Sony KDL40W2000 Clouding?

Have received a few emails from interested readers (including 2 from existing owners) asking if our KDL40W2000 suffered from clouding.

Short answer… yes.

For those who don’t know what “clouding” is, it is a type of mura (Japanese term for blemish) defect which plagues the current generation of Sony Bravia LCD TVs. It manifests as blotches/ patches of uneven backlight (usually lighter in colouration) occurring at random on the LCD panel, and is most obvious during black scenes (most people notice it when they’re switching AV input).

Currently there are a few potential solutions to this problem, but none has been definitive. Sony themselves advise Bravia LCD TV owners who are experiencing “clouding” to lower their backlight as this makes the problem less noticeable. The firmware fix that was released in the USA to XBR3 owners served only to achieve exactly this therefore masking the problem rather than solving it.

As it’s estimated that at least 50% of the W series Bravia LCD TV suffer from clouding, we’ll still perform our tests on our current set to see if the mura defect actually affects its picture quality. Stay tuned.

Sony Bravia KDL40W2000 LCD TV

We’ve received so many questions asking when our review of this award-winning HDTV is going to be ready, so here’s a quick update on what’s happening.

We received it late yesterday afternoon, moved it to our test environment, and basically spent the whole night tinkering with the settings (there are just so many of them!).

Colin’s gonna run the LCD TV through our battery of tests throughout this week, and hopefully the Sony KDL40W2000 review will be ready by this weekend.

Minor Website Update

Colin, my “partner in crime”, thought that we should inject some dynamic content into our website to keep people coming back in between our reviews. So we’ve added a news section (we’ll try to post something interesting every day), and partially revamped our home page – the review list has been moved to the right column; the middle column will be occupied by these “dynamic content”.

If you’re only interested in our reviews, you can sign up to our free email alert… you’ll receive a notification email every time a new review is published. Don’t worry, your email won’t be used for spam or be released to third parties – we’ve barely got enough time on our hands to grow this website.