The BRAVIA KDL-55HX925 has every feature Sony has built into its 2011 range of LED TVs, so gadget geeks will be spoilt, but the HX925’s glossy design — attractive and stylish though it is — means it is not appropriate for watching in a bright room.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-55HX925: Design, connectivity and setup

Let’s get this out of the way early — the Sony BRAVIA HX925 has a very glossy screen. Sony’s product page for the HX925 talks up its high quality Corning Gorilla Glass screen finish and the supposedly reflection-reducing OptiContrast panel, but if the HX925 is an example of a screen with low reflectivity we’d hate to see what Sony considers a highly reflective one — a mirror, we’re guessing.

If you’re watching in a room that has no light sources in front of the screen, it’s not a problem. If you’re in a room that has ceiling lighting that’s not especially bright, or if there’s lighting behind the screen, it’s not a problem. But if you’re in a room lit by daylight, even diffused through curtains, you’ll be able to see your own reflection in the HX925’s panel. It is simply inappropriate if you’re going to be using it in anything other than a dim or dark room — or if you don’t care about reflections disrupting your viewing.

Setting up the Sony BRAVIA KDL-55HX925 is a painless process. The stand only connects to the television with a few small hex bolts, and we thought it was a bit flimsy — if you swing the HX925 from side to side through its swivelling range, the screen itself wobbles slightly. If you’ve got the option we’d recommend wall mounting as a permanent solution. We had the TV connected to a Apple MacBook Pro and Sony BDP-S480 Blu-ray player over HDMI for our testing, as well as a TiVo HD PVR to compare digital TV quality.

When the BRAVIA KDL-55HX925 is powered on for the first time, you’re prompted to run through a digital TV channel scan and to set up the television’s networking features. As befits the most expensive and feature-packed model in Sony’s line-up, the HX925 has inbuilt Wi-Fi and integrated Ethernet networking, so you can opt for whichever is more convenient. We chose Wi-Fi to cut out having to connect another cable to the back of the TV — it’s 802.11n so there are no problems with streaming high quality video through Sony Internet TV or downloading content through the TV’s BRAVIA Internet Video service.

The Series 8 is Samsung’s top-tier LED TV, with all the features of lesser TVs like the Series 7 and Series 6 as well as boosts to picture quality and video processing. If you can afford to pay for it it’s an excellent TV with no crippling flaws — the few problems are mainly restricted to the TV’s Web features. However, its Series 8 plasma rival has almost equal picture quality and offers larger screen sizes.

Samsung Series 8 3D LED TV: Design

The Series 8 looks just like its Series 8 plasma sibling, apart from a much thinner bezel around its 55in screen. The 5mm thick chromed bezel blends into the space behind the television, so in a dimly-lit room the Series 8’s screen stands out. It’s a very modern-looking TV — times have changed since chunky piano black LCD TVs dominated the market two years ago. The Loewe-esque four-legged stand is a feature we have liked on Samsung’s TVs since 2010, so we’re happy to see the trend continuing here.

At 29.7mm thick the Series 8 is a reasonably slim TV. It’s not as stunning as the Series 9 LED TV from 2010, which was thinner than a pencil, but we think the Series 8 would look great mounted against a wall with Samsung’s thin picture-frame wall mount.

The Samsung Series 8 is bundled with a novel remote control, which has a standard remote control layout on one side and a QWERTY tactile keyboard on the other. The QWERTY keyboard makes entering Web addresses or router passwords much easier than the traditional remote control keypad, and we like its inclusion even though we think it’ll get minimal day-to-day use. We did have some trouble getting used to flipping it over when a text-friendly prompt came up, and we found we had to be within a few metres of the TV to use it.

Samsung Series 8 3D LED TV: Connectivity

Just like the Series 8 plasma, the Series 8 LED has four HDMI ports, a couple of USB 2.0 connectors, Ethernet, built-in Wi-Fi, digital audio out, VGA and break-out ports for component and composite video. The TV’s active shutter 3D glasses sync up through an inbuilt infrared transmitter.

We don’t think there’s anything major missing here, but a couple more USB 2.0 ports on the Samsung Series 8 would be nice — then you could attach a USB hard drive permanently to the TV to store a music or movie library.

