As I sat staring at Sony's 52-inch NX800 Bravia LCD television - a device that looks like a black hole consuming a living room table - I wondered why anyone would need this much TV.
Perhaps you like playing video games where the characters are larger and higher-resolution than you are; perhaps you have an entire wall you want to hide; perhaps you have $3000 and a fetish for black rectangles.
The NX800 is the latest - and perhaps the last great - High-definition, two-dimension TV from Sony. I say "last great" because, even though I'm sure Sony will churn out bigger and better Bravias for years to come, the company's focus - like every other TV-maker's - is shifting to the next big cash-grab: 3D. Indeed, Sony rolls out two new 3D TVs in Canada this summer.
The 52-inch model I tested will run you three grand. Add another grand for the 60-inch model, subtract $400 for the 46-inch.
In keeping with my ongoing war against electronics manufacturers' joyless, letter-and-number naming conventions, I will henceforth refer to the NX800 as Frank.
The first thing you notice when Frank shows up at your house is that the box it comes in is overpopulated with logos, acronyms and other methods of illustrative bragging: Edge-lit LED! Motionflow 240Hz! Bravia Engine 3! What does this mean? Basically, that the picture quality is good.
(In truth, TV manufacturers often have a hard time explaining to consumers just why their expensive HDTV set is better than some other manufacturer's expensive HD-TV set - while there are hard-core TV coinsures out there, a lot of people just walk into the nearest Future Shop, see a wall of similar-looking sets and make a bee-line for the biggest "Sale" tag. As such, manufacturers have to make their sales pitches simple, memorable and easy to differentiate. Case in point: At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, Sharp ran a massive ad campaign claiming that you should buy Sharp TVs because ... they are the best at reproducing the colour yellow. Do you like Spongebob marathons? Documentaries about corn? Sharp is the TV for you).
But good picture quality is nothing new: Sony is responsible for some of my favourite TVs in recent years, even though these one-week loaners are the only way I'll ever get my hands on any of them. Last summer I reviewed the 52-inch KDL-52XBR9 LCD television from Sony, and the (admittedly excellent) colour quality, black levels and general contrast all feel similar with Frank (of course, the XBR9 went for $4100 last summer, so there's a pretty big price gap). The refresh rate is crisp enough that you aren't likely to ever see any blurring on screen.
A couple of differences: the screen seems a bit more shiny on this new model, and as such I got a bit more glare off of it. It's a minor issue, but the glare did add to a feeling of colour inconsistency across the screen. This probably also has to do with the decision to use edge-lit LED, which allows Sony to make a thinner set at the expense of picture consistency.
As you'd expect, Frank comes loaded with every input port out there, including four HDMI slots, an HD PC slot and Ethernet. You get two speakers in all, but if you want the full force of explosions or orchestral flourish, you'll likely spend a few hundred dollars more on audio equipment.
Sony does give Frank another neat feature: a light sensor that measures ambient lighting in a room and adjusts backlighting accordingly. The company pitches this as way to conserve energy.
I've said this with previous high-end TVs, but a caveat about all the excellent video quality: You really will need the highest-end media to make any real use of it. Sony does Blu-ray better than anyone else, so if you pop one of those DVDs on, you'll see some of the best picture quality out there. If your viewing habits run to lower-definition stuff, you're probably paying for more TV than you need.
But don't expect anything leaps-and-bounds better than other manufacturers' top-end TVs. With Sony, as with companies such as BMW and [I tried to think of an analogy in the computer industry, but just came up with Sony again] you're getting great engineering, but you're also paying a markup for the brand name.
The things I liked most about Frank actually had nothing to do with picture quality.
Primarily, the TV itself is gorgeous. Sony calls it "monolith" design, and it feels like they took the concept of a rectangle and somehow made it more rectangular. What you get is a single thin slab entirely free of curves or protrusions of any kind. The effect is beautiful - this is the prettiest Sony TV I've ever seen and, if it weren't for some insanely thin LG prototype I came across during CES this year, probably the prettiest TV I've seen period.
The emphasis on design is evident elsewhere, too. Sony still uses a variant of the Playstation 3 menu system, but it's cleaner. Even details such as the volume bar on the screen have a bit of flare to them.
Along with the TV, Sony sent me something called a "Bunchin Stand," which is a $300 brushed steel track with a groove running down the middle of its length. Setting the TV into this thing makes it look even smoother. The folks at Sony kept telling me about how the TV in this position is also angled six degrees upwards, making viewing easier if the set is at a lower level than the viewer. I have no Idea a) if I managed to tilt the TV back the exact six degrees, b) why this is such an important feature or c) whether it made any difference whatsoever to the viewing quality. I did have the TV pretty low to the ground to begin with, and didn't notice any deterioration, so maybe this feature worked so well that I didn't even notice it.
To be honest, I spent most of my time with Frank not watching high-def movies, but college kids on their web cams.
This isn't as sleazy as it sounds. Sony has made web content a big part of their sales pitch. With Frank, they back it up by giving the TV Wi-Fi connectivity. This is a significant improvement - it can be mighty frustrating to have to run a cable from God-knows-where the router is all the way to your living room.
But having given the TV wireless life, Sony must back that up with content. Frank comes pre-packaged with access to a variety of specialty web channels ranging from cooking webisodes to something called "the Midwest Teen Sex Show." You also get access to Youtube, but not all of Youtube (more on this shortly).
To call some of the web-based content low-budget would be flattery. Some of the web channels available through Frank essentially consist of nothing more than five-minute segments of deer-in-the-headlights college kids talking into their web cams about what they had for lunch that day. There is some good stuff buried there, including home-repair segments and mini travel shows, but also a lot of content that straddles the line between so-bad-it's-good and just bad.
Youtube is by far the biggest repository of videos available through Frank (or anywhere on the web, I guess). But you will soon notice two things when you try to access it.
1: Trying to type on a virtual keyboard using a TV remote is an exercise in frustration that will eventually cause your thumbs to mutiny.
2: A lot of the most popular videos on Youtube have mysteriously disappeared.
To address point number 1, it is an absolute shame that Sony doesn't offer some kind of keyboard to go along with the TV, because typing is a chore. The virtual keyboard layout is similar to that on a phone keypad, with three or four letters jammed on each number key. So you can press "1" on your remote twice to type "B," or you can scroll to the 1 key on the screen and hit it twice. "Extreme Mountain Unicycling" took forever to type.
And when I tried to feed my guilty Lady Gaga addiction, the Youtube search returned thousands of hits, but none of the singer's actual music videos, even though they're readily available on Youtube when I access the site from my computer. It turns out that this is just another one of those infuriating side-effects of licensing agreements, content restrictions and other legalistic voodoo crippling media on the web. If I walk ten feet to my computer I can watch official music videos on Youtube just fine. Hell, I can just run a cable from my computer to the TV. But God forbid I try to watch the same content directly through my TV - civilization as we know it would come to a screeching halt. I can only begin to image what extra content the folks who buy this TV in the States will get.
Ultimately, I have a hard time justifying $3000 for Frank. There are competitors' 52-inch LCD sets that, in fairness, don't have nearly the colour quality, wireless connectivity or beautiful design, but sell for less than half the price. Around the same price range, you're looking at sets from LG with similar specifications (I haven't tested the newest LG sets yet, but previous experiences have been positive).
What truly sets Frank apart is its design. If you're already intent on buying a top-end set, Sony's latest doesn't disappoint in any technical sense, and it looks better than pretty much anything else out there.