Sony KDS-R50XBR1 - My theater is complete!

[ottscay]

After (mostly) conquering the surround system with a 7.1 Reference -7 system, I was ready to upgrade my TV. After months of reading reviews while pinching pennies, I bought a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 over the internet. All I can say is it is awesome. I only watch movies (too much junk on tv, and not enough HD content to make watching it worthwhile), so hookup was a snap - I connected an HDMI cable from my DVD player to the TV.

The TV up-reses all images to 1080p, sot he first thing I did was to test combinations of output from my Denon 955; 720p output combined the best with Sony's internal scaling, producing a remarkably sharp image from DVDs. I spent 10 minutes tweaking the tv settings (turn off most of the extra processing in the "advanced" control panel, switch tv color mode to "Pro" and color balance to "warm"). Then I ran the THX Optimizer off of one of my DVDs to finish tweaking the color balance and black levels.

Then I stuck in the Revenge of the Sith DVD. Holy mother of god it is sweet. Bumping up from my 30" widescreen CRT to the 50" SXRD is just an insane upgrade in terms of image size, with almost no sacrifice in image quality. It is simply the only RPTV I would own (well, possibly the 60" or 70" versions if I had room and $ for them...).

It's not all peaches and cream; the useless (to me) side speakers are attractive, but not removable, which makes the TV much wider than it needs to (that's why the 60" model won't fit in my room). There is a very slight loss in shadow detail compared to high quality CRT TVs, albeit much, much less than in plasma, lcd. and (other) RPTVs. Obviously you can't hang it on a wall, although at 94 pounds it's pretty light for a 50" TV. And finally, much like Klipsch speakers themselves, the TV is very revealing in the quality of your source material. If you are watching an 8 year old dvd, it looks like it. You can aleviate this by turning on a bunch of Sony's internal processing, which does a good job of making all source material watchable, but it also makes them all less accurate, so you lessen the truly spectacular images on DVDs that are made well.

That said, I am thrilled with my purchase. For those of you who have similar watching preferences, I cannot recommend this TV enough. Boy, now I can't wait for a Hi-def DVD format to emerge this spring (go Blu-ray!). After that I will finally done with my home theater...expect I'd like to get my amps all outboard and just use my reciever as a pre/pro. Stupid upgrade bug...

Scott

[ottscay]

And a shot of the front of the theater room:

Sorry it's a bit of a mess, I need to build a shelf for the center speaker, and until then it's displacing the DVD player... Still, it looks the same when the lights go down and the movie comes up!

[earthaziel]

Dude the plastic boxes with the DVD player on top of them are so money. I think you should just leave it the way it is :-)

Matt

[kenratboy]

Dude the plastic boxes with the DVD player on

top of them are so money. I think you should just leave it the

way it is :-)

Matt

Totally! That is pure PIMP!

I love that TV. If everything Sony made was that good, their

troubles would be over (like if every Chevy was as good as the

Corvette!)

[SteelerFan]

Don't know if this will make you feel better or worse but my HT doesn't look any neater than yours does at the moment. I'm sure we'll both eventually get things cleaned up. Enjoy your new TV.[]

[Bill H.]

Beautiful setup.........thanks for posting Pictures.!

[wuzzzer]

My best friend just bought this refurbished through sonystyle.com for $1599 with free shipping and 18 month no interest no payment financing. I'm looking forward to helping him set it up!