Sony Bravia KDL-40EX43B review

Let’s cut to the chase. If you’re and looking to buy a new TV and Blu-ray player, you’d be hard pushed to find a better value option than the Sony Bravia KDL-40EX43B. There, we’ve said it.

What you get is a 40in Sony LCD TV with an integrated Blu-ray player for around £569 online, including delivery. Well, the KDL-40EX43B will actually cost you about £100 more than that, but due to Sony’s “VAT back” promotion, as long as you buy before Christmas, Sony will refund you the tax, making the actual price £569. Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, what is this TV actually like?

There’s no getting away from the fact that you’re getting a lot for you money with this TV, but it’s also worth pointing out that that the KDL-40EX43B sits in Sony’s Essential range, which is basically the entry level. As such, the KDL-40EX43B doesn’t look quite as slick and stylish as sets found in Sony’s premium Network, or even Signature ranges. That’s not so say it’s an ugly TV – with a glossy black bezel and stand, the KDL-40EX43B manages to look reasonably sleek, as long as you remember to dust it regularly.

There’s no fancy LED backlighting here, so the KDL-40EX43B isn’t the slimmest of LCD TVs, but when you consider that Sony has squeezed a Blu-ray drive into the chassis, its profile is quite impressive. The Blu-ray drive is a slot loading device located on the right edge of the TV along with an array of controls. Don’t get excited about having an extra HDMI port because of the integrated Blu-ray, though, as this TV only has three HDMIs instead of the more common four. We’re assuming that despite being integrated, the Blu-ray player uses an internal HDMI connection.

Load time is respectable, and having the single remote control for Blu-ray and TV duties is no bad thing. However there is one particularly annoying aspect to the Blu-ray playback – the lack of an automatic resume function. If you decide to stop watching your movie in order to watch a TV programme, when you go back to the Blu-ray it loads the disc from scratch rather than resuming from where you left off. This would be, to some extent, understandable if you switched the TV off, but we’re talking about just dropping back to TV functionality and then going back to Blu-ray playback.

Having the Blu-ray integrated also limits your audio options. The KDL-40EX43B does have an optical digital output for pumping a surround sound bitstream to an external amplifier, but the latest high definition audio codecs can’t be carried by an optical output. Both Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio require an HDMI output to carry their bitstream, so lossless surround codecs are off the menu.

Of course it could be argued that anyone buying a TV with an integrated Blu-ray player will be using the integrated speakers too, but in this case that would be a big mistake. The sound in most flat screen TVs is far from impressive, but the sound from the KDL-40EX43B is simply terrible. There’s no hint of bass whatsoever, so action scenes in movies lose all sense urgency and impact. There’s a pseudo surround option in the audio menu, but whether it’s employed or not, the soundstage remains narrow, without any sense of immersion.

The TV itself has a decent feature set considering the bargain price. You get both analogue and Freeview HD digital tuners built in, and a whole host of Internet TV options. There’s an Ethernet port at the rear for hooking up to your home network, although a USB wireless dongle can be purchased. There are two USB ports – one at the rear and one at the side – so you’ll still have USB connectivity if you go down the wireless route. Talking of USB functionality, we couldn’t convince this set to playback Xvid content, but then we’ve encountered that same issue on all the recent Sony TVs that we’ve tested.

Other inputs include component video, composite, a headphone socket and a D-SUB PC input. The KDL-40EX43B will happily display a native 1,920×1,080 resolution from a PC over both VGA and HDMI.

Set up and general menu navigation is an absolute breeze thanks to Sony’s XMB interface. If you’ve used a PSP or PlayStation 3 the interface will be familiar to you already, but even if you haven’t it’s by far the most intuitive TV interface on the market. The EPG is also impressive with clear, well resolved graphics and a preview window displaying the currently tuned channel.

Image quality is reasonable, but hardly the stuff that high definition dreams are made of. The main problems lie at either end of the scale, where blacks simply aren’t black enough and bright scenes have a habit of looking washed out. Firing up Serenity on Blu-ray highlighted this problem, where the scenes on Miranda are almost painful to watch as the images are so bright and washed out. If we tried to reign things back a bit to make these scenes better, we started to lose detail in darker scenes.

We encountered similar, but not quite so stark (no pun intended) results when watching the Iron Man 2 Blu-ray. The race in Monte Carlo is slightly too bright and oversaturated, but the night-time climax at the Stark Expo lacks the deep blacks and vivid colours that the scene deserves.

On the plus side, the pictures produced by the KDL-40EX43B are very sharp, especially with high quality source material like Iron Man 2. Results were equally good watching BBC HD via the Freeview HD tuner. Standard definition performance is pretty decent too, but only if the source content is good enough – BBC 1 looked very good, but lower bit-rate Freeview channels looked dirty and lacked detail.

Sony’s Internet TV implementation is impressive, and there’s a decent selection of high quality IP content. Taking pride of place is BBC iPlayer, although Sony’s player is still in Beta phase. It still worked well, but does appear a little rough around the edges. Other highlights include Demand Five, LoveFilm, EuroSport and Sony’s own streaming libraries. Internet TV playback is watchable, but there are noticeable compression artefacts – that didn’t stop us watching Blade Runner on iPlayer though.

If you’re on a very tight budget and need a new TV and Blu-ray player, the Sony Bravia KDL-40EX43B will tick all the right boxes, especially when it comes to price. And if you’re planning to wall mount, or just hate cables, the all-in-one nature of this TV makes it even more attractive. However, you’ll be making compromises when it comes to image quality, usability and features.

For better quality we recommend a separate TV, such as the amazing Panasonic Viera TX-P42G20B (currently less than £600) and the Sony BDP-S370 Blu-ray player, which has the same internet portal as this television.