Like most widescreen sets, the 57XBR offers several aspect-ratio settings. Normal plants a standard 4:3 image in the center of the screen, with gray bars to left and right; Zoom is widescreen for standard letterboxed sources; Full is the widescreen anamorphic mode for enhanced DVDs; and Wide Zoom combines a left-right stretch with a small degree of top and bottom cropping to resize 4:3 material to fill the screen. Needless to say, the latter involves visible image distortion. Most set manufacturers offer such modes on their widescreen sets; whether or not you care for such tricks is a matter of taste. The owner's manual does caution against extensive use of Normal mode because of possible burn-in due to those stationary gray bars at the sides of the image. My approach to minimizing such concerns is to start with a proper calibration (which limits contrast to levels far lower than any of the factory settings). I then use Normal for 4:3 sources when the material demands it (classic films and premiere broadcasts), Zoom when I don't mind a bit of cropping top and bottom, and Wide Zoom for sports and other material where I can tolerate a little distortion.

An Auto Wide feature automatically switches to the correct widescreen mode with program material that has been encoded with the appropriate trigger signal. It will not operate with 480p; for that, you have to switch modes manually. But the good news is that the set retains full aspect-ratio control with a 480p source, providing for proper 480p playback of non-anamorphic sources—unlike some sets, which lock into the anamorphic mode with progressive inputs.

Flash Focus is Sony's trademarked name for the 57XBR's auto convergence. It's very slick. Push a button on the pop-out control panel below the screen (not on the remote, unfortunately), and after five seconds of flashing lights the set is converged. As delivered, our sample's Flash Focus did not do a perfect job of this, though it did produce a definite improvement, and an image with no obvious problems on normal program material.

There is also a subconvergence mode in the service menu, which is by far the most extensive convergence system I have ever seen on a rear-projection set. More than that, it's even more precise than the zone convergence on Sony's best separate CRT projectors. I only wish it were readily accessible to the user. But Sony, like most manufacturers, is clearly afraid that the average user will only make matters worse if given this much control.

They apparently feel that way about reviewers, too; I was perfectly willing to make the service adjustments myself, but they preferred to send a technician over to do it. But because he had to do it during the day, the result, while an improvement, was not spot-on. (Blue is very hard to converge at any time, but particularly so with any ambient light in the room.) But I observed carefully what the technician was doing, and was able to further fine-tune the convergence later that evening. It wasn't difficult, but if you don't know what you're doing, you can really mess up the set by aimlessly roaming around in the service menu. I did notice, however, that a perfect service-mode convergence did not always remain perfect when rechecked the following day (after a suitable warmup, of course). The error was small enough that it was apparently within the error margin of Flash Focus, which would not eliminate it. It was really only obvious with test patterns, but I do wish that Flash Focus were supplemented with a manual multi-point user convergence, for the truly fussy owner.

Unlike Sony's KV-36XBR400, the 57XBR has no option for disabling scan-velocity modulation. Sony sent me a special remote that had been set up to toggle it on or off, so I could judge its effect. The scan-velocity modulation in the 57XBR, as delivered, is not aggressive. I had to look closely to see the change using the needle pulse pattern on Video Essentials; it was barely perceptible.

Pass the remote
The multi-purpose remote furnished with the 57XBR (it can also control two other components in addition to the television) is about as well-designed as they come. The important buttons are large and well-spaced. The navigation joystick is positive in action. The remote is not illuminated, but the most-used buttons are white and slightly iridescent.

Sony provides several preset options on the video control menu—Vivid, Standard, Movie, Game, and Pro—each with factory settings for each of the video controls. They can be freely changed to suit the user. Though such user-established changes are non-volatile and are not lost when the set is turned off or unplugged, they can't be locked, and are thus subject to loss if the Reset button on the remote is pressed. Fortunately, Reset functions only when the Video Setup mode is selected.

None of the factory video presets produced an accurately calibrated picture; Vivid, in particular, is a maximum-contrast mode that appears designed primarily to attract potential buyers in a dealer's showroom. I chose Pro to start, then heavily modified it using the Video Essentials DVD as a guide. Prior to a full gray-scale calibration (performed about three weeks into the review period), I set the color temperature to Warm, which ultimately turned out to be the most accurate of the three available settings (Neutral was not). I conducted all of my auditioning with the set's noise reduction and Dynamic Picture features turned off. The optimum Sharpness setting varied between 30% and 40% (slightly higher for cable watching); turning Sharpness down to very low levels noticeably softened the image.

Performance
The first source material I watched on the 57XBR was cable television. I mention it here only because most buyers will use the set at least part of the time for ordinary television viewing. The picture was a little soft, more obviously so than my recollection of Sony's 36-inch KV-36XBR400. But I saw fewer motion artifacts from cable with the 57XBR than with the smaller, direct-view set. It's a little difficult to be definitive here; I was using a different cable company with the larger set and, of course, everything else being equal (which it never is), a larger image is always more revealing of flaws in the source. There was the expected wide range of picture quality from station to station, but all were at least watchable. The bottom line is that the 57XBR's performance on cable was good but not exceptional—a result more reflective of the source than of the set itself.

But our primary interest here is home theater, not home TV, and it was on DVDs that the Sony really came into its own. After performing a basic calibration (proper adjustment of the user video controls), I was immediately impressed by the picture, and my respect for the set continued to grow in the two months I lived with it. Color (particularly after a proper gray-scale evaluation) was spot-on, aside from some red "push" that I corrected (without serious side effects) with a slight reduction of the color control. Black-level retention was a little off, resulting in a shift in the base black level with changes in the average picture level. But this was never obvious on program material, only on test patterns. Black-level detail was good, and blacks in general were good as well, though a little less deep than those from a good direct-view CRT monitor or a CRT video projector and screen (in a darkened room). Images were crisply detailed—just a hair softer than the best I've seen, but thoroughly filmlike. On the best material the picture was creamy-smooth and grain-free. Video noise—the most extreme form of grain—was negligible.