Sony XBR-55HX929 3D LCD HDTV First Impressions Review

Display Size & Technology

The Sony XBR-55HX929 is a 55-inch LED LCD HDTV.

The TVs use a backlight that employs local dimming, but there's no information available on how many zones there are. We didn't notice any of the uneven lighting that sometimes crops up with local dimming, but we'll reserve our final judgment for a TV we get into the office.

Formats & Resolution

The XBR-55HX929 is a 1080p HDTV with a 1920x1080 resolution. No fancy 4000x2000 panel here.

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio

It's hard to make quality judgments about a TV based on a show floor model at CES—especially since we're using our dumb human eyes and not our CS-200 ChromaMeter—but we had no qualms with the XBR-55HX929's performance. It looked like there was a great deal of processing going on, but we also saw a deep black and fairly bright white.

Color

Color was harder to judge than the blacks and whites, because all of the demo videos were insanely oversaturated. It can certainly do oversaturation, but we're mainly concerned with how accurate the color performance will be once those vivid settings are switched off.

Motion & Refresh Rate

We only saw some minor blur on these TVs: very, very minor. If the XBR-55HX929 holds up to what we saw at CES, these HDTVs represent a new era in not needing to worry about a TV's motion performance. Even moving images looked crisp, with very little lag.

Viewing Angle

The TV's viewing angle looked to be a bit better than the average LCD, but it wasn't perfect. We'd say we got out to about 50° before we noticed the contrast had taken a noticeable hit. Of course, this is just based on us eyeballing the TV, so take it with a grain of salt.