The screen's black-level response, for instance, was excellent, delivering rich black colours largely devoid of the grey clouding phenomenon so common on ordinary LCD TVs. The local dimming capability of the direct LED lighting array helps these rich blacks appear right alongside crisp, exceptionally pure whites, as well as all manner of vibrant colours.
High-definition images looked almost scarily sharp and detailed, and this clarity was hardly hamstrung at all by the motion blur and judder commonly found on LCD TVs. The Motionflow processing that makes this possible can generate an unwanted shimmer or flicker side effect from time to time, but, provided you leave it set to 'clear', these moments are rare enough as to be almost insignificant.
Even RGB dimming and direct LED lighting can't get you perfection, though. For instance, no matter how long we spent calibrating the settings, we couldn't get green tones to look entirely natural. That's possibly a result of the colour range that the TV can produce actually being wider than the colour range of normal video standards.
Also, the picture wasn't as bright once it was correctly calibrated as we'd expect to see with a normal LCD TV. Finally, the Bravia Engine 2 processing didn't do quite such a clean, natural job of upscaling standard-definition images to the screen's 1080p resolution as Bravia Engine 3 does.
Still, with some fair to middling sound quality to keep the often terrific pictures company, there's no doubt that the KDL-46X4500 is a deeply impressive chunk of TV tech. In fact, it might even have managed to justify its £2,700 price tag were it not for one tiny problem: the existence of Samsung's UE46B8000. That 46-inch, LED-edge-lit TV produces comparable picture quality -- its colours are slightly better, in fact -- for about £900 less. And it looks better into the bargain. Ouch.
Conclusion
If considered in isolation, Sony's Bravia KDL-46X4500 is an excellent, sometimes imperious, TV, suggesting again that LED backlighting really is the quality option for LCD technology. It's just a pity for Sony that Samsung's current LED sets perform well enough to make the need for expensive RGB dimming seem questionable, while also being vastly cheaper.
Edited by Charles Kloet
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