Sony Bravia KLV-40ZX1M

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm David Katzmaier, Senior Editor at CNET. I'm sitting next to the Sony KLV-40ZX1M. This is a 40-inch LCD flat panel TV. It's actually not a TV, it's a monitor which means it doesn't have a tuner, but it does have speakers in this case. This particular monitor is special because it uses "edge-lit" LED technology, so the edge-lit tech allows that this TV actually be thinner than any LCD we've reviewed yet. It's only 1.1-inches thick, so if you look at it from the side, it kind of disappears in this razor thin design. Of course that does present a couple of design questions, where are you going to put the inputs. Sony solved that problem by building a special stand end of the TV here. The single arm kind of goes up to the back here and you can hide the single HDMI cord that comes with the TV and the AC cable, so they kind of snake along the bottom here and disappear. The flip side of that and you can see features why this TV really only has that single HDMI input. The edge around the TV is relatively thick with this nice burnish black. You can't really make it out here, but it really looks nice in person and the speakers for this TV are hidden in the bottom of the stand. So, the special stand does come with the TV, the speakers are hidden inside and if you want to wall-mount the TV you're going to have to spring for a special proprietary speaker bar that Sony sells for another couple of hundred bucks. Other features on this TV include this ability to adjust a lot of the picture parameters. You can go back and play with the color temperature, you can play around the gamma and a lot of the picture presets are fully adjustable. So, again lots of ways to play around with the picture on this monitor. The downside about this TV, it looks really good when it's turned off, but when it's turned on the picture isn't really all that great. For 3500 bucks we expected a little bit more of the black levels on this TV -- not very deep at all. On the flip side it does have relatively good color, but the uniformity is another issue. The edges of the picture as you'd expect from a technology called "edge-lit" are actually a little bit brighter than the middle. I mean in dark areas you can kind of see that the corner is especially brighten up a little bit. So, uniformity again not as good as we expected. On in all though, it is a pretty striking-looking TV. This is the Sony KLV-40ZX1M and I'm David Katzmaier. ^M00:02:10 [ Music ]