Sony KV-FS200 review: Sony KV-FS200

Sony's second-most-expensive 27-inch flat-screen TV has a handsome, straightforward design with a silver finish and speakers set into the panels to the left and right of the screen. The speakers are each driven by 10 watts of power. The front panel has controls for menu and input selection, as well as a composite input. The remote control is large and backlit and is easy to navigate, as is the onscreen menu.
The KV-27FS200 boasts numerous performance features, which show up in its picture. The most important is the 16:9 Enhanced mode, which delivers the full resolution of enhanced-for-wide-screen DVD. Those few differences, along with a good color decoder and reasonable factory setup, deliver big improvements in picture quality. In the original Austin Powers movie, the dancer with the mod raincoat of multicolored panels offers a good color test. On this TV, the yellow panel looked right, the red panel was bright but not blurry, and the black panel was appropriately shiny for vinyl, but there was still detail in the shadows.
Generally, you have to get to the 27-inch screen size before you see great performance in a TV set, and this unit performs very well. We found it online for about $499. Its only competition is from other Sonys, namely, the less expensive KV-27FS100, which, for about $50 less, offers the same performance but not a two-tuner picture-in-picture (PIP).