The Sony Bravia KDL-40EX503 is Sony’s very first TV to come packing a built-in Freeview HD tuner.
As we sit in our high-spec, tech-fuelled test rooms, it’s easy not to get particularly excited by Freeview HD. After all, we’ve had loads of HD channels for years now from Sky, as well as a couple from Freesat.
But the reality is that our tech labs are hardly representative of the Great British TV marketplace as a whole. For many ‘normal’ people, getting a satellite dish and new receiver for Freesat HD involves too much hassle and clutter, while the monthly subs cost of getting Sky’s HD platform just doesn’t bear thinking about.
In fact, let’s be honest here: there’s a healthy chunk of the British populace that barely understands what HD does, much less actually watches any of it.
So the truth is that in terms of potentially making HD mainstream, the arrival of Freeview HD – an HD service you can receive through your TV aerial rather than a dish – is potentially a very big deal indeed.
When we talk here about Freeview HD arriving in the UK, we’re not meaning that Freeview HD broadcasts have only just been switched on. The Crystal Palace transmitter has actually been sending out HD signals since December 2nd 2009.
But today sees the launch of a new product at the reception end of the Freeview HD chain: the UK’s very first TV with a built-in Freeview HD tuner, able to receive the new DVB-T2 transmission standard.
That TV is this Sony’s 40-inch KDL-40EX503. Which has to count as quite a coup for the Japanese giant, given that it can sometimes be slightly late to the party when it comes to mainstream (as opposed to enthusiast) TV technology.
In fact, you could argue that the 40EX503 has arrived too early! For as happened with standard definition Freeview when it launched, Freeview HD is currently far from a nationwide phenomenon.
Freeview HD issues
The need to upgrade transmitters for Freeview HD means the service is currently only available from two transmitters: Crystal Palace in London and Winter Hill in the North West (the latter transmitter covers around 2,690,000 homes in a circle centred near Blackburn and stretching to Chester and Macclesfield to the South, and Lancaster and Skipton to the North).
Around 60 per cent of the UK’s population is expected to be able to get Freeview HD by the end of 2010, but there will still be huge swathes of the country that won’t be able to receive Freeview HD until 2011 – at the earliest.
However, while this Freeview HD ‘regionalism’ seems hugely unfair given that we all pay the same TV license fee, it is, of course, not Sony’s fault.
In fact, Sony would doubtless love it if every single person in the UK could already get Freeview HD, since all it can do with things as they are is provide a TV geared up for the areas already lucky enough to have Freeview HD broadcasts, and hope that other people in areas not currently served by Freeview HD will fancy buying a Freeview HD TV anyway, just so they’re future proof.
If you want to find out just how much of a wait you have before Freeview HD reaches you, a postcode checker can be found on Freeview’s website.
The final little background ‘disappointment’ we ought to cover before getting our teeth into the 40EX503 is the amount of HD content on Freeview. For at the moment you only get the BBC’s part-time HD channel, and the very sporadic HD content from ITV.
Channel Four’s HD broadcasts are promised to hit the platform soon, though. And in any case, for cash-strapped and/or dish-hating folk, having any HD channels at all via your aerial is infinitely better than having none.
The EX503 series is positioned as the second rung up Sony’s Freeview HD TV ladder, resting above the as yet unseen EX403. And its step up from the entry-level model finds it sporting two main advantages: one aesthetic, one feature based.
The aesthetic improvement finds a brushed aluminium panel running along the TV’s bottom edge, which adds a touch of opulence to the otherwise straightforward glossy black rectangle of the rest of the bezel.
The 40EX503′s main feature boost over the EX403 is its MotionFlow 100Hz system, designed to reduce judder and LCD’s core problems with motion blur.
But that’s far from the end of the 40EX503′s processing story, for it also has Sony’s Bravia Engine 3 system, with its broad focus on improving everything from colour and contrast to sharpness and standard definition upscaling.
While Bravia Engine 3 continues from last year’s range, though, the 40EX503 makes a massive leap forward in another area: online capabilities.
We’ve written many times before about the impoverished nature of the AppliCast online system introduced on some of last year’s Bravia models, so it’s a huge relief to find the 40EX503 taking things to a much, much higher level. Including, most noticeably, lots of smooth HD video streaming.
Online video content
Particularly welcome – not least because most rival online platforms have been offering it for a while now – is YouTube support.
This includes all the popular features seen on other online TV platforms, such as easy remote control access to lists of Featured, Most Popular, Most Discussed, Most Responded, Most Viewed, Top Favourites and Top Rated videos.
The video quality of the clips is ultimately dependent on how they’ve been encoded to YouTube’s servers, but the BE3 engine does a fair job of upscaling them to the TV’s HD resolution.
