Review: Sony Bravia KDL-52HX903

Sony has really upped the ante with its 2010 Bravia TV range. It's added many more features and introduced a radical new 'Monolithic' design.

So the first thing we must do with the 52-inch KDL-52HX903 is put our detective hat on and try to nail precisely where it sits in the company's labyrinthine lineup.

From the front, it looks like any number of new Sony models, with its sheer, one-layer fascia comprising a black, glass-topped bezel containing a subtly illuminated Sony logo in its bottom edge. It sticks out further round the back than Sony's new edge-LED models, though.

And there's good reason for this, for it uses direct LED lighting, where the diodes sit right behind the screen rather than around its edge. So hopefully it will deliver on the established wisdom that says direct lighting delivers superior picture performance to edge lighting.

Third dimension

The other big news about the 52HX903 is that it is 3D capable, although you'll need to add an optional 3D kit containing a transmitter (£50) and as many active shutter glasses as you want (£99 each). If you want 3D capabilities built in, you'll have to buy Sony's edge-lit LX903 models instead.

For one last bit of perspective here, it's worth adding that Samsung's similarly specified edge LED model, the 55in UE55C8000 costs around the same at £3,000, while LG's 55in 55LX9900, which we reviewed recently, costs around £3,700 and both these models have 3D electronics integrated.

We start this section with a feature the 52HX903 doesn't support. For, due to its relatively large depth, it can't be slotted into one of Sony's slinky silver speaker bar/stand options. Though the TV still looks lovely on the black desktop stand provided.

Judging by the connections, Sony must think that most people who buy a 52HX903 will prefer to use this stand rather than wall hang it. For most of the connections face straight out of the TV's rear rather than providing side entry.

Connections

That said, there are a couple of HDMIs down the side of the screen, together with a USB port you can use for either playing back video, photo or music files, or inserting an optional Wi-Fi dongle. It would be nice to have the latter built into a £3k TV, but it's not to be.

The set does carry an Ethernet port so you can access Sony's Bravia Internet Video platform (as well as content on a DLNA PC, or future interactive services from the TV's built-in Freeview HD tuner).

Bravia Internet Video is arguably the most complete online TV platform around at the moment. The amount of video streaming content available is considerable, taking in a huge and extremely varied series of content providers including YouTube, blip.tv, DailyMotion, HowTo.com, the Demand Five Channel 5 'iPlayer', and LoveFilm. With LoveFilm you can sync the TV to your online account, and downstream full films on demand.

Also impressive is how stable the Bravia Internet Video platform was during our tests via a simple 2MB connection: a result, perhaps, of the TV's built-in seven-second buffer.

The optional 3D transmitter for the 52HX903 attaches to a special port on the TV's rear, with the TV automatically detecting its presence and activating the TV's 3D options.

The local dimming engine at work with the 52HX903's direct lighting system handles all the individual clusters of LEDs that drive the picture individually, so that you can, in theory, have full brightness from one cluster right alongside full blackness from another.

This results in what Sony has opted to call 'GigaContrast', which sounds more like the name of a Godzilla adversary than a helpful measurement of TV performance.

Smooth processing

Another major discovery on the 52HX903 is its MotionFlow 400 processing. This suggests that the TV has 400Hz processing, which isn't strictly true. For in fact it has 200Hz processing with a scanning backlight; the same configuration used in Samsung's C8000 3D TVs. Interestingly, Samsung's marketing has stuck with calling those TVs 200Hz models.

The 52HX903's onscreen menus are awash with features and adjustments, some useful, some not. In the latter column, are detail and edge enhancers that tend to make the picture look forced, plus the Eco feature that adjusts the picture automatically in response to ambient light conditions.

After all, after spending £3k on a TV, you might prefer to calibrate the picture yourself than rely on an automatic system to do it for you.

Tweaking the setup

Among the useful tools are gamma adjustment, an option for adjusting the aggressiveness of the dynamic LED control, various 'strength' settings for the MotionFlow system, and a Clear White mode with three alternative white balance settings.

You also get three settings of Sony's LiveColour processor, for boosting colour saturations. But rather surprisingly, you don't get a proper colour management system, something that surely should be a given on a £3k TV.

