Black is beautiful; black is elegant; black is magical : This is what you’ll tend to feel when you first clap eyes on the Sony Bravia KDL-32V5810 32” LCD TV. The TV is black in it’s fullest glory with a glossy black bezel that doesn’t in the least bit look garish. There is a silver band that runs along the bottom edge of the frame, which enhances the piano black terrain. The TV comes with an integrated freesat tuner, which is apparently it’s selling point. Once you move form the design and start to dig deep into the feature set of this LCD TV, the most striking aspect is the way it handles black levels.
Yes, a surprising improvement when compared to other LCD TVs from Sony that seemed to be haunted by a grey cloud in all the dark areas. This 32” Freesat LCD TV has a full HD resolution and quotes a high dynamic contrast ratio of 60000:1, which is justified on screen. Sony’s ingenious BRAVIA ENGINE 3, which seems to do wonders for the overall contrast and sharpness is firing on all cylinders in the KDL-32V5810. The connectivity front appears confident with 4 HDMIs, a D-Sub port and a USB 2.0 Input, to name a few.
Features like 24p True Cinema, Picture Frame Mode, USB Media Player, Applicast and Eco settings which are present in most of Sony’s tellies are all intact and so is the Scene Select function. Though the video does not lack in any aspect, the same cannot be said of the audio. Sony does not get around the problem of fallible audio quality that it’s TVs tend to suffer from. But more than anything else, the price (almost £630!) is that which appears to be a shocker. Costing almost double that of 32 inchers from LG and Toshiba, the KDL-32V5810 does not impress us all that much to be summed up as “expensive but worth the money spent.”