Another new service to Sony is blip.tv, designed to provide an online ‘channel’ for ‘quirky’ independent TV series. Some of the series are in HD, which, crucially, manages to stream perfectly smoothly into our 40EX503 using just a standard 2MB broadband pipe.
It very likely helps the stability of the 40EX503′s video streaming capabilities that the set carries a buffer able to store up to seven seconds of video material, and supports PING monitoring, where it assesses the quality of the connection to a specific site and adjusts the video quality it receives accordingly, where possible.
Another intriguing new video streaming service is Sony’s Digital Cinema Concert Series. At the time of writing this featured concerts from ThirdEyeBlond, Creed and Chickenfoot, together with backstage footage. And, um, none of the footage actually worked, flagging up ‘Content Error’ messages when we tried to play it.
But while it’s a bit embarrassing that Sony’s own content should fail during our tests, we guess the system is still in its early days, and should be fixed by the time the TVs start landing in people’s homes.
Next up on the online platform, rather bizarrely, is a Ford Models service, where you get to see various models from the Ford agency talking you through their photograph portfolios and giving beauty tips. Hmm.
We guess this might have been added with noble fashionista intentions, but we have a sneaky feeling it will mostly be watched late at night by lonely blokes…
DailyMotion and more
Yet more video content comes from DailyMotion, a sort of YouTube rival with less content but lots of HD, as well as not one but two ‘how to’ video services: howcast and eHow, covering everything, from applying for unemployment benefit to avoiding jet lag and finding love with a Capricon! Wow, you really do have to love the internet.
An OnNetworks portal, meanwhile, provides among other things HD video of tourist resorts, videos about the gaming world, and video golf tips, with more meaty golfing content provided by golflink.com, which features reams of videos on how to improve your golf technique.
More lifestyle content comes from livestrong.com, with pages of video clips on everything from dealing with diseases to improving your appearance and relationships.
If music’s your bag, then there’s the SingingFool portal, where you can see a healthy selection of music videos from new, aspiring bands across a variety of genres.
The penultimate online service is a facility for listening to podcasts from a selection of the most popular podcast sources (including NASA and CNN). But I’ve saved arguably the best online service until the last: LoveFilm.
At the moment this only offers trailers for new films (many in HD), and tended to suffer a little with judder and digital blocking. But these problems should be ironed out easily enough, especially if you have a fast online connection. Even better, Sony assures us that you should eventually be able to sync your LoveFilm account to your Bravia TV and then stream in full, paid-for feature films.
This potential to sync with online accounts for full movie streaming adds an important new dimension to online TV connectivity beyond the video streaming (including iPlayer support) introduced a couple of months ago by Cello’s iViewer TV.
We guess some people might rue the lack of full internet access on the 40EX503. But avoiding this allows Sony to deliver a really slick and quick online interface, and doesn’t detract from the fact that Sony has gone from online zero to hero in one fell swoop.
Specification
The internet services described above are piped into the 40EX503 via either an optional Wi-Fi USB dongle, or a built-in Ethernet port.
Other connections alongside this Ethernet jack, meanwhile, include four HDMIs, a USB 2.0 input able to play MP3, JPEG and AVC/AVCHD/DivX/MPEG4 video files, two Scarts and a PC port. We should add, too, that the Ethernet port can also be used for streaming in multimedia stuff from a DLNA-certified PC.
The only pity concerning the connections, in fact, is the fact that there’s only one USB, which could become a pain if you go for the optional Wi-Fi dongle but also want to sometimes use a USB storage device to play files into the TV.
While the 40EX503′s feature count is obviously dominated by its new Freeview HD tuner and online services, it has got a few other tricks up its sleeve worth mentioning.
There’s Sony’s Picture Frame system, for instance, whereby the TV goes into a low-power mode so that you can use a photo as a ‘screensaver’ when you’re not actually watching the set.
There’s also support for the National Public Radio online portal, an ambient light sensor, MPEG and standard noise reduction routines, a black correction tool, a sliding gamma bar, and Sony’s Live Colour system for boosting colour saturations. You can also turn the 100Hz engine off if you don’t like the way it works with a particular source.
After a few teething problems – including it taking five minutes to figure out how to get batteries into the remote! – we finally realised that the 40EX503′s operating system is really rather good.
The number of key features, such as Internet Video, that have dedicated buttons on the remote for immediate access is impressive, and the PS3 XMB-style double-axis on-screen menu approach works well once you’re used to it.
The electronic programme guide for finding stuff on the Freeview platform is nice too, combining lots of clearly presented information with a sensible navigation system and a small picture of the channel you’re currently watching playing in the top-left corner.
We should add for the record, too, that the new remote control design feels more comfortable in the hand than the old skinnier Sony design, as well as making buttons easier to pick out.
