Sony KDL32S2000 32" Bravia Flat Panel LCD HDTV

The sleekly styled, silver 32-inch Sony Bravia KDL32S2000 is packed with the latest high-performance video features, including a wide viewing angle, blazing fast 8ms response time (great for sports and action movies), and a wide color gamut backlight that provides more natural skin tones and highly accurate overall color reproduction. It also offers integrated HDTV capabilities (with an integrated ATSC tuner), digital HDMI video connectivity, and a bottom speaker design that helps save space. The thin profile of this Bravia TV accommodates VESA compliant mounting systems (separately available). The removable pedestal swivels 30 degrees left and right and also tilts forward 3 degrees and backward 8 degrees for additional placement flexibility.

With clean lines and styling, Bravia TVs look great in any room, either on a stand or mounted on the wall.

Like other TVs in the Bravia line, the KDL32S2000 uses Sony's Wide Color Cold Compact Fluorescent Light (WCG-CCFL) to display a color gamut almost 30 percent larger than a conventional CCFL display, which results in deeper reds, more vivid greens, and cleaner blues. It also offers a high response time (also referred to as refresh rate) of 8 milliseconds (ms), which is able to clearly portray fast-moving images across the screen with well-defined edges and without ghosting (streaking or shadowing). The set's Light Sensor feature intelligently adjusts the screen brightness to match the ambient light in a room, ensuring a comfortable viewing experience.

It also features the latest in Sony's unique S-PVA (Super Patterned Vertical Alignment) LCD panel technology, which divides each sub-pixel into two segments per color for a more refined consistency in colors, contrast, and brightness at wide viewing angles. This seventh generation Sony LCD panel was specially crafted at Sony's plant and produced from one of the world's biggest mother glass (a huge sheet of glass that can be divided to create multiple LCD panels).

The KDL32S2000 has a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution, 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, 178-degree viewing angle, and 1300:1 contrast ratio. (The higher the contrast ratio, the greater a TV's ability to display subtle color details and not get washed out by ambient room light.) The Cinemotion 3:2 pulldown cinema video processing detects and compensates film--which is shot at 24 frames per second (fps) compared with video's 30 fps rate--to video for a smooth theaterlike experience at home. The 3D digital comb filter offers 10-bit signal processing that renders superb gradation of grays, resulting in superior picture detail.

Blurred image caused by motion artifacts due to slow panel response time of typical LCDs.

BRAVIA's fast panel response time handles the motion in sports and video games

Other convenience features include:

• WEGA GATE Easy Operation Guide allows you to easily navigate to the most convenient TV functions: favorite channels, TV channel list, external input list, or settings.
• Favorite Channels with the WEGA GATE function, allows you to navigate a list of up to 16 favorite channels without leaving the current channel.
• Wide Screen Mode allows you to watch 4:3 normal broadcasts in wide screen mode (16:9 aspect ratio).
• Parental Control (V-Chip) helps parents monitor what their children watch on TV by establishing rating limits.
• Caption Vision/Info Banner allows closed caption and/or channel programming information to be displayed.
• The Freeze Function temporarily freezes the picture in a separate screen while the programming continues to display, which can come in handy when you want to copy a recipe, phone number, etc. that flashes too quickly across your screen.

It pumps out 20 watts of audio power via its integrated bottom-aligned stereo speakers (10 watts per channel). It has a built-in Dolby Digital decoder (for connecting to a surround sound home theater receiver) and it can also produce SRS TruSurround XT virtual 5.1-channel surround sound from its two speakers. This set offers the following connection options:

• Composite (RCA audio/video): 3 inputs (1 on the side)
• S-Video: 2 inputs (1 on the side)
• Component (Y/Pb/Pr): 2 inputs (with left/right audio jacks)
• HDMI: 1 input (with L/R RCA audio connections)
• PC: 1 D-Sub15 input (with L/R stereo mini plug connection)
• RF: 1 input
• Total audio inputs: 5 (1 side, 4 rear)
• Analog audio output: 1
• Digital audio ouput: 1
• Headphone: 1

Tech Talk
HDMI is a lossless, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface to link any audio/video source (such as a set-top box, DVD player, or AV receiver) with your TV--all over a single cable. HDMI supports standard, enhanced or high definition video, plus multi-channel digital audio on a single cable. It supports all ATSC formats--standard (SDTV), enhanced (EDTV), and high (HDTV).

Component video (also called Y/Pb/Pr) features a three-jack video input, which provides separate connections for luminance (Y), blue color difference (PB) and red color difference (PR). This results in increased bandwidth for color information, resulting in a more accurate picture with clearer color reproduction and less bleeding than you would get with S-Video or composite (RCA yellow video plug) connections. You will need a separate RCA left/right audio cable for sound.

TruSurround XT audio adds three new audio enhancement technologies to produce an amazingly immersive sound experience.

• Dialog Clarity brings movie dialog into focus during the playback of any surround-encoded material to make speech much clearer and crisper.
• TruBass creates incredible deep rich bass allowing a person to perceive significantly deeper, richer low bass tones that are far beyond the physical low frequency capabilities of the speaker itself.
• The SRS WOW feature widens the soundstage by processing standard two-channel stereo material as well as multi-channel encoded material for a dramatic improvement in the playback of any stereo audio over a two-speaker system.

And in case you were wondering, BRAVIA is short for "Best Resolution Audio Visual Integrated Architecture."

What's in the Box
32-inch Bravia LCD television, tabletop stand, remote control (with batteries), coaxial cable, HD15-to-HD15 cable, printed operating instructions

Warranty
1 year for parts and labor; in-home diagnostic warranty service for one year (for LCD TVs from the Bravia S-Series measuring over 30 inches)

Customer Review: Beware of Sony's HDMI

One of the attractions of this set is HDMI (High Def Module Interface). HDMI is currently defined as a single cable the transmits both Video and Audio. A very clean installation, via a single cable. However for Sony, for this set, you need a cable with a HDMI end that connects to the cable box, that then goes to a DVI connector (video only) on the Sony LCD, and THEN a separate audio cable. What a pain in the %#@%$#. Therefore no Digital Audio.

Customer Review: Aspect feature undocumented limitation

Excellent set overall, but one misleading entry is in the manual which the factory confirmed to me is partly mistaken. The "wide zoom" feature for aspect control, magnifying etc., is shown with a separate panel entirely devoted to features applicable to high definition, wide screen sources. The manual fails to mention these functions work only on broadcast or cable tuner reception, and are not available on any external input, HDMI or component video -- such as a Sony high definition recorder for the broadcasts. The issue affects the extremely wide panavision movies which have to be rendered with horizontal black bars even on a 16:9 display to see the entire width -- which is how some are transmitted on HDNET for example (premium channels seem to adopt a full screen, pre-zoomed approach). Cable boxes have zoom features built-in which can expand these pictures, but the tv won't do it by itself, the way it handles low definition signals, and the very limited releases of early HD-dvd, blu ray players etc so far don't have it. The need for it is less with a wide screen to begin with, compared to old 4:3 screen format, but the pictures are shown almost 1/3 less than the vertical height of the screen.

The only two brands which do have this feature complete have so many other faults they cannot compare with the sony for this viewer. No other leading brand has the feature, either, and the sony at least can process the broadcast signals more than some of them.

The limitation of sony S series also applies to the more expensive XBR series sets, at least for 2006.

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