Sony Bravia KDL40EX703U 40-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p 100Hz LED TV with Freeview HD

Sony Bravia KDL40EX703U 40-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p 100Hz LED TV with Freeview HD Review

This is my first flat screen TV after about 2 to 3 years of researching and shopping around hanging on to my old 26 inch CRT - so apologies if the review is long and boring. I will try and help you as much as I can if you post any comments/questions.
Delivery & installation :
Installation was very smooth probably took just under 20 min to mount on the table top stand. Later I wall mounted using a tilting wall bracket from Amazon (£31) with the help of another person.
The positives:
TV delivers stunning HD videos with the help of backlit LED technology and that gave a truly amazing "wow-factor" soon after installation. In my view, the LED-HD quality is superior to a plasma screen of the same size. The on-screen menu is very intuitive (like a computer screen) and is very easy to navigate, though one might fiddle around a bit initially with the navigation keys on the remote control with its 'sandwich style design'. TV has two HDMI ports and USB and AV on the side making it easy accessing after wall mounting. There is a "presence sensor" that turns off when not being watched. Easy to connect PC via the HDMI port to watch blue-ray disks( yet to invest on a blue ray player). The sound quality (dolby surround when available) is superiors though it doesn't add much of bass(drum beats!) effect to the music - may be due to the low 10W speakers that comes as standard with most of the TVs.

General/Neutral views: When you make a switch from CRT to a large LCD TV of this size, you must be mentally prepared to accept some "pixellation" effect on screen when you are close to the LCD screen. From my observation, images are best enjoyed when you are at least 2.5 to 3 meters away (slightly less for HD content). Having said that there is plenty of menu options to play with to customise individual settings to make it appear better, but bear in mind that analogue/PAL recorded images do appear "pixellised" on an LCD screen. This is something we all have to live with, in my view.

Freeview HD quality is superior but I keep on experiencing some intermittent stability issue with the freeview HD signal reception (but ok with non-HD reception at the same time). I am not sure whether it is due to my postcode/house/antenna location. As pointed out by the first reviewer, from my initial observation, freeview HD signals are much stable when you have all other electronic component devices turned off near the TV. So it could be other components making the freeview-HD reception unstable or poor - but I have no first hand information to prove this.

Negatives: If you want to wifi enable the TV to download videos from internet, you have to buy a separate Sony specific dongle which will cost you around £70-75. There are no other cheaper alternatives available currently. There is a LAN port on the TV, which you can connect if you have a ethernet cable hanging around. May be another option cheaper is to set up a wireless access point near the TV, which means you can convert your home wifi signals back to a ethernet cable for around £30-35. I tried accessing the internet feature of the TV via ethernet and was deeply disappointed. TV comes with a handfull of internet video sharing websites(youtube, dailymotion etc ) they are pre-built and enabled on the TV and none of the videos that played looked impressing quality wise. I notice there is no HD-support for videos downloaded via TV like youtube flashplayer supporting 1080p resolution via windows/mac PC. So overall the "internet feature" is not really worth looking into in my opinion.
After wall mounting, I find the ports behind the TV are a bit of stretch and cables do tend to get a bit bend near their heads - which may cause some longterm wear n tear.

Overall, I would give 4/5 - becuase I am not too dependent on the freeview-HD feature of the TV for HD content. If you are planning to buy this TV for freeview HD, my advise is to do some investigation on the freeview signal reception on your area/postcode but most importantly, at your premise's antenna.

Sony Bravia KDL40EX703U 40-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p 100Hz LED TV with Freeview HD Feature