Sony KDL-46EX720 3D LED-LCD TV

Design and Build Quality‘Slim is in’ with all research, in these times. Sony, too has followed suit by incorporating this concept in the design of the KDL-46EX720 HDTV. The bezel of the television is slim and has a glossy black finish. During the bezel on the side and top measure in at one inch, the bottom part of the bezel measures at two inches. There is hardly any depth in the television with it measuring a mere inch. Sony has used a minimalistic approach during designing this HDTV. This television is quite light and weighs in broad outline 17.9kg, not that one has to carry this very often.Sticking with its minimalistic approach, Sony has placed all the input and output connections on the rear of the KDL-46EX720. Being thin in design, Sony has not compromised on the connectivity options of this television and have added four HDMI ports, along with two USB 2.0 ports at the back. To maintain the slim design, Sony has added a bay at the rear where the USB ports, a single HDMI port, VGA and a 3.5mm audio jack are located. These are positioned in such a way that they lie flat against the back panel. The other connectors that include the HDMI, component, composite, Ethernet and various others are found next to the bay. All these connectors face outwards, unlike the ones found in the bay. Sony has managed space then and added two down firing speakers at the bottom sides of the television.

Feature called X-Reality Picture Engineering

Another interesting quality of this HDTV is that it has a feature called X-Reality Picture Engineering. Sony claims that with this feature, the television can analyze each scene to produce suitable colour and contrast, thereby discouraging one to put up with low resolution images on this television. To keep the design of this television slim, Sony has used Edge-LED backlighting. One cannot compare a full-array LED display with an Edge-LED backlit display, as a full-array LED display fares much better on most counts. On the whole, both perform so then and keeping in mind the slimness of this television, an Edge-LED is better suited for the style factor which this Sony television possesses.FeaturesThe interface is a bit different as opposed to the XMB seen on most Sony Blu-ray players, home theatre systems and their PS3. The interface features various widgets that line up at the bottom of the screen. When one is in an option, the sub-options get loaded upwards and a mini screen occupies the rest of the screen displaying what option is selected. The interface is very intuitive and one can get used to it fairly quickly. Being a smart television, KDL-46EX72 has Sony’s Bravia Internet features. The Bravia Internet Video has a fair amount of widgets for different sites where one can watch video content. Apart from this, his HDTV can as well be used to access social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter through the designated widgets found in the options.

VoIP service, Skype can as well be used with this television to make video calls, but one has to purchase a special video camera separately. Other features include various preset modes for viewing this HDTV just as cinema mode, game mode, graphics mode, etc. The only hang up we had with this television is that when we tried connecting multiple NTFS external HDDs to it, it did not read. To make up for it, when we connected a FAT32 USB flash drive to it, it worked. This limits the amount of expandable storage that can be used with this 3D TV.On the whole, the features list of the KDL-46EX72 is pretty extensive and this television has fared well in this way far. Read on to know about the performance of this HDTV.PerformanceTo test the performance of the Sony KDL-46EX72, we hooked it up to a notebook to run a DisplayMate test, as so then as used a USB flash drive and a Blu-ray player. During running the DisplayMate test, we noticed that while the colour intensity test all Greys looked as they should. Greens and Reds looked vibrant as compared to other colours. All other colours appeared accurate. During testing the colour scales we noticed that there was no bleeding across most colours, except for red where a slight amount was noticed. Viewing angles are in effect good and even with a room full of people, one can enjoy the images without any issues.

The USB flash drive

Using the USB flash drive, we were able to playback videos quite then except with some colours being more pronounced than others. Videos rendered very smoothly and no other issues were noticed. We tried the 2D to 3D simulation and it performed decently. Even though it was not as good as the LG LW6500, this 2D to 3D rendering fared a lot better than most other 3D televisions. The active glasses that come along with this television did not produce much flickering and overall we were pleased with the 3D performance. With X-Reality innovation that’s available in this television, standard definition videos look a lot more refined. This appealed to us a lot.Streaming video content off the net was a breeze and we able to view the preloaded channels without any hiccups. We tested the ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ Blu-ray with this television and the video playback was brilliant. There were no backlighting issues whatsoever, which added to the stellar performances of this TV. The remote control was very responsive and we had no issues. This attributes to there being multiple sensors on the face of the television. Out of the box, the KDL-46EX72 is good to go and tweaking of brightness or contrast levels is not necessary.