Sony Bravia 32" S5100 LCD HDTV

This television has been wonderful. A real pleasure. And I like it when purchases go that way.

For starters, it has plenty of inputs. Two components and two composites for hooking up analog stuff. Three HDMI inputs. An RGB input for PCs, RF for cable or HD antenna, and S-Video. It has audio out on the back, as well, for passing your HDMI sound to a receiver.

Now, if I had my way, it would have a DVI input for PCs - but that's alright, a DVI->HDMI converter is cheap and easy.

Menus are nice. Plenty of options. One small nicety is being able to name all of the inputs - so that instead of "HDMI 1", "HDMI 2", "HDMI 3", and "Composite", you can have "DVD", "Blu-Ray", "TV", and "Playstation".

It also lets you assign names to analog channels. Yes, I still have basic analog cable. It's $7 per month, and gets me the few channels I watch.

The parental controls are nice and flexible. Separate settings for TV and movies. Parental lock on individual channels, can block unrated, and even block external inputs.

If your video source uses 24fps, like movies, this will support it without having to do conversion. It can also do a 60Hz refresh rate. Very nice and bright. Visually, it's all that you'd want.

The only feature that I would really want to see added would be an LED light source - but those are still new on the market, and significantly more expensive than this TV. This TV is certainly not inexpensive, but it sure is nice.

Update: A while back, the HDMI output from my media player stopped showing video on the TV. I figured it was the media player, everything else was working. A month later, the HDMI connection from my Blu-Ray player lost audio. A week later, the HDMI output from my Kodak ZX1 stopped working. At that point, my feeble brain realized that it was probably the TV. I noticed on Sony's web site that a firmware update addresses an issue of "occasionally" losing audio on HDMI connections. I gave it a try, and it fixed all of the issues. I think that Sony is horribly understating the bugginess of the original firmware!