A big surprise of the past year has been seeing how well the latest crop of LCD flat-panel TVs has held up against the plasma competition. But for me, the real turning point came in 2006, when I reviewed Sony's KDL-40XBR2 - the first LCD set I'd seen that could render blacks with near plasma-like depth. Sony's LCDs have now entered the XBR5 zone, with the new 52-inch KDL-52XBR5 leading the pack. At $4,800, this set is unquestionably pricey. But as you'd expect, there's a lot going on under the hood to prop up that price tag.

Chief among its feature list is the hottest new LCD buzzword: 120-Hz scanning. This works to reduce "motion lag" by doubling the screen's refresh rate from the standard 60 Hz up to 120 Hz. It requires that additional video frames be created to fill the temporal gap, and Sony's user-selectable Motionflow processing manages that by interpolating new frames from those existing in the original signal.

Another feature debuting this year in Sony TVs is XMB (Xross-media Bar) menu navigation. Similar in design to the menu system on Sony's innovative PlayStation 3 console, XMB allows you to easily scan through the TV's unusually deep menus.

As with last year's XBR LCDs, the 52XBR5's expansive screen is flanked by black built-in speakers and surrounded by aluminum-edged acrylic trim. Its glossy black bezel distinguishes the XBR5 line, and while it can reflect a fair amount of light during daytime viewing, the look is undeniably spiffy.

Among the set's generous input selections are a side-panel HDMI input and two additional HDMI (version 1.3) inputs around back. A USB port labeled DMex accepts Sony's Digital Media Extender, a $300 external box that can access online video from Sony's content partners (including Yahoo!, AOL, and Sports Illustrated) through a broadband connection.

The 52XBR5's remote control has a clean, well-organized layout and a backlit keypad. I liked that the buttons I use most were right next to the central menu-navigation joystick. Pressing the Input button calls up an onscreen list of sources, and the set's aspect-ratio options are selected by pressing Wide. They include Normal (4:3), Full (16:9), Zoom, and Wide Zoom, with the entire suite accessible when viewing both standard- and high-def programs.

Setup The 52XBR5 packs in so many picture adjustments that space constraints allow me to only breeze through the high points. A Display Area adjustment selects between Normal mode and a no-overscan Full Pixel mode that lets you view high-def Blu-ray and HD DVD discs at maximum resolution with no edge-cropping. The TV provides several adjustable picture presets, as well as a Custom picture memory that can be independently modified for each input. Other adjustments include variable backlighting, four color-temperature presets, Standard and MPEG noise reduction, variable Gamma, and Standard, Wide, and x.v.Color (xvYCC) settings for Color Space. And the TV's Advanced picture menu features adjustments for custom-tweaking the color temperature.