Sony Bravia KDL-40EX43B review

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.