Sony Bravia KDL-55EX620 LED LCD HDTV Review

Motion Performance

The Sony EX620 series, along with many other Sonys, has a feature called MotionFlow that helps smooth out some of the problems traditionally seen in LCD TVs. When an object is moving across the screen, you typically see some blurriness that's caused, in part, by the screen refreshing itself at only 60 frames per second. Features like Sony's MotionFlow (Samsung, LG, and others have their own brand names for it) try to remove that judder by guessing what the pictures in between those 60 frames per second might look like, then digital creating them and inserting them between the original frames. Technologically, it's an amazing process, but practically speaking, the results are mixed.

When we ran our motion tests, which specifically push the blurriness issue, everything was improved by MotionFlow. Flicker, fine detail loss, trailing – all of it disappeared. However, we wouldn't recommend using MotionFlow most of the time. The problem is that your eye is used to a certain level of blurriness. That's how the image was recorded. The attempt to remove that blur creates an uncomfortably sharp image, especially anything shot on film. For sports and live action programming, you won't notice as much.

Overall, the Sony Bravia KDL-55EX620 gets points for detail retention, but with the proviso that you should learn how to turn this feature off. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

The Sony Bravia KDL-55EX620, surprisingly, had a few problems with the 24fps test. We play a Blu-Ray movie with certain test patterns to see how well the TV can use 3:2 pulldown to create a smooth motion. It showed real issues with high contrast / high frequency patterns. There's even a feature in the Sony's menu called CineMotion that's supposed to address these problems, but it didn't seem to help. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling

The Sony Bravia KDL-55EX620 has a native 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution, but most of the footage you send it will be of a lower resolution, unless you do nothing but watch Blu-Ray movies. Fortunately, the TV is pretty good at taking these non-native resolutions and scaling them up to fit the screen. More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

The 480p video we tested showed absolutely no problems.

720p

The 720p video showed some noticeable Moireing in high contrast / high frequency patterns, though it was not widespread. There was no problem reading fine details like small text.