Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 LCD HDTV Review - Color Accuracy

Color Accuracy Summary
• Rock solid color gamut • Average red/green/blue performance • Peaking in blue can lead to some loss of detail • Innacuracies in color gamut, especially blues and greens • Tests done using DisplayMate
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Color Temperature (9.93)

Light emitted by HDTVs can have various color temperatures, giving the television a bluish or yellowish cast depending on where the temperature is set. Whatever the HDTVs color temperature one thing that you want is for it to stay constant regardless of the content being displayed. That consistency is what we test for in this section. Below you can see a graph of the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 color temperature across the greyscale.

You can see form the graph that the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 did a solid job holding color temperature constant. Even at the darker greys where the color temperature deviates a bit more, it's still far less than what we see from other televisions. In actual fact these small deviations will have almost no impact on the viewing experience because our eyes cannot detect them.

You can see in the graph above the same information plotted on a color space. Each of the dots represents one of our data points. Anything within the red circle means that our eyes won't detect the change. This is excellent performance from the KDL-52V5100, some of the best we've seen in this test from any HDTV.

RGB Curves (7.35)

HDTVs produce their light by combining red, green and blue. As such the performance of these three colors is key to determining the quality of color that a television can produce. Here we look at how well the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 did in producing these colors accurately. Below you can see curves for each of the three colors plotted across the intensity scale.

What we're looking for out of these curves is a smooth concave curve that keeps rising all the way up to the end. You can see that there are some issues with the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100's curves, for example they're a bit bumpier than we'd like to see. You'll also notice that the blue curve, and to a lesser extent the red curve, both plateau at the higher intensities. This is called peaking and it means that once the KDL-52V5100 reaches a certain level it can no longer produce discernible differences between different shades of that color. These issues combine to give the KDL-52V5100 a slightly below average score in this section.

Color Gamut (5.32)

Color gamut refers to the exact range of colors that an HDTV can produce and their color coordinates. In order to ensure that everyone watching a television, wherever they are, see the same shades of color when watching the same content HDTVs need to match their color gamut to an international standard known as ITU Recommendation .709. Below you can see a graph of the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100's measured color gamut as compared to this international standard.

You can see that the KDL-52V5100 had some problems matching up to the international standard, especially in the blues and greens. What this means is that some colors won't appear on the KDL-52V5100 in exactly the way that the content produce wanted them to appear. Just so you know almost all HDTVs have some trouble matching the color gamut, and although the KDL-52V5100's performance here is a bit off, it's actually just about average for all the televisions we've reviewed. If you want to know exactly how innacurate the KDL-52V5100's color gamut is you can see a table of the exact deviations below.