Sony Bravia KDL-40NX700

Motion Performance

Motion Smoothness (7.0)

The Sony KDL-40NX700 did not quite match the great performance we saw recently on the Sony KDL-46EX700. The motion smoothness was roughly equivalent, though we did see more jagged edges. There were more issues with the artifacting, which we’ll detail in the next section.

The NX700 menu includes a few options for smoothing over motion performance issues. The Motionflow feature can remove some of the jaggies, but if turned up too high, additional artifacts become all too apparent. There’s also CineMotion, another feature that’s supposedly ‘provides smoother picture motion than the original film-based content,’ whatever that means. This was a little harder to see the the effects of, but you can always experiment.

Motion Artifacting (5.0)

The Sony KDL-40NX700 definitely showed more motion artifacting than its cousin, the KDL-46EX700, which we reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s hard to pin down what causes these differences. Even similar TVs can have widely different processing parts, glass, and more. Specific to the 40NX700, we saw strobing and false coloration in moving objects. And unlike on the EX700, the NX700’s special motion processing features like Motionflow and CineMotion did not do much to alleviate the issues. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps (2.00)

The Sony KDL-40NX700 supports native 24fps video just fine, though our testing indicated that the 3:2 pulldown could stutter on the frame rate a little. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling (8.27)

The Sony KDL-40NX700 is a native 1080p television, but unless you only plan on watching Blu-Ray or a select few broadcast channels, you’ll be throwing lower resolution video at it. How well the TV can handle that kind of footage is up to the internal processing. Overall, it’s pretty good. Let’s look at it detail. More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

Footage in the 480p format is pretty rare, but we test it anyway. When the Sony KDL-40NX700 displays it, the screen loses 3% on every side (top, bottom, left, and right). If it’s a computer you’ve plugged in, this means you’ll have a hard time seeing the icons and task bars. However, we didn’t see any other problems.

720p

The 720p footage resulted in a 2% overscan loss, and we saw some aggravating Moire issues in certain types of high frequency patterns.

1080i

The 1080i footage also lost 2% to overscan and had even more problems with Moire patterns.

Other Models in the KDL-xxNX700 Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
Sony Bravia KDL-46NX700 46 in.