Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR6 Review

Just beware of Mura

Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR6 Review from Amazon.com

Until the XBR8 is shipping, the 52″ KDL-52XBR6 HDTV is the top-of-the-line Sony LCD television. Consequently, as you might expect, the color, image, and performance are superb. The picture is honestly nothing short of spectacular.

It was a great disappointment, however, to discover that “mura” (also called black clouding), an irregularity in the LCD panel that keeps it from going dark evenly during playback of a very dark scene or during a dip-to-black in the program material, is STILL an issue with the XBR6 family. I found posts about this problem as far back as the XBR2.

Simply said, “mura” (the japanese word for “unevenness”) is a quality control issue. Some sets have it, some don’t. The larger the panel is, the harder it is to build it perfectly, and the nature of LCD backlighting makes it difficult to build a large, LCD screen that renders a pure black screen evenly without clouding. But not impossible. You see many 40″ sets with no mura at all. Other manufacturers’ 52’s that have fewer accolades about their onscreen images don’t seem to have the problem, although, admittedly, their operating images may not look anywhere near as good as images seen on this tv.

Amazon is shipping my 2nd sony kdl52xbr6 even as I write this…so we will see whether my first was just a bad panel, or whether Sony Customer Service’s comment that “some mura is typical of this unit and LCD technology” is accurate.

This is Sony, after all…and it’s their best-of-the-best product in the family (if you don’t count the $7,000 XBR8). You don’t expect “good enough” from Sony; they are the unit against which all others are judged, which means you expect “perfect”.

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

I’m happy to report that the second unit supplied by Amazon is considerably more uniform in low light. In a pitch black room, there is still a small amount of black level mura, but it is so much better than the first unit that I can live with it. In a nutshell, if your viewing area is a very dark, movie-theater-like environment, you may see what I’m talking about. But if you have even a small amount of ambient light in your room, you probably won’t.