Sony KV-27FS13 27" Flat-Screen TV
Nice picture, nice sound, but...
My previous TV, a 25-incher, conked out two days before Thanksgiving. After three days of furious research, I ventured out to my \\"local\\" electronics store (8 miles away!) at 8 am the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. I had already decided on a Sony 27\\" flat-screen and didn't need PIP, so the KV27FS13 was the one. It was rather difficult to judge the quality of the picture in the store; I couldn't get more than five feet away from the set, arrayed as they were down narrow aisles. But the price was right, and I've had a good experience with my Sony flat-screen computer monitor.<BR>The punchline: The salesman asked,\\" How many do you want? We have 19 in stock.\\" Ooh. (...)One for every bedroom. As if.<br />With bungee cords, the box barely fit in the trunk of my Caprice, but I got it home and in the door, courtesy of my trusty handcart.<BR>Getting it up on the TV stand with no help proved harder. At 100 pounds and with few right angles for my hands to get a purchase on, it's a big'un. I'm glad I got the in-home repair plan, 'cause I ain't movin' that thing again till it's ready to go to that home theater in the sky.<br />But enough of all that. You want to know about the picture. Well, it's flat, and there is less glare, but it's a picture. The ugly little secret no one will admit is that picture quality is dependent on many things, none having to do with the flatness of one's TV screen.<br />This has been brought brutally home to me during the time I've had the set. On the stations with high quality signals, the picture is fantastically bright and clear. I can see the weave in fabrics, the blemishes, laughlines and stretchmarks on actors' skins, the veins on leaves and petals, the scratches and nicks in football players' helmets. Watching certain cable channels, old family videos or clapped-out video-store rentals, however, is an exercise in frustration. I can only compare the experience to trying to read fine print without my bifocals. Our local peacock-network affiliate has multiple ghosts and scratchy sound, as it has for the last three years. <br />Around back, it's got more plugs and outlets than my stereo receiver. From the looks of them, you could hook up enough speakers to start a second Northridge quake. The cable connection worked, and that's all I cared about. <br />A few minor quibbles. There's no flat surface on top to rest the cable guide and TV listings. Why bother putting volume, channel, and on-off controls along the top front edge of the cabinet? And the color of that cabinet can best be described as stained-with-a-few-years-worth-of-kitchen-grease-silver. Sony, please. Either make it bright silver or paint it black.<br />Once you OPEN AND READ THE MANUAL, this TV's onscreen menus are a joy to use. And I have a Sony VCR, so I can use its remote and the TV's remote almost interchangeably. Very nice.<br />Moms 'n' Dads who use TV as an electronic babysitter will be happy to know that through the use of this Sony's password-prompted parental controls, their progeny can be blocked from seeing anything but G-rated fare, so hopefully they will grow up be model students and upstanding citizens and not stand around smoking and spitting and making noise in front of my house. We shall see. <br />Watching old CinemaScope movies that have been letterboxed is a much more pleasant experience than on my old 1989 25\\" bubble-screen. If you do a lot of that, you might want to spring for a 32\\" flat-screen, but invite some strong friends over for pizza and beer the day you bring it home. It's close to 200 pounds (Yes, I asked while I was at the store.)<br />Sound? It's head-and-shoulders above that coming from my old TV, whose two integral \\"stereo\\" speakers were partially blocked by the housing. I've already tried hooking the TV up to my stereo system using both the back and front audio ports, and the sound is phenomenal. I got a pretty good idea of what surround sound would be like if I ever went that route. Again, the sound is best on newer shows that were in stereo to begin with. Old movies and TV shows(my favorite kind) didn't have clear-as-a-bell sound to begin with, and there's not much improvement in 1950's audio even on a 2001 flat-screen stereo set.<br />So there you are, folks. If you're going to buy a Wega or any other flat-screen TV, buy it. Wonderful picture, wonderful sound under ideal conditions. But don't expect it to be a cure-all for weak output from the aforementioned sources. If anything, the high-quality display and the relative power of the speakers will exacerbate the flaws in these sources.As we used to say in the bad old days of DOS and the bad new days of HTML, \\"Garbage in, garbage out.\\"