After frankly playing catch up for a couple of generations with many of its rivals in the flat TV world, the success of Sony's recent Bravia LCD TV range has clearly got the Japanese giant feeling confident again.
Its latest LCD offering, the KDL-32D3000, at around £750 seems to have pulled out all the stops in an uncompromising bid to make it a truly stellar performer.
Strengths
Sony's 32D3000 is reassuringly tech-heavy. Not least among its attractions is a brand new image-processing system called MotionFlow + 100Hz, which doubles the TV's normal PAL refresh rate to improve LCD's issues with resolving motion. By adding extra frames of image data, the thinking goes, you can reduce the resolution lost as objects pass across the screen.
The 32D3000 is unusual by 32-inch TV standards, in that it accepts high-definition 1080p/24fps sources through its three HDMI inputs too. What's more, these HDMIs are -- for the first time on a 32-inch LCD -- version 1.3 affairs, compatible with features such as automatic lip synching and Deep Colour (provided any sources ever support this picture-boosting facility).
On top of the MotionFlow + 100Hz engine, meanwhile, the 32D3000 also provides Sony's Bravia Engine processing, designed to improve scaling, colours, detail levels and many other things besides. Plus the TV employs 10-bit picture processing to considerably increase the number of colours the set can show.
This all adds up to a formidable wall of picture-processing power, so it probably won't surprise you to learn that, for the most part, those pictures are really quite excellent.
Black levels, for instance, are as good as anything we've seen on a 32-inch LCD screen, avoiding the majority of the greying over effect we've come to expect from LCD TVs and packing dark scenes with plenty of subtle shadow detailing.
Good black levels are usually accompanied by good colours and so it proves on the 32D3000. They're more vibrant and pure than with previous Bravia sets and also retain natural tones under a wider range of circumstances.
The Motionflow + 100Hz system also does its bit to make moving objects look clearer.
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peter martin 15 November 2008
Good: Picture colour clarity
Bad: The frame looks old compared to new model
Comment: I have had this tv for a year now and it still looks spot on, i have a sony blue ray player to go with it. First the picture on freeview is very good, the old films that they show look better than the old crt tvs. As for the high def picture is excellent. I go into tv stores to see the new models the 32d3000 still looks as good as any of them
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