Luckily, the TV is capable of producing a very likeable colour performance under its own steam. But there were still occasions where a skin tone here or a grassy shade there didn't look quite perfect, and might have benefited from some fine tuning.

Finally, there are a few tricks of note to report with the set's 3D playback. For starters, as with Samsung's 3D TVs, the 52HX903 can convert 2D pictures to 3D if you wish. But you're also provided with tools for adjusting the depth of the 3D effect, and, intriguingly, for adjusting the brightness of the 3D glasses.

There are good and bad points regarding the 52HX903's operating system. On the plus side, the presentation of the onscreen menus is pretty, with good use of graphics in places, such as the screens where you can pick from your list of inputs or choose a thematic picture preset.

The remote control is comfortably sculpted and many aspects of its button layout work nicely. However, the concentric circle arrangement of buttons at the remote's heart makes it far too easy to select the wrong button, especially in a dark room.

Interface

As for the onscreen menus, while they're smartly presented, their twin-axis structure also means they can be a little tortuous to navigate - a situation not helped by the way they default to the input list every time you call them up, or by the slight delay caused by some of the menu selections.

One final niggle concerns the 3D controls. For while the remote sports a dedicated 3D button, pressing it doesn't give you access to key options like being able to select what sort of 3D content you're watching (side by side, over under, etc). Nor does the 3D option in the Home Menu give you this sort of control: instead, you have to press the Options button.

The 52HX903's pictures are generally excellent. Particularly exceptional is the image's contrast.

Thanks to the efforts of one of the best local dimming systems we've seen, the 52HX903 is capable of producing both startlingly deep black levels and squint-inducingly bright whites, all within a single frame, which is something a standard LCD TV could never hope to do so successfully.

It's great to see, too, that the 52HX9032 delivers its superb black levels with impressive cross-screen consistency, with little to no evidence of uneven brightness or patches of clouding. Nor does the image's overall brightness level jump around obviously as the picture is asked to cope with mixed brightness content from a source, avoiding another common LCD failing.

Contrast levels

Direct LED-lit TVs with local dimming can have a habit of losing shadow detail in dark scenes. But while it's certainly true that good plasma and some good edge LED screens can reproduce slightly more shadow detail, the Sony certainly doesn't leave dark picture areas looking excessively hollow.

Nor does the 52HX903 suffer too badly from LED's tendency to cause light halos around bright objects when they appear against dark backgrounds.

You can see a gentle cloud around things like the white MGM logo against a completely black background, but the issue is sufficiently contained that you only get a sense of it under really extreme image conditions; there's no obvious telltale cloudiness to normal pictures.

Colour response

As is often the case with TVs that boast extreme contrast ranges, the 52HX903 also enjoys a superb colour response. The range of hues on show is immense, enabling the picture to look dynamic and subtle all at the same time.

And tones are mostly on the money, despite the lack of much serious fine tuning potential. The previously mentioned moments where tones can look a little unbalanced without the colour management tools to fix them are thankfully rare.

Motion reproduction is another palpable hit. This 52in set produces the cleanest, sharpest most natural motion we've seen on a Sony TV so far. In fact, its motion handling is among the very best we've seen from any flat TV to date.

You do have to be a little careful with some of the screen's settings to keep motion looking spot on; set the MotionFlow system too high, for instance, and shimmering noise appears around the edges of moving objects.

The Film mode can make small objects like tennis balls disappear momentarily, too, if you're not careful when you use it. But provided you're careful, pictures will remain blissfully free of both judder and blur/smearing.

Crisp image reproduction

The 52HX903's exceptional talents extend to its reproduction of the sharpness and detail with HD sources, leaving Blu-rays and HD broadcasts alike looking crisp and clean. We have seen some TVs make HD look even more defined, but we found the 52HX903's level of sharpness to be engagingly natural, especially as it doesn't emphasise source noise.

The 52HX903's standard-definition performance is good too, with the TV's Bravia Engine 3 processing clever enough to add detail to pictures during the upscaling process while also sifting out noise.

