For more than a year, the W series of Bravia televisions from Sony have been must-haves for Home Cinema fans.

They were amongst the first commercially available TVs to successfully include what we now consider standard features for high-end flatscreens while avoiding flashy gimmicks that add no extra functionality.

Following the success of the W3000 and the W4000, we've recently had the chance to test the 40'' version of the W4500, this Sony Bravia KDL-40W4500.

Similar Styling

As with the earlier models, this new offering features a Full HD screen with a matte panel, and its design is largely similar to that of the W4000: the rotating stand is back, and only a few details have been honed.

Its remote control is still ahead of the game, with a logical layout and a relatively restrained set of functions directly, with other settings accessible via the onscreen menus.

By far the most useful aspect of the remote is a Theater button which allows the activation of cinema mode with a single press, meaning you can go from watching the news in a brightly lit room to a full Home Cinema experience with deep blacks and strong contrast almost immediately.

Sony's famous XrossMediaBar user interface is back, giving a PS3-style touch to navigation, even though the icons used are a little less striking.


Connectivity

On the back, you'll find all the inputs and outputs that you would expect from a modern TV, including three HDMI ports.

For viewing content from your home network, both a USB port and an Ethernet port supporting the DLNA standard are available.

Currently, it's only possible to enjoy JPEG photos or MP3s using these connections, with no support for video, but no TV currently available can truly claim to handle this properly.

The built-in digital tuner supports Full HD.


Fluidity beyond compare

In an upgrade to the W4000, Sony have included their Motionflow 100 Hz technology on the W4500, and it's certainly a worthwhile addition.

The manufacturer has greatly improved the fluidity of moving images, and have gone a long way in controlling the 'slowing down--speeding up' phenomena that's so striking with rival Philips' HD Natural Motion system.

All in all, the system is largely successful in tackling ghosting.

What we did find, however, is that it's not worth turning up the Motionflow system to its highest setting, where you risk producing noticeable visual artifacts on fast-moving images.

Instead, keeping the default lowest setting give better results, but even under this configuration, rolling subtitles were a little jumpy.

It's impossible to tell whether or not this is a problem whose origins lie with the Motionflow 100 Hz system or elsewhere, but the kind of moving text that produced these results is in any case rare, and hardly of great concern.

In Use

With the default settings activated, this TV gives relatively good results, with its blacks particularly dark (0.9 cd/m²) in dynamic contrast mode, although this does cause the gamma curve to vary widely from one scene to the next.

As is usually the case, we obtained the best results in Cinema mode, whose default settings are almost faultess.

We managed to achieve a contrast of around 1500:1 using ANSI measures, that is, flipping continuously from black to white and back on a single image.

With a little bit of trickery, the W4500 is far from alone in reaching better contrast scores--up to 4000:1--in dynamic contrast mode, at the price of losing image fidelity.

Colors are handled excellently.  The CIE chart (right) is very good, with a DeltaE score of 3.0 showing how good a screen this is: only very rarely do its competitors reach scores as low as this.

Movies

Watching movies only served to reinforce our first impressions.

Blacks are thick and strong, colors natural and contrast well defined without being aggressive.

One of the only other disappointments is the upscaling of Standard Definition sources.

Even though these are handled reasonably well--at least as well as on the W4000, in fact--the results still aren't as good as those produced by DVD players with dedicated scaling capabilities.

As ever, our PS3 managed better results, as you can see here:


Another weak spot is the relatively poor viewing angle.

While it's true that we have adopted a new testing procedure for examining this, the results were still pretty disappointing.

We now use a darker scene so that deviations are more readily noticeable when you move away from the screen's central axis.

The perception of blacks was noticeably lighter for the fourth viewer who sat down on our sofa with three people already in place, and the vertical viewing angle is even more reduced, with the quality of the image decreasing when moving from sitting down to standing up at three meters from the TV.

To finish with our list of gripes, you should know that the sound is not really worthy of the pictures produced by this TV.

Excellent Value

To do it justice, you'll definitely need to plug in a separate Home Cinema sound system as the W4500 only uses two speakers, with no woofer to support the bass--the lack in quality is noticeable.

Even if we've concluded our review by pointing out one or two of the W4500's faults, we have to insist that, overall, this is an excellent piece of hardware--in fact, it's one of the best TVs available today.

It's already available for less than 1300 euros (1800 USD / 1000 GBP) online, and it's definitely possible that it will fall into the 1000-1200 euro (1350-1625 USD / 750-925 GBP) bracket ahead of Christmas.

Whichever way its price goes, however, you certainly get a lot for your money with the W4500.