Samsung Series 8 3D LED TV: Features

If you get hung up on what extra features you get with your high-end TV, Samsung’s got you covered. The Series 8 has, by our reckoning, the best Web features of any TV on the market at the moment. Sony’s Internet TV beats out the Samsung setup in the sheer number of video services on offer, though.

The iOS-like grid layout of Samsung’s Smart Hub is easy to navigate, and Samsung’s App Store equivalent lets you pick and choose what services you want your TV to access. Like any marketplace there are bad eggs (Twitter and Facebook are much easier to use on a real PC) and good ones (Google Maps is fun on a big screen, and BigPond Movies on Demand is convenient), but the freedom to add or remove apps is excellent — if this ‘smart TV’ trend continues, we think it’s something all manufacuters should do.

The Series 8 is one of only a few Samsung TVs with a built-in Web browser. Used in conjunction with the QWERTY remote, it’s serviceable enough if you’re too slothful to get up off the couch and go to a computer. It also supports a variety of rich Internet protocols like HTML5 and Flash, so you’re not going to have a gimped browsing experience. Microsoft’s Silverlight protocol is missing but we didn’t find this an issue. At the end of the day, you’re still going to get a better Web browser in a PC.

Samsung Series 8 3D LED TV: Picture quality

Samsung’s high-end TVs have always impressed us with their excellent detail and colour, especially the LED models and especially when displaying High Definition content. The Series 8 LED TV continues that trend and takes it slightly further than last year’s Series 7. The changes aren’t mind-blowing, but we didn’t expect them to be considering Samsung was working from such a high quality template.

The Series 8 is the only LED model in Samsung’s 2011 LED TV range to feature local dimming, where the TV’s LED edge-lights can dim individually to control the brightness in different areas of the screen. This theoretically allows deep blacks alongside bright whites and while it doesn’t have the same pin-point lighting accuracy as a plasma TV, the system works well. It’s only a problem when there are small areas of bright white light against a dark background, like rolling movie credits.

After running through Terminator: Salvation and The Dark Knight a few times and adjusting the TV’s settings from the Cinema preset (it’s the best preset, but you can still make it look better by lowering the brightness to suit your room and dropping sharpness slightly), we were consistently impressed with the picture quality and detail that the Samsung Series 8’s 55in panel displayed. It’s the most detailed TV we’ve seen when viewing Full HD video — Blu-rays look excellent.

Standard definition up-scaling of DVD and YouTube and other low resolution content is reasonable, but it’s not as clean or as sharp as the pictures we saw from the Sony BRAVIA HX820. This means that day-to-day digital TV looks marginally better on the Sony than the Samsung.

The one fault we could find with the Samsung Series 8’s picture quality was some bloom in the lower left and right corners of the screen on a black background — patches of extra brightness where the TV’s LED edge-lighting sits. We’ve seen this before on edge-lit LED TVs of all brands and all sizes, so it’s not an issue confined to this particular TV. If you want to avoid it, buy a plasma.

3D viewing is, to our eyes, marginally improved from last year’s TVs. There’s less cross-talk, where each eye sees a slight double-edge on 3D surfaces, and the effect seems to be stronger overall — perhaps a function of Samsung’s newer, lighter, brighter 3D glasses. We played through Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and some ocean documentaries and found the 3D effect to be generally acceptable. We’ve never experienced nausea while watching 3D TV and the Samsung Series 8 didn’t start our stomachs churning.

Vizio’s LED lamps are recyclable, and feature a glass-free design to prohibit shattering. The LED lamps are designed to give off a warm hue of light, reminiscent of a natural source. The LEDs product line (see table) will feature triple the lifespan of compact fluorescent bulbs, with up to 25,000 hours of usage. Vizio plans to enter the market in late Q4 of this year.

Vizio high-efficiency LED lighting product collection

Vizio’s partners in the LED lighting space include Epistar and Seoul Semiconductor, two of the world’s top-ten suppliers of LED lighting. “This is a natural progression for Vizio beyond consumer electronics. We look forward to Vizio applying its innovation, marketing and distribution channels to save American consumers even more with its new line of LED lighting,” said Donald Leo, Vice President of Seoul Semiconductor.

“Vizio’s expansion into the LED lighting market stands to challenge the convention in the same way that it has had in the flat-panel television market,” said B.J. Lee, Chairman of Epistar.

