World Crisis Online

Sony; Panasonic Comment Print Email Reprints share LinkedIn StumbleUpon Reddit Digg Del.i.cious Tweet Five years ago, I headed to Costco and brought home the biggest flat-screen TV that would fit in my hatchback. The 42-inch Vizio LCD set I chose was my first HDTV and a massive improvement on the 25-inch tube TV it replaced.

Even so, it was a basic, budget-priced model, not a dream machine. And a lot has happened to TV in the past half-decade — most notably the advent of services such as Netflix Watch Instantly and Hulu Plus, which make the Internet a plausible alternative to cable and satellite TV. My Vizio can get online via the use of external gadgetry, but it feels like a throwback. (See the top 10 gadgets of 2010.)

So when I recently got the chance to review a thoroughly modern television set — Sony’s new Bravia KDL-55HX820 — I happily removed the Vizio from its place of honor in my entertainment center. The Bravia lists for $3,399.99 but is $2,799.99 direct from Sony and $2,144 at Amazon as I write this. With 55 inches of real estate and technical advances like LED backlighting, it resoundingly trumps my TV in terms of picture size and quality. Its minimalist black case and sleek profile — it’s barely over an inch thick — also beat the boxy Vizio.

As long as I was going to have a home theater-worthy TV in the house, I set up a real home theater by adding Panasonic’s SC-HTB520 Sound Bar 2.1 audio system. The $399.99 kit includes a 40-inch stereo speaker bar that can sit in front of the TV and a subwoofer that you can tuck pretty much anywhere you want, since it communicates with the bar wirelessly. Snooty audiophiles who’d cheerfully fill their living rooms with speakers and string the necessary cables might turn up their noses at this setup. I liked it, though — both for the five-minute installation and for the dramatic upgrade in sound quality over the Bravia’s stock audio. The first time that bass boomed out of the subwoofer, it sent my cats scurrying for cover.

I hooked the Bravia and Panasonic up to my Comcast cable, TiVo DVR and PlayStation 3 (which doubles as a Blu-ray player). But I was most interested in test-driving the multitude of Internet services that Sony has built into this set. So much entertainment is in there that a box such as Apple TV or Roku would be superfluous. If it wasn’t for the paucity of sports and news, you might even be able to get away with dumping cable.

This Sony TV has the best assortment of video services I’ve seen on one device that isn’t a PC: Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu Plus, Amazon Video on Demand, CinemaNow, YouTube, Dailymotion, Sony’s own Qriocity and Crackle, and more. For music, you get Pandora, Slacker and Sony’s Music Unlimited. Yahoo Widgets provide access to Twitter, Facebook and weather reports. If none of this stuff manages to amuse you, you can also use the Bravia’s support for a technical standard called DLNA to tap into audio, video and photos stored on your home network. The set even has USB ports that let it access files on hard disks or thumb drives. (See the 50 best inventions of 2010.)

In short, the set offers an embarrassment of riches — although a few of its many offerings are embarrassing, period. For example, a page of video podcasts included outdated shows (Larry King Live!) and video that simply wouldn’t play, at least when I tried. And I’m not sure who the intended audience is for its Internet browser, which expects you to enter text with a TV remote control and sluggishly displays Web pages with teeny-tiny fonts that you won’t want to read from across the room. Still, even if you stick to the good stuff — especially the major movie and music services — the Bravia offers a smorgasbord of content.

I found the set’s user interface, a fraternal twin of the one on Sony’s PlayStation 3, to be merely tolerable. The profusion of menus and options makes it tough to find items, especially since some of them are pockmarked with oddities like a Barbie widget and show “recommendations” that look suspiciously like promos for CBS shows. The sign-up process for Amazon and Netflix is also less brain-dead simple than it is on most devices. I did like the fact that a search feature is available nearly everywhere, though. And when my wife Marie tried the remote and saw that it had a dedicated Netflix button, her response was simple: “Life is good.”

The Bravia includes both built-in wi-fi wireless networking and an Ethernet port. I was skeptical about depending on wi-fi: High-definition video is one of the most bandwidth-hungry applications known to man, and I knew that my network’s signal strength in the living room was less than fabulous. I gave it a try, though, and found that some video services worked fine but others suffered from intermittent pauses as they buffered video. I ended up ditching wi-fi and installing a couple of powerline networking adapters, which let the TV talk to my router over electrical wiring. That greatly reduced video hiccups but didn’t eliminate them. (High-def movies from Amazon remained persnickety.)

Even if HD isn’t glitch-free, it’s the medium that you want to watch on the Bravia. (With HDTVs, the bigger and better the set, the crummier standard-definition content tends to look.) HD from cable looked good. Blu-ray — a format I hadn’t warmed to on the Vizio — looked better. And HD from streaming services varied from okay to outstanding. (The best-looking, best-sounding Internet HD I found was on Walmart’s Vudu, a service that isn’t included on the Bravia but is available on the PlayStation 3.)