The all-important 3D performance throws up the first really significant picture problem. Pictures undoubtedly suffer from crosstalk, where you can see ghosting to either side of the edges of very defined objects.

As with its appearance on Samsung and LG's LCD 3D TVs, this can be very distracting at its worst, leaving images looking unfocused.

3D crosstalk

However, while there's clearly more crosstalk around than we witnessed on Panasonic's P50VT20 3D plasma set (which remains our 3D TV of choice), there also seems slightly less of it than we saw on the 3D sets from Samsung and LG. Indeed, there's sufficiently less of it to leave the 52HX903's 3D pictures looking mostly rather enjoyable.

Especially since they remain impressively bright and colourful even with the (unusually comfortable and light-shielding) 3D glasses on, aside from a slightly creamier look to peak whites.

Sony's 2D to 3D conversion system is rather less aggressive than Samsung's, with its 3D effect really being very limited in depth. But on the plus side, this does mean it produces precious few unnatural depth effects.

One other smaller issue with the 52HX903's pictures is that, as with all direct LED TVs we've seen, it suffers a slightly limited viewing angle; watching from more than round 40 degrees results in a big leap in light haloing around bright objects, and a reduction in colour intensity and authenticity.

Given that the 52HX903 is fairly chunky by today's standards, its audio is underwhelming. It stands up to everyday TV stuff OK, but as soon as it's pushed hard with a robust film soundtrack, trebles start to sound distinctly tinny, the mid-range sounds thin and unconvincing and bass becomes largely non-existent.

Three grand is, without question, a considerable ask for a 52in TV, especially one that asks you to cough up an extra £150 minimum for its 3D features, and still more if you want to add Wi-Fi.

Against this, though, is the simple fact that the set produces 2D pictures that frequently look nothing short of magnificent, and good, if flawed, 3D pictures with the 3D transmitter attached.

Plus, the set looks a million dollars and has some of the best multimedia capability around.

Sony certainly can't be accused of being half-hearted with its 3D debut. The 52HX903 is stuffed to bursting point with features, all classily integrated within one of the most stylish TVs the brand has produced for years.

Its online features are arguably the best around at the moment, and the picture quality produced by the direct LED backlighting system is also comfortably ahead of any of the other Sony LCD TVs we've seen to date, and thus by default the finest picture quality Sony has ever achieved with an LCD TV. In fact, it's one of the best pictures we've seen from any flatscreen so far.

Or at least that's the case with its 2D pictures. For while its 3D pictures are the second best we've seen, with impressive clarity, rich colours and a good (adjustable) sense of depth, they still suffer noticeably with the crosstalk ghosting issue that's blighted 3D playback on all non-plasma TVs we've seen to date.

It's also a shame that Sony hasn't been able to make the 52HX903's audio meatier, and perhaps the TV feels rather expensive for a set that has to have its 3D compatibility added separately at extra cost.

We liked:

Its design is superbly regal, it is extremely well stocked with connections and has an impressive features list.

Its picture quality is what really wins us over, though, as Sony's second generation of direct LED backlighting technology is used to fantastic effect to produce one of the most dynamic, natural and colourful pictures we've seen.

We disliked:

Although the 52HX903 is pretty much beyond reproach with 2D material, it does suffer at times with crosstalk noise when showing 3D, in keeping with other LCD TVs we've seen.

Its viewing angle is rather restricted too, and there is minor haloing around very bright objects when they appear against very dark backgrounds.

Finally, it lacks full colour management tools, and its sound is surprisingly bland and thin for such a substantial and pricey TV.

Verdict:

As with the recent review of LG's 55LX9900, Sony's 52HX903 presents us with a conundrum. For while it's a technological and design marvel capable of delivering outstanding multimedia talents and producing terrific 2D pictures, its 3D talents are slightly scarred by their susceptibility to crosstalk noise. Its audio is nothing to write home about either.

These latter issues inevitably bring the set's £3k price into play and not in a good way. It's impossible to ignore the fact that Panasonic's 50in P50VT20 TV does better with 3D and is still an excellent 2D performer with a good multimedia feature count, all for £950 less once you've taken the cost of the Sony's extra 3D kit into account.