As North America’s largest shipper of LED-backlit HDTVs, Vizio realized a 2000% growth in total shipments year over year, with over 2 million units shipped in 2010. From 2009 – 2010, the company’s contribution to energy savings (based on power consumption of 2009 vs. 2010 Vizio HDTV models at an estimated savings of 280,000 MWh/yr) could be viewed as equivalent to the energy needed to power the city of Las Vegas for more than a year.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the residential sector general service light (A19 type) bulb purchase rate of LEDs will increase approximately 300% between 2010 and 2015 to 100 million units.

These are among the findings in Strategies Unlimited’s new report “LED Driver ICs – 2011.” Sales for LCD backlights will dominate through the period, with growth from edge-lit TVs and monitors. LED lighting applications will be the “next big thing” for LED drivers and driver ICs, beginning with LED replacement bulbs, as a response to improvements in technology and the phase-out of incandescent bulbs.

LED driver IC revenues are threatened, however, by continued integration into fewer ICs, as well as by competition from organic LEDs (OLEDs), compact fluorescent lamps, and other technologies.

Severe price erosion for driver ICs will limit the revenue growth as volumes increase, but new, higher-priced ICs are appearing that reduce the overall bill of materials and also help maintain the average price of the ICs.

Also, AC-LED products minimize the driver and some eliminate the driver IC, but will not have a significant impact on overall revenues through the period, and may even help accelerate adoption of LED lighting.

Lighting market

The production value of drivers for lighting will see strong 40% compound annual growth through the period. The driver is defined as the entire LED circuit, including the driver IC but excluding the LEDs. Innovations in driver design will help take LED lighting mainstream, but the market will quickly shake out those who cannot meet strict goals for dimming, efficiency, power factor, and price.

To meet these goals, large and small companies are bringing innovations to market, such as digital control and novel high-voltage designs. Industry and government are moving toward more standardized specifications that will reduce manufacturing costs and accelerate adoption.

The top 10 LED driver IC suppliers hold more than 55% of revenues, with about 30 IC suppliers and captive manufacturers sharing the other 44%. With the acquisition of National Semiconductor by Texas Instruments, TI is now the number one supplier of LED driver ICs. Winners will be those who can keep delivering innovative products at competitive prices. Fabrication with leading-edge, high-voltage BCD processes and 8-inch (or larger) wafers will play a key role.

Report details

“LED Driver ICs – 2011” is the latest in a series of reports from Strategies Unlimited on LEDs and LED lighting. It takes a fresh look at the LED driver electronics market, with more than 300 pages of detail on technology and application trends. It is a revision of an earlier report, with perspectives on the LED applications, driver technology, requirements on the drivers and driver ICs, and findings on suppliers and market shares. It provides unit, price, and revenue forecasts to 2015 for all LED driver IC segments, and for the overall driver for LED lighting.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Design, features and power

The materials the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC are constructed of feel slightly cheap — the plastic bezel around the screen is a bit tacky and easily picks up fingerprints, for example, and the base of the TV’s stand is a simple square of glass — but the TV is solid and doesn’t feel flimsy when standing. The stand swivels over a small range.

We don’t think you’ll be using the Vanto GLED2407HDC with a huge range of digital TV devices, but there are single inputs for HDMI, composite, component and VGA. You can also connect a home theatre system via coaxial digital audio. A USB port also allows a small range of media files to be played back, with support for MP3, WMA and JPEG. If you’ve got a large enough USB memory stick you can also record digital TV and play it back later through the Vanto GLED2407HDC.

The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is very light on power — it has the enviable combination of a small screen and efficient LED edge-lighting. According to Grundig, running the Vanto GLED2407HDC for ten hours a day for ten years would only cost $204. At 40W max power consumption it’s more efficient than even a laptop computer or incandescent light bulb, so we doubt you’d notice a big impact on your power bill. When we tested the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC on a power meter and took an average power reading over an hour of TV, it sat at 37W.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Picture quality

The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is a Full HD 1080p 24in panel, and Grundig quotes a 1000:1 contrast ratio. In practice this means when you’re playing a Blu-ray movie or watching an HD digital TV channel, the amount of detail you can see on-screen is impressive. The screen does need a fair bit of tweaking from its default settings to display the best picture quality — we dropped sharpness significantly, as well as lowering brightness and contrast. When we ran through our test Blu-ray movies of The Dark Knight and Terminator: Salvation, we were happy with the amount of detail that could be seen and the colour and contrast of the movies.

