Sony Bravia KDL-46Z4500 (46-inch LCD)

By Ty Pendlebury, CNET.com.au, CNET Asia
Dec 12, 2008

When it comes to selling televisions, companies will do whatever they can to make their model stand out from the rest, especially in these tough times. Whether it's putting weird holes in or giving the TV an unmeasurable "1 trillion-to-1" contrast ratio, it's getting pretty desperate out there. Now, there's a new war afoot, and this one's going to--our apologies--hertz.

We can't end an intro on a bad pun, so we'll elaborate and say that motion compensation is the "next big thing" according to Sony, and it has introduced its next generation of MotionFlow with 200Hz.

Design

This "bezel one-upmanship" has really gone too far, and too long, and there really can be no victor. In a normal room situation, the Sony Z4500 is a rather stoic black, but it has a guilty, terrifying secret. You see, with this latest television, Sony has gone all "festive", and released a finish which looks like the blue glitter-covered hats you wear on New Year's Eve. By day it's mild-mannered, by night it's Mardi Gras! To be fair, you can see the glitz only when you shine a light directly on it.

Of course, the speaker system demonstrates the company's fondness for "floating glass", which in our opinion, saw its lowest point on the Bravia X4 with its flimsy mounting cheapening what was supposed to be a flagship telly. Here on the Z4500, it's not great, though in a horizontal mounting it almost looks classy.

But we've said it before, design is always secondary to performance in our opinion, and, as we'll report shortly, this frog in prince's clothing is actually pretty good.

The remote itself is a familiar design from the company, with large, easy-to-find buttons. Unfortunately, the d-pad isn't as good as on previous remotes with significant lag, meaning you can overstep a selection when going up or down a page.

Tags: TV, Sony Corp., performance, Bravia X4

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