picked up and tuned in some local HD channels from my cable. ... and I did not purchase the HD box from them yet!

For the price / performance / quality , I can't see how you could get a better TV.