The screen did struggle a little with the opening scenes of The Dark Knight where pin-pricks of bright white light are contrasted against a deep black background — but this is common to almost all LCD and LED TVs. Apart from this one foible, the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC does a good job of displaying video. Only a small amount of detail is lost in especially bright and especially dark areas of the screen.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Conclusion

When we tested the Vanto GLED2407HDC, we thought it had good picture quality as well as good power efficiency. It is reasonably cheap even at its recommended retail price, so if you can find it discounted it’s an even better deal.

The LG DM50D offers high refresh rates, and as such has been certified as “Flicker Free” – an added bonus because it places less strain on the eyes of users looking to enjoy 3D gaming and viewing. Viewers will also purportedly benefit from reduced crosstalk artefacts when watching extra-dimensional content, which is important to keep eye fatigue to a minimum. For four-eyed folks a clip-on style is available, which can simply be attached onto standard prescription lenses. Si-hwan Park, vice president of the monitor division at LG’s Home Entertainment Company, said that the company had carried out research which revealed that many people are not happy about wearing the more cumbersome 3D glasses, while some have concerns about their health when using these glasses.

The monitor itself features 2D-to-3D conversion capability, which will work automatically with games, and regardless of whether it is hooked up to a PC. LED backlight technology and HDMI connectivity will come as standard. Users will also be able to watch videos from a flash drive without the need to boot up the computer thanks to the USB Quick View feature of the DM50D.

The new offering from LG effectively provides consumers with a cross between a PC monitor and a personal 3D TV. Surprisingly, the Seoul-based corporation remains coy on the actual screen size, but judging from the model number it could be either 50 inches or 50 centimetres (20 inches), with the latter being more likely given that the 3-dimensional television/monitor is meant to “fit easily on a desktop”. The LG DM50D is scheduled to hit the shelves in Europe from July before being rolled out on a global basis.

So says the Institute of Energy Economics, a research group overseen by the country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

IEE analyzed the benefits of switching to LEDs following the March nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Meltdowns prompted the country to abandon expansion of a nuclear industry that has provided 30% of Japan’s electricity with 54 reactors – 35 of which remain shut for safety.

IEE’s findings surfaced this week in the Mainichi Daily News.

“Promoting the introduction of LED lights will serve as energy-saving measures that have immediate effects and sustainability,” the Tokyo-based online paper quotes an IEE representative as saying.

LED light bulbs use only about 10%-to-20% of the power consumed by incandescent light bulbs, and about 60% of fluorescents, including common energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. IEE figured that Japanese homes, offices and manufacturing sites use some 1.6 billion bulbs, annually eating up 150.6 billion kWh of electricity.

If people replace those with LED bulbs, the country would cut annual consumption by 92.2 billion kWh, to 58.4 billion kWh, according to IEE. It says that’s the equivalent of 13 nuclear reactors, a quarter of the country’s total.

Cost is a challenge. As we’ve noted before, LED bulbs in the U.S. can have retail prices of $40. If you have, say, 40 bulbs in your house, you’d pay $1600 to replace them all at once.

IEE tallied the bill for 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan at ¥15.7 trillion ($194 billion). However, the upfront cost provides long-term savings not only in electricity bills, but also in longevity. Manufacturers say LED bulbs can last for 25 years, although it will take a quarter of a century to find out if that’s true.

Another knock on LEDs, especially for home users, is that lighting designers and architects note that they lack the warmth of incandescent bulbs. But the good news from Japan – 70% of the 1.6 billion bulbs in Japan are fluorescent, to which many people would prefer LEDs for glow.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Design and setup

The Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 looks more attractive than last year’s model thanks to a seamless fascia, using a single sheet of glass along the front panel with no bulky bezel. It’s very reflective glass, which means you’ll need to make sure to position the TV where no direct light sources are hitting it — otherwise you’ll be distracted by reflections and will have to turn the screen brightness up to compensate. It’s an annoying inclusion that limits the locations the HX820 can be placed in a house.

