Great Picture--Even with Standard Def

I'm just going to hit a few points that were of concern to me when I bought this TV over a year ago. Other people have posted the "speeds and feeds" so I'm not going to duplicate that info.

My old TV blew up and wasn't really ready to go whole route to pay for HDTV signal. I still have a Sony Standard Definition (SD) DirecTV Tivo (SAT-T60) with a lifetime subscription and I'm not ready to give that up.

Viewing Standard Definition Signals

I was afraid the SD signal would look bad on this screen. What I've found is that old TV shows are pretty grainy but more recently produced shows really look great.

There's a button on the remote to set how the picture is displayed. If you're watching a widescreen TV show (16x9), you select "Zoom" and the picture pretty much fills the screen.

I don't use the stretch settings because it ends up making people look chubby and the LCD screen doesn't suffer from "burn in" issues.

Non-HighDef DVDs

I have a Philips DVP5982/37 DVD player that I send through a Yamaha AV receiver using component video and it LOOKS GREAT! This DVD player claims to upconvert the regular DVDs to 1080p signal.

Sound

I have no idea how the speakers sound on this since I run all of my audio through the Yamaha AV receiver.

PC Video Input

I have a Sony VIAO PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. I originally used this to play DVDs, but there is some problem that causes some DVDs to hang, so I bought the Philips DVD player. I still use this to display the PC to play music. One thing that threw me on hooking up the PC was before I installed everything in the cabinets, I tested my configuration. I used a fairly short VGA cable at that time and my display card would drive the monitor at the full 1080p (1920x1080) resolution. When I installed the components and used a longer VGA cable, I had to lower the resolution because the 1080p resolution would not display properly.

SDTV vs HDTV

I'm sure when I finally go th HDTV I'll never want to go back but frankly, the SD picture on this display looks good enough to satisfy me for at least another couple of years.

The one thing that does bother me is that the the major networks have quit transmitting the widescreen shows on regular TV. A lot of the cable networks still transmit them in widescreen, so I can take advantage of the width of the monitor for these shows. In addition, DirecTV quit transmitting surround sound on SD. All of these guys want us to upgrade to HDTV, but I keep hoping DirecTV and Tivo will mend their relationship so I can have a decent HD DVR and not have to settle for cable.

ONE CAUTION:
The frame surrounding the display is VERY fragile and you CAN NOT put the weigh of the display on it EVER! This makes it kind of hard to install. I ended up putting the stand for it on top of a short ladder then having my neighbor help me put it in the stand. Then I hooked up all of the cables and finally, we lifted it out of the stand and hung it on the wall. If you hang it on the wall I HIGHLY recommend that you keep the stand in case you have to take it back off the wall.

NOTES FOR PEOPLE WITH FANCY REMOTES

I have a Philips Pronto Pro remote and I have a button with a Macro to turn everything on and switch to a certain mode. One huge flaw in the XBR is that after it receives the ON signal from the remote, it takes 5 or 6 seconds before it will accept any other commands. This means I have to keep pointing the remote at my infrared receiver until it finishes running an 8 second macro.

Warning! Techie remarks to follow, so if you don't understand this stuff, don't worry, it probably doesn't apply to you.

Also, the XBR supports most of the Discrete remote codes you'll need, but it the there are not discrete codes for all 4 of the screen width settings, so you'll have to use one of the discrete codes to get to a known state and then a toggle to move forward to the one you want to select.

If you have a remote mounted infrared receiver:

I have a remote mounted infrared receiver to control my components which are hidden in the cabinet. LCD monitors interfere with these receivers unless you have one that is LCD safe--these babies cost $100 so that was an unexpected expense in setting up my system.