Very clear picture.

Horrible geometry problems.

This TV could be great, but it falls short. I got this TV as a replacement for a defective, and unrepairable Sony TV I had purchased 6 months ago. The picture could be great, if it could only display a straight line. When horizontal lines are displayed on the screen they tend to look more like a "W" than anything else. You can especially see this flaw when displaying your digital satalites program grid. I have had the TV in for repair twice, (1 week and a half in the shop each time)in the month Iv'e owned it and it comes back worse every time. The service tech. said that it was a design flaw, and that there is no way to fix it. Sony, who happens to be the KING of POOR customer service said that they would buy the unit back from me. They said they would notify me of the details of the buy back within 48 hrs. They said that over a week ago and I still havn't heard anything. If you do buy a Sony product and you have a problem with it be prepared for very, very long hold times. I wait an average of 30 minutes every time I have to call to find out the status of my repair / refund. I've been dealing with some sort of repair or replacement for the past six months. I've had a TV in my house for about a month in the last 6. This is only my experience with Sony, you may get lucky.

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Panasonic Superflat

One of the reviews complains that 16:9 enhanced mode compresses the picture too much.
I would suggest that you set your DVD player to send picture in 16:9 format (streched with extra info) and not letter box or pan scan. When you set the TV to 16:9 the picture is a regular DVD size but you get the extra lines.

And you are right if you have letter box or pan scan piping from the dvd things will be too compressed.

Tv is an excellent unit.

color saturation, focus, 16x9 enhanced mode, styling and features

the damn xds featre which would otherwise be cool but you got to navigate through 50 buttons to get in and out of it.

if your looking for regular 27-32 inch sets i strongely urge you to consider the kv-27v16. it does cost more but i do believe it does have certain benefits over its other brethrin. first off (and maybe the main reason people buy this set) is the screen shape; vertically and horizontally flat. this makes almost any viewing position in the house a good one. another great feature is the 16x9 enhanced mode which gives you the full resolution capabilites of the dvd format despite the apearance of black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. this is done by decreasing the height of each scan line and then redisplaying it at the proper aspect ratio(after setting your dvd player to also display a 16x9 image). the tv also sports component video inputs as well as two super video inputs. i have not encountered any of the problems listed below like inncorect geometry or "flashing" maybe these are problems they have corrected or i just got lucky. i've heard some complaints about putting the second s-video connection in front but if you have a receiver with super video switching then the second one on front becomes almost irrelevant unless you use it from time to time for a video game system or camcorder. in closing this is a marvelous television with a very good image. the sound while not stunning is not that bad enough where i feel myself running to turn on my home theater while watching regular broadcast tv. 5 stars from me.

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a panasonic something-or-other