Gadgetory

hello I'm David Katz my from CNN and this is the Sony xbox360 five inch member of the series this is Sony's most expensive flagship TV for 2012 all the bells and whistles we'll get into that in a little bit but let's take a look at the styling of this TV I really like the external design of this Sony it's a beautiful look Sony calls it a monolithic display like a lot of the other previous high-end Sony TVs this one's a little bit different with the stand it actually has this sort of circular stand on the bottom here you can see it's chrome-plated kind of in circles thus the platform that it's on and it really makes a nice accent to the TV itself which seems to float above the stand of course like the other monolithic sets it also has a black bezel looks like a black slab when turned completely off and one pane of glass along the front completes the really nice design Sony's remote on the other hand isn't quite as nice as on previous years it looks a little bit cheap for such a high-end TV but of course we expect you to replace it with a universal clicker Sony's feature set doesn't include the gesture recognition or fancy remotes found on other high-end TVs but it does have plenty of smart TV content the built-in Wi-Fi can access a whole bunch of different content suppliers including Netflix Amazon Instant and a host of smaller niche services they're a little bit more difficult to get to Sony did layer all that content among three different menus so it can be a little bit difficult to navigate but all told there's plenty of content there once you can find it Sony's picture settings aren't quite as advanced as some of the other high-end TVs out there but it does include a whole host of picture presets of course adjusting between them can be a little bit confusing but at least you can make those adjustments and not have to worry about dialing in a whole bunch of different picture settings the default picture settings on this TV are also quite accurate of course the standout feature on this high-end TV is its backlight this TV has an LED full array back light which means that unlike most the edgelet TVs you'll find those LEDs are arranged behind the panel that backlight can also be dimmed in individual sections of the screen which can really improve black level performance and all the HX 950 produces some of the deepest blacks we've ever seen and the best we've seen this year from any LED or plasma TV the sets blacks are inky especially when you turn out the lights and watch a dark scene it really does pop plenty of contrast on this TV the downside of the local dimming though is that you do get a little bit of blooming artifacts if you have like a lighter image on the screen in a bit dark background you might see a little cloud there of course that is a little bit subtle compared to a lot of the other artifacts we've seen we'll take it any day for the improved black levels the set also has excellent color and very good video processing on the downside it doesn't really maintain its image from off angle as well as we'd like to see especially for a TV that gets this dark all told however the 2d picture quality the sony is excellent and still among the best we've ever seen from an LED TV in terms of 3d performance thx 950 suffers from a lack of 3d glasses included in the box there's also a couple artifacts including the intolerance to head tilt and a little bit of flicker that we noticed so all told 3d is a lot more disappointing than 2d and the Sony's backside is as packed as you'd expect from a flagship TV there's four HDMI inputs a component video input a PC input and two USB ports for photos video and music that's a quick look at Sony's xbr hx9 50 its highest end TV for 2012 I'm David Katz my or Kristina