Product DescriptionExperience Sony’s highest level of picture quality in a sleek, elegant design with the Sony BRAVIA LX900 Edge LED Backlight LCD HDTV with 3D. Enjoy incredibly high contrast levels for true blacks and bright whites plus sharp, vibrant colors and crisp, fluid motion. Connect to the internet and instantly stream the widest variety of online entertainment. Add the Sony 3D Sync Transmitter, put on the Sony active glasses and enjoy 3D movies, sports, and video games in Fu… More >>
I first want to say that I based much of my decision to buy the XBR-52LX900 on my past experience with Sony HDTV’s and the research I did on the internet (especially from the tests done by [...]). I’ve paced the big electronic stores and compared many brands and technologies firsthand in the past 5 years and try to make the best decisions I can for what’s right for me. Do all the research you can before you buy any TV and try to see TV’s in person before you make any decision.
I’ve had my LX900 now for 4 days and I can say that it is a mammoth of technology. With so many features, you can get lost and even side tracked with all the settings and features you can meddle with. I can’t count how much personal time I’ve personally lost to this glowing marvel. I got my LX900 to replace my XBR4, which I thought was pretty good at the time when I purchased it 3 years ago and should be better than my XBR9 that I bought earlier this year. First impressions were the size and design. It’s huge, but very thin and quite an elegant, angled creature. I had contemplated the HX909 with the full LED and even the 8000 series Samsung, but decided to go with the LX900 since it’s slimmer and comes with the 3D glasses as well as a built-in 3D emitter and WiFi. The HX909 does have a slightly better picture since it achieves deeper blacks due to full LED lighting, but the LX900 touches off an explosion of LEDs’s to achieve a brighter picture, so I think the LX900 is just a step behind the HX909 visually in terms of contrast ratio. Right out of the box I wasn’t that satisfied with the picture and kept playing with the settings (especially the motion flow). I finally went to [...] and used their “calibrated” settings which really optimized the picture and cleared it up significantly. You really have to come to terms with the fact that source video is everything when it comes to the picture on HDTV’s no matter what settings you choose. The colors on the LX900 are really good and it nearly blinds you with the whites that it can display. However, the screen does glow too much in the deepest blacks with splotches of light on the sides of the screen due to it being an edge-lit LED screen and not full LED with localized dimming which lets a tiny bit of light bleed through. However, my blu-ray 1080P source from the PS3 looks impeccable on this behemoth! HD cable channels are pretty sharp, but anything below that is a bit too cluttered. Sadly, I do get excessive judder on fast motion and I’m trying to hold off on tweaking the motion flow since it seemed to degrade the brightness of the screen and have an overall negative impact on the image (something that an elite HDTV shouldn’t be doing). There’s a “theater mode” on the remote that can benefit the picture of some video sources more than others when you engage it. Some of the signals would get very washed out and grainy, the theater mode helped settle the picture back into a nice soft texture and clear the image up in many cases. Then there’s that little 3D button at the top of the remote. Here’s where things really heated up! You power up the glasses with a single button, hit the “3D” button on the remote, and poof, any image on the screen is converted to 3D! My first experience was “humph”, but that was until I found the 3D settings. The TV default to a “medium” setting in the 3D effect. When I punched it up to high and set the glasses to auto darkness, you really got the feeling that you were looking through a window to the world (something much like looking through an old viewmaster). I unconverted some football, racing, tennis, and golf – which is pretty neat. When I put in “Planet Earth” or any Blu-Ray 1080P source, it really got deep, clear, and started popping out inside the TV! I figured only 3D on a Blu-ray could perform a decent 3D effect, but the LX900 proved me wrong! Since then, I’ve been re-watching all of my Blu-ray media again in 3D – it really is completely different in 3D. The 3D is really good on the LX900, but I know that it wouldn’t look that great without the crisp details and color that it serves up even before you convert it to 3D. I was truly floored when it converted my personal photos into 3D from my PS3! I can’t wait to get the update to my PS3 to play 3D Blu-ray in September. The remote really is a stand out also. I know that sounds ridiculous, I thought the same thing reading other reviews that went on about the remote. I fully understood what they were talking about when I actually got to play with this thing first hand. There’s no battery door to break or lose when you pop it off. Instead, the whole bottom of the remote is a sliding sleeve that moves forward to expose the battery compartment (pretty slick). You can engage widgets and the streaming video over the internet with the press of dedicated buttons (there are plenty of buttons dedicated to one function) as well as navigate the xcross media bar and pull up any settings. The streaming video channels like YouTube and How To TV are pretty neat, but most of the videos are really all sub-par standard definition which looks badly muddled as you could expect. Amazon HD video and Netflix look very good and I have had no buffering problems at all with my WiFi streaming that content. What I can’t understand is why there are so many movie services that do pretty much the same thing as the other. Netflix or Amazon should be all you need for movie service. Same with Slacker radio and Pandora, they do pretty much the same thing, no? The widgets are okay, but they really function way too slow and have a clunky feel to them. There’s not a lot of variety except for the typical Yahoo and Facebook widgets and I can’t stress here how long they take to load. My computer pulls these up quicker and they function much better with a computer and a keyboard. I hope the future holds the integration of app support like the apple store and the android marketplace – are you listening Sony? I am very dismayed by the built-in speakers on this TV, they really sound “tinny” and cheap. I have played with the sound settings trying to get something decent out of them, but for now I have had no success in improving this at all. The i-manual doesn’t really give me any help on this either, but I hope to be able to correct this in the future. Since I have it hooked up to my theater system (which sounds outstanding), this is not a problem yet. That’s another thing that I don’t like about the LX900. It comes with no physical manual. You have to press the button on the remote that’s dedicated for the “i-manual” so that it can pull it up off the net. Navigating the manual is again slow and clumsy. They could have used one branch of tree pulp to manufacture and include a printed manual which would be a big improvement over the i-manual.
So, was this TV worth the price that Sony wants for it? I’d say no. This is why I only gave 4 stars for it. It’s pretty nice to have built in WiFi, 3D emitter, and include 2 pairs of glasses, but for the price it should be a full LED design and really “wow” you with a flawless picture. Then again, the slim monolithic design of the LX900 is the trade-off where you have to make the call. It’s a decision between full LED and edge-lit LED or thicker versus thinner. Since my picture is still one of the best looking pictures I’ve seen (along with the eye popping 3D effects), I am pretty happy with my monster. The widgets and streaming media really weren’t very impressive. I would have to say that it’s a toss-up between the LX900 and the HX909 (might have got the HX909 if they threw in their 3D package and a WiFi dongle), but since the LX900 is supposed to be their flagship model I chose the LX900. You might even consider the Samsung 8000 series, since they’re cheaper. But, I’ve found that there’s something about the Sony (must be the processor) that makes them just a hint more clear to me when they’re side by side with the Samsungs and an identical 1080P source. At any rate, I’d let prices settle at least $900 dollars less before buying one a Sony or wait for the next generation in a year or so.
Rating: 4 / 5