Sony Bravia KDL-46Z5100

Audio Quality (7.5)

The Sony KDL-46Z5100's built-in speakers are definitely better than average. Voices were clear, explosions were bassy without being boomy, and fire sizzled. Although the speakers can't really compare to a nice set of external speakers, they're probably better than fmost cheap auxiliary sets.

The sound options menu lets you choose a 'Sound Mode,' which are like equalizer presets. There are four different sound modes: Dynamic, Standard, Clear Voice, and Custom. The Custom setting gives you access to an equalizer with sliders for 100Hz, 200Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 5kHz, and 10kHz. The TV also has sliders for treble, bass, balance, and voice zoom ('Emphasize voice or ambient audio').

There's also a surround sound and sound enhancer you can toggle, but neither have a particularly significant effect on the TV's sound. Fortunately, the TV creates enough depth on its own.

Menu Interface (6.0)

The KDL-46Z5100 features a PlayStation 3-like design. Pressing the menu button will bring up a horizontal string of icons that expand vertically when highlighted. The menu is attractive and intuitive, but it has some annoying usability issues.

The menu is intuitive, but the lack of looping is annoying.

First of all, the menus don't loop around. This means getting from point A to point Z means you have to scroll through the 24 items in between them. We prefer menus that allow you to skip easily between the first and last items in a list. The lack of looping menus is especially noticeable if you like to tweak the picture settings often: opening the main menu will default to the input list, which is the second to last item. You have to scroll all the way to the left in order to access menu items, then all the way through the picture menu before you can access the advanced settings.

The picture menu is very similar to other Bravia TVs.

While this is will undoubtedly be annoying for power users, the average consumer probably won't be too troubled by this. Overall, we liked the menu system despite its easily fixable quirks.

Manual (6.75)

The KDL-46Z5100's manual is average overall. It has a table of contents and a very sparse index, both of which should help navigation to a certain extent. There's tabs on the edges of the pages to aid in browsing to a particular section. The font in the book is a good size but coud be slightly bigger. The pictures are a bit on the small side and tend to be busy with arrows, but the descriptions are good enough.