Sony KV32HS510 32" Flat-Screen HDTV
Not great for Standard TV: Soft, grainy, compressed
This model is now discontinued but has been replaced with the very similar Sony model KV-32HS420. I purchased the last one from my local Sam's Club for $650, a great price. It is bulky and very, very heavy (176 lbs.) It nearly killed my neighbor helping me get it up a half flight of stairs. It is so big and deep that it crowds my small living room and feels too close, viewing from 6-7 feet away. After a few days, we got used to that. <br /> <br />The picture quality in HD mode is excellent, but the reason for buying a 3:2 set is because 90% of programming is still standard definition 3:2 format, including the channels I watch most such as IFC, CNN, & Comedy Central. This TV upconverts the 420i standard TV signal to 1040i, which effectively quadruples the image density, so that you don't see large pixels. The problem is that in doing so, a lot of compression is used and the resulting picture has obvious artifacts similar to those found in highly compressed JPEGs. Many people won't notice this or won't care, but for me it's very annoying and I find myself constantly looking for the little particles and extra lines that appear in faces and particularly around text. The compression also makes SD images look softer and more grainy than on a conventional TV. I prefer my 20 year old JVC 27\\" to this! Wide screen DVDs look much sharper and cleaner, possibly due to the 3:2 pulldown and/or 16:9 enhancement which allows for higher resolution from widescreen sources.  <br /> <br />If you have a large room and are going to be viewing at a  distance, this might be a good choice, as the artifacts are hard to see beyond 10 feet or so (but the images are still too soft). If you are going to be watching mostly wide screen or HDTV signals, the image is great, but then you might as well just get a 30\\" - 34\\" wide screen set.  It has no stretch or zoom functions, but you can view 2 sources side by side. The built-in tuner is only a standard NTSC tuner, not an HD tuner, so you can't get over-the-air HD programming out of the box, another huge drawback. I'm not fully satisfied and will probably return it.