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Sony KDL-52XBR6 52" BRAVIA XBR® LCD Flat Panel HDTV

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up the tv. They made sure the remote and the set worked, and they were off after no more than 15-20 minutes from start to finish.

Picture Quality: More than for any other reason, this is why I bought this tv. For me, the decision process started and ended with picture quality, everything else a set had to offer was just extras, nice to have or something to ignore. On the XBR6, HD is stunning. SD is excellent. This is equally true for sports, movies, news, evening soaps. The XBR6 delivers a vibrant picture whether you are sitting straight in front of it or off to one side or the other. The factory settings are very close to the mark, if not on it. If you decide to tweek the picture for personal preferences or to accommodate room lighting, the manual and online menus are easy to follow and offer concise explanations.

No reflective glare: Concern about glare and reflection was a critical decision point for me because the set was going into a room with multiple windows and skylights Daytime with the Sony Wega's reflective crt screen had been horrible. Now, after watching the XBR6 on a few sunny days in a row, glare and reflections are subdued/tamed except on very dark scenes. On colorful scenes, the glare and reflections just aren't noticeable. I am very pleased. My expectations have been more than exceeded. The Samsungs I strongly considered as well as a couple of plasma sets got nixed because of my concerns about reflection and glare. A small negative for me is the reflective quality of the plastic frame around the set.

Sound System: Sound quality from the tv was never a decision factor for me just as it wasn't 10 years ago. A 10 year old Bose Lifestyle 1-2 system was easily connected, and its Dolby 5.1 output sounds better than ever.

Quality and reliability: Sony is number one in service and reliability. The rest are still learning. You can look it up. I did.

Misc. : 1. We have a small net monthly savings by going with direct tv for the local channels, dvr and hd. This amount does not include the foregone costs for tivo since we had paid a one time fee for the life of the unit to avoid month to month subscription fees to it. This amount does include the rip-off monthly fee increase for high speed internet access from the cable company because we discontinued cable service. After eight years with tivo, I thought I'd miss it more than I have, but the features on the direct tv dvr are very similar.
2. There is a couple of seconds delay when switching from one channel to the next. I assume it is due to the line from the satellite that is being multiplexed as a dual line. It is more than acceptable to me, but the pause that refreshes is noticeable.
3. The Tv Guide feature that Sony is promoting is useless for satellite subscribers because it is incompatible (unsupportable?) with them and also redundant, just as it is with cable.
4. You don't need to pay a premium for hdmi cables. See the discussion on avsforums about them as well as their discussions about lcd televisions. The discussions can be over the top and sometimes make a fringe issue sound like it is the center of the universe. These folks care about their viewing experiences. They also seem to know something. They are more reasonable than a person who faults a set sold in the US for not supporting a frame rate used overseas.
5. When doing diligence, I used cnet's reviews, myproductadvisor (to better understand my own requirements and what features are out there, although it seems to have a Samsung bias), other expert reviews, end user reviews (like this one and the others here), the manufacturer websites, and visits to several stores to see with my own eyes.
6. I am 100% satisfied, a very happy camper. I had high expectations from order placement to the day to day set usage, and those high expectations have been met. Sony, Amazon, direct tv and Bose are a great combination, and they've clicked at every level for me. I think they are the best at what they do.

Thanks for listening. I had fun. I hope this helped.

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Sony KDL-52XBR6 52" BRAVIA XBR® LCD Flat Panel HDTV

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me the difference. Amazon gets an A+ for product, price, service and communication but fails on the entire delivery. Still well worth it though. DON'T FORGET TO ORDER THE HDMI CABLES FOR THE CABLE BOX AND DVD- THEY ARE SOLD SEPARATELY AND IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST HDTV, LIKE ME, THEN YOU'LL BE SURPRISED.

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Sony KDL-52XBR6 52" BRAVIA XBR® LCD Flat Panel HDTV

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such as time passes and you realize what you have.

Let's start by talking about Amazon's delivery service. Delivery came four days after my order, so that part worked well. But there was only one guy driving the delivery van. Have you ever seen one person try to carry a fully boxed 52" TV? Not sure what the delivery company was thinking, but it was clear I wasn't going to get "white glove" service. With my help, we brought in the TV and uncrated it in the middle of the foyer to be certain that it had no cosmetic damage. Friends later helped move it into place.

After an hour or so of rewiring (as now I can use the HDMI output of my cable box and Bluray player), attaching the external over-the-air rabbit ears (and if you've never seen OTA HDTV, it's a must -- not only a better picture but also more subchannel options than you get from your cable box), and setting it up for HDMI inputs from a digital camera, hooking it up to the wireless network via an Ethernet cable to an Apple Airport, and using its digital output to run a line to the sound processor, we were good to go. The TV works flawlessly. We had no difficulties with the setup process. The interface is similar to the one for Sony's Bluray players, so there's some benefit to staying within a brand family here.

Overall, as others have already described, the picture is magnificent. After comparing it in the store to the 55XBR8, I can't say that I miss the slight advantage that the XBR8 has in picture quality. For the difference in price (about $4k), the XBR6 will be fine. Going from a CRT based HDTV to an LCD panel does have its differences. The only downside I've seen is that analog-based shows on older DVD's have a tendency to show some compression-related artifact that I never noticed on the CRT. Analog broadcasts are fair - Star Trek:TNG, for example, looks like it was filmed entirely through gauze. Standard DVDs look wonderful, particularly with the Bluray player, and all the HD sources are perfect, and so crisp in 1080p as to be three-dimensional in quality.

Hooking up a digital camera through an HDMI output (such as available on the Canon 50D), leads to the ability to have family slide shows in a comfortable spot (the living room, where we used to pull out the slide projector) instead of surrounding the computer monitor. And the images look wonderful - we're not quite where we used to be. I still think projected Kodachromes have advantages over the digital reproduction at this size, but we're getting awfully close.

The interesting thing is that the XBR6 has a VGA input that is really usable. Hooking a computer up will allow you to use this as a 52" computer monitor. That means that the TV becomes a wireless internet hub even without the Ethernet input. Get your mail, look at pictures, play music (yes, there's a separate audio computer input), and read the newspaper now that some newspapers allow you to access the exact image of the newspaper as it appeared in print. And it all looks just as good (well, better, really) as it does on a dedicated computer monitor.

So it's now a reasonable reality that you can purchase a computer, a BlueTooth keyboard and mouse, hook it into the back of the TV, and then use the TV as a dedicated entertainment hub when tied into the home theater sound processing equipment. Sure, you could have done that a few years ago, but it wouldn't have looked this good or worked well enough to lead to your actually using the equipment this way. Now it's all here - and as a bonus you get a stunning TV.