Oh, yeah: Like many new TVs, the Sony is 3-D capable. The special glasses, which aren’t included, run about $70 each. Marie and I aren’t exactly 3-D fanatics, but we dutifully donned spectacles and sampled a Blu-ray of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. We had about the same reaction to the technology that we have had at theaters: sporadic enjoyment of dimensionality interspersed with tedium and complaints about the picture being blurry. If you’re more enthusiastic about 3-D than we are, you might find it more of a selling point.

After half an hour of Alice, we switched to watching Avatar in glorious, razor-sharp 2-D. Lounging in my own comfy chair a few feet from such a pristine picture, enveloped in sound from the Panasonic system, I didn’t just find this borrowed home-theater system to be a step up from my aging Vizio. It also felt more civilized than our local cineplex. True, new movies like Captain America and Horrible Bosses aren’t part of the package, but neither are noisy strangers, overpriced popcorn and hazardous parking lots. I can live with that trade-off — maybe not all of the time, but a lot more often than I ever would with a lesser TV.

McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he’s @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every week on TIME.com.

See the 20 back to school gadgets.

Read about how to watch free HDTV with an antenna.

Comment Print Email Reprints share LinkedIn StumbleUpon Reddit Digg Del.i.cious Most Popular » Full List » MOST READ MOST EMAILED 8 Ways to Beat the Winter Blues Woman Reportedly Burns Down House After Facebook Un-Friending Pictures of the Week, October 28 – November 4 The Mars500 Experiment Ends Who Are Hollywood's Most Overpaid Actors? Anna Hazare: Breaking His Silence to Win Back India’s Middle Class Israel Drills for a Missile Strike Magic Johnson and HIV: The Lasting Impact of Nov. 7, 1991 ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Can Improve Psychological Health Long Term Chinese Boat Skipper Arrested off Japan Why Would China Want to Help Bail Out the Euro Zone?Chopin’s Iconic Piano: A Historic Family Feud in MajorcaFifty Years After the Invite, Turks Are Still Outsiders in GermanyPlaying FavoritesWhen Will We Learn? More News from Our Partners CNN ‘Call of Duty’ to let gamers cross platforms Nook Tablet coming November 16 Apple’s new ‘glass cube’ store reopens in NYC Huffington Post Herman Cain Accused Of Sexual Harassment By Another Former Employee Actress Sues Amazon For Revealing Her Age On IMDb Jon Stewart: Occupy Wall Street 'The Hard Rock Cafe Of Leftist Movements' DailyFinance.com Rick Perry’s ‘Cut, Balance and Grow’ Flat Tax Plan: Big Savings, Bigger Costs The 4 Emotional Traps That Are Really Making Americans Miserable Money-Life Balance: What It Is and How to Get It Time.com on Digg Upcoming Popular Today POWERED BY digg

Related SpecialsGadgets Then and Now Newsfeed 12 Oddly Artsy Posters for the London 2012 Olympic Games In Case You Missed It: SNL Rips on Kim's Divorce and Perry's Antics No Sour Grapes: Wines From ‘Bad Years’ Are Best Values More on TIME.com Which G Would You Be? A Top 10, from the G20 to Kenny G Kim Kardashian and the Top 10 Short-Lived Celebrity Marriages 7 Billion People: How the Next Population Milestone Will Affect Our Crowded World Techland Do Windows 8 Tablets Stand a Chance? Andy Rooney: 'I Don't Really Like Gadgets' (and Other Tech Quips) 'Nest' Thermostats Already Sold Out Through Early 2012 Moneyland The NBA Lockout and the Economy: An Overstated Impact What the Greek Debt Crisis Means for You Could the Fed Spark the Housing Market? Top Stories on TIME.com Default and Deterioration? What the Greek Debt Crisis Means for You The 22-Year Old Who Led the Charge Against Bank of America What Ricki Lake Doesn’t Tell You About Homebirth Quotes of the Day » “If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families.” JOE PATERNO, Penn State football coach, on the arrest of his former assistant, Jerry Sandusky, for charges of child sex-abuse. Two of the university’s top officials are now facing charges of perjury after failure to report the crimes More Quotes » For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish. Stay Connected with TIME.com Subscribe to RSS Feeds Sign Up for Newsletters Get the TIME Magazine iPad Edition Read TIME Mobile on your Phone Become a Fan of TIME Get TIME Twitter Updates NewsFeed U.S. Politics World Business Money Health Science Entertainment Photos Videos Specials Magazine © 2011 Time Inc. All rights reserved Privacy Policy RSS Newsletter Mobile TIME For Kids LIFE.com Subscribe Contact Us Terms of Use Media Kit Reprints & Permissions Help Site Map Ad Choices TIME Our partners CNN CNN MONEY LIFE