Sony BRAVIA S-Series KDL-46S5100

I’m not a big TV person, so I can’t compare this TV to others. I actually purchased this TV to play my PS3 on it, which is great!!!!! The games at 1080p look absolutely flawless. I can’t really make a lot of comments about the functions, but there are a lot of them. Everything looks great and for the price it’s great, and it’s a SONY!

Three months later, here is a review update:
This is still a good TV, especially when I purchased it 3 months ago. However, over the course of 3 months the HDMI connections started doing some weird things.

My set up is very simple: HDMI 1 is connected to my Digital Cable, HDMI 2 is connected to my SONY PS3 and HDMI 3 is connected to my SONY DVD upscale player. The problems I started having was the HDMI connections weren’t reading the signals sent by each component. At first I though it was the digital cable, because I stopped getting a signal. So, I had my cable company come out to my house three times and the last time they exchanged the digital DVR cable box with a new one. However, I noticed that when I turned on my DVD upscale using the “Bravia” features, I could no longer get a signal from my digital cable. So I unplugged the HDMI 1 (digital cable) and connected it to HDMI 3 (DVD upscale), then I received a cable signal. Same thing was happening to my PS3 (HDMI 2). It was like the PS3 and the DVD player kept knock’en out the cable signal.
So after hours of troubleshooting this ongoing problem, I realized, it wasn’t my digital cable boxes, PS3 or DVD player, it was the TV itself and since it was over 90 days, since the day I purchased it, I couldn’t return it to Wal-mart. So I called SONY and come to find out, SONY apparently knows about this problem. So SONY sent me a software update in the form of a USB drive. I received the USB drive, connected it to the back of the TV and the TV updated the software. The process took about 3 minutes and so far, everything is working fine.

I guess the biggest problem I have with this situation is that, if SONY knows this TV need a software update, why don’t they recall the TV or send the software update to each store that is selling the TV, so customers don’t have to go through this madness? So I wrote this review to warn customers who’s buying this TV and those who brought this TV of what to expect as you connect components to this TV using the HDMI ports over time. I would also recommend buying an extended warranty, just to be safe in the long run. I would also change my rating and give it 4 stars if I could, but I can’t.

Reviewed by : X “X-Man”,   Aug 26, 2009