Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100

Ease of Use (7.5)

The Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100's menu system is a simple tabbed interface with an attractive design. Along the left you'll see icons and names for each the tabs with an area about half the width of the screen to the right showing the options for each tab. From the top the different tabs are Picture, Sound, Screen, Channel, USB, Lock and Setup.

The main menu is a simple tabbed interface.

Navigation is accomplished via the 4-way control of your remote. All of the controls are easy to use and understand and we also like that making adjustments wether via a sub-menu or on-screen adjustment bar are consistent throughout the interface. We like this menu interface a lot better than the more difficult to use Playstation style menu we saw on the Sony Bravia KDL-46W4100. Our one annoyance is that the menus didn't wrap from top to bottom, so to get to the bottom of a long list of options you'll need to hold the down button.

Picture Controls (7.5)

The Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100's picture menu gives you a good degree of control over picture options. All of the standard controls you would expect are here like Backlight, Picture, Brightnes, Color etc. Almost all of the options are available right at the top level of the menu, with only a few requiring you to enter the Advanced Settings sub menu.

Almost all picture functions are available at the top level of the menu.

In the Advanced Settings menu you will find two motion options, the ability to turn game mode on/off and a white balance control. That last gives you more granual control over RGB settings. Overall the KDL-52V5100's doesn't offer quite the degree of control that some other televisions offer, but it gives you 90% of what even advanced users might want in an easy to use interface. Our one annoyance is that labeling of features wasn't great so you'll have to go to the manual or online help to find out exactly what something like the Clear White option actually does.

Audio Controls (7.0)

The sound tab of the KDL-52V5100's menu system gives you several options that you can choose from. These include several different sound modes: dynamic, standard, clear voice and custom. You can also turn the simulated surround sound feature on/off here, adjust Treble, Bass and Balance and also control the speaker output. We would have liked to see a bit more of an extensive equalizer here, but other than that it does the job.

We would have liked to see a more extensive equalizer.

Other Controls (8.0)

In addition to picture and audio the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 offers menus for adjusting the screen size and placement, channel control, a separate menu for the USB port, a lock menu for parental controls and a Setup menu where you can set the date and time, etc.

The setup menu is where you find closed caption, time and language settings.

In addition to these there are also two other menu interfaces available on the KDL-52V5100. The first is the Tools menu, which is used to access a subset of features that changes dynamically depending on your input. There's also a favorites menu that allows you to add your favorite inputs or channels for quick access. We like these extra features, but once again have to criticize Sony for not providing better on-screen explanations of what options actually do. Combined with the poor documentation that comes with the HDTV (see below) this can make figuring out how to use these tools a bit of a pain.

_he favorites menu appears as a strip at the bottom of the screen.

Manual (2.5)

The manual that ships with the Sony Bravia KDL-52V5100 is simply sub-par. It does a decent job at giving you information on the things it covers, for example there's a clear explanation of all the controls on the remote, but it simply doesn't cover 90% of the televisions features at all. We found ourselves needing to go to Sony's suppor time to look at deeper documentation time and again. So even though the manual has some of the things we always look for and like such as a table of contents, index and clear page headers, we just can't recommend it. If you actually want to figure out how your HDTV works we recommend looking at the KDL-52V5100's online support here.