Let’s kick off this section with the all-important Freeview HD playback. Which is… variable.
Sometimes some BBC and ITV material (broadcast currently in 1080i/50, though 1080p/25 and 720p/50 are also supported) looks great – sharp, clean and crisp. And sometimes it looks a little soft and noisy. This slight variability is not the Sony TV’s fault, though, but rather an issue with the broadcasts.
Don’t be too alarmed by the variability in Freeview HD quality, though. For even one of the less impressive Freeview HD images still beats a standard def Freeview image into a cocked hat.
Decent performance
Turning to the quality of the 40EX503′s images rather than those of the broadcasts it receives, the news is mostly very good.
Particularly excellent is the 40EX503′s black level response, which achieves levels of profundity much deeper than anything Sony has managed before, and actually deeper than that of almost any other non-LED LCD TV we can think of – bar, perhaps, Samsung’s B650 models.
It’s nice to find, too, that the 40EX503′s screen does a great job of soaking up ambient light reflections. But best of all on the black level front, the 40EX503 suffers scarcely at all with that recurring Sony problem of backlight leakage.
Contrast niggles
If you look really hard during extremely dark scenes, you might just make out the tiniest hint of backlight inconsistency in the extreme corners. But it’s much, much less noticeable than it was on many sets from Sony’s previous generation, and simply can’t be seen at all during 95% of your viewing time.
It’s a relief, too, to find that Sony has achieved its excellent black level on the 40EX503 without sacrificing as much shadow detail as we might have expected.
Another feather in the 40EX503′s cap concerns its motion handling, as it manages to pretty much completely remove judder from the image, even if you only use the Motionflow processing’s Standard setting.
Actually, we’d advise that you stick with this rather than going for the High mode, as otherwise you can start to see a few too many processing artefacts. In Standard mode, side effects are restricted to the rare appearance of momentary flickering or shimmering around very fast objects – something that’s easy to live with given the benefits the system brings.
The 40EX503′s colours, meanwhile, are good, displaying exceptional subtlety when it comes to blends and colour shifts.
HD images also contain plenty of detail without looking gritty or forced, and standard definition pictures are translated to the screen’s full HD resolution without exaggerating source noise.
The only issues we have with the 40EX503′s pictures, in fact, are a) that colours are a tad muted post calibration, and b) they’re not quite as crisp looking as we’d like, thanks to a touch of motion blur, and a generally marginally soft tone.
But unless you’re one of those people who love to see every HD pixel presented with clinical, almost forensic clarity, we’re confident that the various plus points of the 40EX503′s picture engine will be more than enough to win your heart.
Sonically the 40EX503 is a classic game of two halves. On the positive side, the 40EX503′s speakers prove unusually adept at picking out treble detail in a sound mix, and presenting it cleanly and precisely.
On the downside, there just isn’t enough bass to balance the treble side out, leaving proceedings sounding a bit tinny and thin.
Value
Many times in the past we’ve found ourselves berating Sony for charging too much for its flat TVs.
But the 40EX503 suggests that the Japanese brand is hell-bent on being competitive this year, for £900 really doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount to pay for a high-performance TV equipped with not one but two ground-breaking features (the Freeview HD tuner and video streaming, in case you’ve lost track!).
Considered simply as a TV, the 40EX503′s generally strong performance, affordable price and currently unique (though probably not for long!) Freeview HD and online video streaming features make it a force to be reckoned with.
It’s only when you put the 40EX503 out there in the nationwide marketplace that any serious issues with it materialise, on account of Freeview HD’s currently very limited availability and rather limited HD content offering.
But it’s really not fair to blame the 40EX503 for Freeview HD’s coverage problems.
And even if you’re not set to get Freeview HD until well into next year, provided you’re patient you could still do worse than consider getting a 40EX503 ready for when your service finally goes live.
We liked:
The good news began so far as the 40EX503 is concerned with its price. We’d firmly expected it to retail for north of £1,000 given the Sony branding and its ground-breaking nature, so its £900 price ticket really doesn’t look bad at all.
It also rather importantly delivers some very good picture quality, sets a new bar for online content, and its all-important Freeview HD tuner works perfectly well. Plus, it’s impressively easy to use for such a complex TV.
We disliked:
In a perfect world, the 40EX503′s pictures would look a touch crisper – something we might actually see happen with Sony’s 200Hz Freeview HD sets when they arrive later in the year.
Colours, too, would ideally deliver a touch more vibrancy after the picture has been calibrated for contrast.
Elsewhere, a second USB would have been nice. But that’s about it.
Verdict:
The bottom line is that if you live in an area that already has or is soon to get Freeview HD, then the 40EX503 absolutely demands an audition.
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