Sony KV27FS12 27" Trinitron WEGA Stereo TV
Amazing picture, 16:9 compression not worth the hassle
I just got this TV today as an upgrade from an old 20&quot; trinitron. The image quality, like others on this group have noticed, is amazing. I was able to compare this TV side-by-side with about 10 other 27&quot; TVs from sony, panasonic and toshiba. The only other TV that came close in image quality was the Panasonic Tau-series flatscreen.<br />The only feature that I'm underwhelmed by is the 16:9 compression mode. The idea of this feature is really cool; it compresses the scan range of the electron gun, giving you the full 500 lines of resolution inside the letterbox of anamorphic DVDs. What they don't mention is that it requires changing setup options on both the TV and the DVD player to make this work (component-inputs only). This wouldn't be a problem, _except_ that you have to revert the settings every time you want to watch a non-anamorphic DVD ... otherwise it double-letterboxes the image, making it very squashed. For me, I just don't want to go through 2 setup menus every time I switch movies, since most of my DVDs are regular widescreen, not anamorphic.