The new Ultra HD 4K television from Sony promises the most beautiful images in a timeless housing. At first glance, the design is quite successful, but how good is this 4K LCD TV? You can read it in our review of the Sony KD-43XF7000.
Sony KD-43XF7000
Price699 euros
Screen type
LCD
Screen diagonal
43 inches, 109.22 cm
Resolution
3840 x 2160 pixels (4K Ultra HD)
Frame rate
50Hz
HDR
HDR10, HLG standards
Connectivity
3 x HDMI, 3 x USB, composite, headphone-in, optical-in, WiFi, Ethernet LAN
Smart TV
Vewd OS
Website
www.sony.nl 8 Score 80
- Pros
- Particularly bright
- Good contrast despite IPS panel
- Excellent color rendering
- Low input lag
- Negatives
- Smart TV capabilities are limited
- Viewing angle limited by IPS glow
The Sony television has a solid and fairly slim design, but does use a separate power supply. For that big block you have to free up some extra space.
Connections
The device has a typical selection of connections for this category, with three HDMI and three USB inputs and a single TV tuner that unfortunately is not suitable for satellite. One HDMI jack and the headphone jack are located at the back and face the wall. That is difficult for wall mounting, especially for the headphone jack. The antenna connections can be found on the side, and are quite close to the edge, making it difficult to neatly hide the stiff antenna cable.
Image quality
No top-end image processor in this model, but excellent results. The noise reduction is good, and with Reality Creation you give the image a little extra sharpness without negative side effects. As expected, the sharpness of motion is limited, but thanks to motion interpolation, you can eliminate stuttering in fast camera movements.
The Sony features an IPS screen with reasonable contrast, which gets even better thanks to the 'Advanced Contrast Enhancement' setting. The gray scale has a barely visible green tone, but otherwise the calibration is solid, with an excellent color reproduction. The screen is at its best with clear content, but can also deliver fun movie performances.
The viewing angle of the screen is somewhat limited because it suffers from 'IPS glow' where a light glow appears on the image from an angle, which is certainly visible in a dark environment. This model therefore comes into its own in well-lit situations.
HDR
The XF7000 supports HDR10 and HLG standards, and you can count on a lot of brightness, just below our requirement of 500 nits. Unfortunately, the color range is far too limited. Even in very high-contrast scenes, the IPS panel appears to fall short despite its solid contrast performance. Moderate to non-existent HDR performance is no exception in this category, but with clear HDR images you can get a cautious impression of what HDR has to offer on this Sony. Please note, those who do not use the 'auto' scene must manually activate the HDR display.
Smart TV
This Sony is not equipped with Google's Android TV, but runs a simpler smart TV environment based on Linux called Vewd OS. The system is very responsive and simple, but the selection of apps is somewhat limited. The three main video streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube) are present, and we also found Plex via the 'Vewd' app store. The media player is also quite complete, with support for the main video and audio formats. Strangely enough it doesn't play only mp4 audio (aac codec and .m4a extension).
remote
The supplied remote is fine, with a handy layout that is slightly simpler than that of the more high-end models. This is not surprising, because of the different smart TV environment. The keys press a bit too loosely, which makes the remote feel a bit cheap, although it does not limit its functionality. Due to the simpler layout, there is room at the bottom of the remote control for larger buttons, which benefits the operation.
Sound quality
Do not expect overwhelming sound quality in this price segment. The Sony performs well for typical TV conditions, in other words: clear display of the dialogues, and as long as you don't ask for too much volume, reasonable sound. For real movie experiences or music, it is better to look for an external solution.
Conclusion
This LCD TV from Sony delivers a very clear image with beautiful color reproduction. The contrast is good, but it's best to look in a normally lit environment to get around the limitations. The television is a great choice for the family, and gamers get very low input lag.
The KD-43XF7000 uses an IPS panel with reasonable contrast, but boosts that considerably with the help of the image processing. Brilliant colors and high brightness guarantee excellent images. Only for HDR the color reproduction and contrast are too limited. The smart TV system offers the most important streaming services, and works smoothly, but is otherwise limited in possibilities.
