PICTURE QUALITY

After adjustment, colors on the Sony looked somewhat punchy, but for the most part balanced. For instance, in a scene from the Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay Blu-ray where the duo (John Cho and Kal Penn) arrive at their playboy friend Raza's (Amir Talai) house after hitching a ride on a Cuban refugee raft, both the orange of their government-issue jumpsuits and the red of a party attendee's bikini top looked vibrant, but not overly lurid (as for the scene itself, that's a different story). Skin tones, too, looked entirely natural on the Sony. Watching another sequence where F.B.I. man Ron Fox (Rob Corddry) interrogates Harold and Kumar's parents, a good range of skin tones could be seen in the faces of the multiethnic cast - and in the stern, pasty-faces of the government agents on the opposite side of the table as well.

The Sony's handling of shadows - and of dark scenes in general -was also pretty impressive for an LCD. In several scenes from Harold & Kumar where the fugitive stoners traverse the Southern landscape at night, the set revealed satisfying image depth. (Along with stabilizing the TV's overall contrast, ACE also helped quite a bit to improve black levels in dark scenes like these) But compared to the best plasmas, the Sony still displayed typical LCD black-level limitations on really dark, torture-test material. For instance, in a scene from the Dark City Director's Cut Blu-ray where John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) roams the city seeking clues to his identity, shadowy streets and buildings in the background had a flat look. Even so, when the scene switched to the somewhat murky SRO hotel where inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) combs Murdoch's room, the set showed an ample amount of detail in the woodwork lining the halls.

Sony's Motion Enhancer processing made programs like a Beijing Summer Olympics soccer game on the Universal HD channel look a bit more solid, and it also didn't add artifacts or impart a sped-up, "video look" to film-based programs - something I've seen with other 120 Hz LCDs. Picture uniformity was also excellent, and the set's regular and MPEG noise reduction processing helped to clean up grainy images without smoothing out significant detail. The Sony's handling of regular DVDs and TV programs was just average overall, with pictures looking soft as compared to the upconverted 1080p picture delivered by high-def disc players.

One strange picture problem that I spotted only after extended viewing with the KDL-46Z4100 was a red "ghosting" artifact that looked a bit like the "rainbow effect" associated with DLP RPTVs and single-chip projectors. This mostly showed up in scenes where a dark object, such as a person with black hair, or wearing dark clothes, made a quick lateral movement across the screen, and it appeared as a solid red flicker trailing the object. To be fair, instances of this problem were relatively few and far between, although it's something that shouldn't be an issue at all on an LCD TV

BOTTOM LINE

Sony's new KDL-46Z4100 combines elegant style with a picture that follows in the solid tradition of earlier Sony LCDs. And the extensive suite of picture adjustments and broad array of video inputs, including ports that let you tap into a home network, further boost its appeal. One or two picture quirks may prevent the KDL-46Z4100 from getting my unequivocal thumbs up, but for the most part I liked what I saw on this slimmed-down new Sony.