How to select the right Sony HDTV

By Philip Wong, CNET Asia
Jun 29, 2009

If you've been a home A/V buff since the early 1980s and 1990s, Kirara Basso and Trinitron should be fairly familiar household names for CRT TVs. As a testimony to the latter's technological prowess, Trinitron professional studio monitors are still a common sight in movie and post-production industries. Fast forward to today, and we see the Japanese electronics giant fully embracing LCD technology and offering an extensive lineup of Bravia HDTVs. Some of the notable entries include the latest 9.9mm-thin LED-edgelit ZX1-series, LED-backlit X-series and the motion-tuned 200Hz Z-series.

For this year, Sony has implemented Integrated Digital TV (IDTV) and DLNA-compatibility for most of its new models. IDTV enables HD broadcast reception, while DLNA and a built-in Ethernet input deliver network multimedia streaming for files such as MP3, JPEG, LPCM, MPEG-2 and AVCHD. This is further supplemented using a side USB port which supports RAW and MPEG-1 encodings. All these auxiliary functions can be accessible via the intuitive XrossMediaBar (XMB) user interface which utilizes an icon-based navigation system adopted from its PSP and PS3 consoles.