2D Performance

After putting the finishing touches on my picture adjustments, a process that involved minor tweaks in the TV’s white-balance menu (see Test Bench), I started my viewing by pulling out a 2D title: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief on Blu-ray. This CGI-heavy fantasy has lots of dark scenes, and the Sony presented them all with solid, uniform blacks. Its performance here was quite impressive for an LCD set lacking any type of local-dimming feature. For instance, in one scene where the demigod Percy (Logan Lerman) and his sidekicks venture into the Garden Emporium of Auntie Em (also known as Medusa, played with serpentine zeal by Uma Thurman), shadows in the Gorgon’s gloomy lair looked deep and extended.The set’s rendering of shadow detail in this scene was also very good, with rows of garden tools that lined the walls coming through clearly. And 2.35:1 aspect ratio films with black letterbox bars (such as Percy) showed none of the dreaded “spotlight effect,” where the screen’s corners look lighter than its center.

Percy’s color palette switches from natural-looking to exaggerated on an almost scene-by-scene basis, and the Sony proved adept at rendering these changes. In a scene at Camp Half Blood where Chiron (Pierce Brosnan) introduces the newly arrived Percy to the assembled teams of teenage demigods, both their bright red- and blue-frilled helmets and the lush green hills in the background looked rich and detailed.

Even so, close-up shots of faces revealed a range of subtle skin tones — most notably the porcelain complexion of Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena, at the center of the throng.

Although the Sony’s screen uniformity was generally very good, it has the same Achilles’ heel (let’s stick with the Greek-mythology theme) as many other LED-lit LCD TVs we’ve tested: off-axis viewing. Once I moved fifteen degrees or more off from a center seat directly in front of the TV, picture contrast diminished noticeably. Beyond that, turning on the TV’s Smooth Motionflow setting gave film-based programs a “video look” that I found difficult to take, although the Standard setting proved more subtle; a less fussy viewer than I might find its judder-reducing benefits to be an acceptable compromise. Up-conversion of standard-def programs was very good: DVDs and standard-def cable TV shows looked relatively crisp and clean. And the TV’s regular and MPEG noise-reduction modes proved able to reduce background picture noise without eliminating fine detail (the MPEG mode’s high setting excepted).