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 has inbuilt Wi-Fi, which meant we didn’t need to run an Ethernet cable to it to enable Internet features. Another feature that’s now integrated is the HX820’s 3D transmitter — in last year’s HX800 the 3D transmitter and glasses had to be purchased separately, driving up the cost for anyone who wanted to watch a couple of 3D movies. Two pairs of 3D glasses are included with the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820.

If you’re planning to use an older video input like component or composite with the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820, note that the TV uses a break-out box to hold some of these connectors. If you’re wall-mounting the TV, the break-out box is another piece of cable you’ll need to hide. All the other connectors you’d expect like HDMI, Ethernet and USB are built into the side and base of the HX820’s rear panel.

We hooked the BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 up to a Sony BDP-S380 Blu-ray player, a TiVo HD PVR, and a Apple MacBook Pro notebook to test picture quality from a range of input sources.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Picture quality

The BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 uses a dynamic LED back-light arranged around the TV’s edge, but there’s no local dimming to vary brightness in different screen areas. Nonetheless the Sony BRAVIA HX820 is able to achieve very deep black levels, soundly beating the Samsung Series 8 plasma when it came to overall blacks. Our Terminator: Salvation and The Dark Knight test Blu-ray discs looked cinematic and delivered rich blacks.

Once you’ve adjusted the Sony BRAVIA HX820 to the room it’s in, it is well-suited to watching movies or any other video. The HX820’s picture processing is of a very high standard and makes high quality video like Full HD Blu-ray video look clean, extremely detailed and almost perfectly vibrant. The screen does take a fair amount of adjustment, though — the default Vivid mode blows out highlights and over-saturates colours. We opted for the Cinema preset but further lowered saturation and brightness, as well as turning off various picture enhancements like the Clear White setting. You also have to sit right in front of the TV to get the best picture — colours wash out and blacks brighten as you move towards the HX820’s sides.

The Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 cleans up low resolution video very well. Streaming content off ABC iView was almost free of compression artifacts, and DVD video was similarly clean and detailed. Noise reduction also works wonders on free-to-air digital TV, which only struggles during scenes of fast motion.

3D video is leaps and bounds ahead of Sony’s efforts from last year. Cross-talk is almost non-existant with good 3D content — we used Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and a few 3D ocean documentaries. The 3D effect is generally realistic and does offer a noticeable amount of extra depth. The 3D effect does become less prevalent as you move to the sides of the screen. We found it best on proper 3D content, but Sony has also included a 2D-to-3D mode on the BRAVIA KDL-46HX820.

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 handles on-screen motion well for the most part, although 24p Blu-ray video can occasionally look slightly jerky depending on the video being played. We opted to keep the TV’s MotionFlow setting on Smooth for TV and streaming video, but Blu-ray movies looked better with it disabled.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Internet features

All of the features from 2010’s BRAVIA HX800 are still in the Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820 — iView is a perennial favourite. These BRAVIA Internet Video services are of a high standard and the BRAVIA HX820 generally makes them look great, so their inclusion broadens the amount of content available to any TV watcher.

Some new features have been included, like a Web browser, as well as Facebook and Twitter access. However, we didn’t like them too much — controlling the Web browser is a difficult exercise with the keypad of the Sony remote control, and logging into Facebook and Twitter becomes a slight hassle. Both Samsung and LG have strong browsing features built into their TVs, and Sony’s effort pales in comparison. LG’s remote control is a Wii-like pointer, and Samsung’s premium TVs come with a full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote.

Sony BRAVIA KDL-46HX820: Conclusion

The Sony BRAVIA HX820 is a high quality television when considered on its own merits — it’s got an excellent picture and a wide range of extra features built in. While the video-on-demand services are great, with the only thing missing a direct movie streaming option, other Web features are mediocre. There’s no app interface for users to choose their own content, and the Web browser is eclipsed by Samsung’s (which makes use of a QWERTY keyboard remote) and LG’s (which uses a ‘magic motion’ pointer).

While the Sony BRAVIA HX820 has some strong competition that should also be considered, we do have to applaud Sony for positioning its 2011 TVs at a reasonable price — the BRAVIA HX820 is a full $700 cheaper than the Samsung Series 8 LED that it competes with. The HX820 has great picture quality due to excellent video processing and reasonable Web features.