Sony Bravia KDL-40EX43B review

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.