GP says:

PROS:

Rich blacks and whites.

CONS:

For the first HOUR you turn your set on it makes snap, crackle and pop noises as the components adjust to warming up.

AND it does it for an hour after you turn it off!! Its insane. Clearly they were in such a rush to come up with make a super

thin screen that they forgot to properly test it.

Also the speaker set-up is horrible. They are literally behind the set or facing down – which makes for terrible acoustics.

You need to max the volume to get any quality sound.

Finally the edge led is far from perfected. Back-lit is still miles above.

Avoid this set until they work out the bugs!
Rating: 2 / 5

Nicholas North says:

I’ll start this review now but maybe update it in future months, as I’ve noticed that the real test of any HDTV is how well it performs after it’s a year ancient. As it is, we’ve had our NX700 for two months now, and I’m very pleased.

Some other reviewers can probably judge picture quality better than I can, and that’s fine. I researched enough to know that this Sony model generally gets high marks for its picture. Someday I’m going to try out some picture adjustments I found during my research – but for now, it’s still on its factory settings, and we all agree that it looks fantastic for the kind of viewing we do.

What made me pick this TV, and the reason I’m glad I did, are its capabilities for component connections and internet features, particularly how well it does wirelessly. This is our bedroom TV, a place where we want to minimize external components, wires, generally all A/V clutter other than this wall-mounted HDTV. So the more it can do on its own, the better.

I consider the following features of the NX700 most vital. And I couldn’t find another HDTV in this price range that had everything below, besides other Sony models.

1) Analog audio out. Why is this so rare? The NX700 also has an optical digital audio output, but often the simplest way to bypass the tinny internal speakers (and all thin HDTV’s have tinny speakers, not just this one) is to run its audio through anything you have nearby – a set of computer speakers, boombox, whatever. It shouldn’t be a requirement to have a dedicated audio system near every TV in your house, you know?

2) PC (VGA) input. Most HDTV’s have these but some do not (like most Panasonics). The NX700 also puts an separate analog audio input jack right near this input for convenience. And it all works well, we’ve used it few times already.

3) Wireless internet, and applets for NetFlix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, Pandora, Slacker (and a bunch of others that we probably won’t use much if at all). Really, this is the most meaningful feature of this TV for us right now, because we didn’t know what to expect from wireless streaming in a location that gets a somewhat weak signal from the router. On the contrary, this TV does just fine – we’ve been streaming Amazon VOD regularly now, and even took a chance on streaming HD movies. With those, we did have one instance where the movie stopped and restarted a bit due to a weak signal, but it was only for a few minutes, and then it was fine. I reckon streaming HD in wireless with current technology is going to be dicey at best, but considering our not-perfect router signal, I was impressed with what it could do regardless.

4) DLNA capabilities. I never set up a computer to be a DLNA server before, but I found the instructions online and did it in 20 minutes. It really was that simple. After that, the TV was immediately able to play my music and view some pictures, just the ones I had enabled DLNA access to. Now I have to spend some time figuring out how I want to use this feature, since I never expected it to work so easily.

5) Other connections. We need a combination of HDMI, Composite and Component video inputs for our living room TV, and this TV was initially set up there. The NX700 has 4 HDMI inputs, including one apparently for PC-HDMI (why would that be any different?), and we’re using two, plus the Composite and Component inputs. Other TV’s do have more inputs, or the same, but some have less – and that would be a deal-breaker for our living room TV. As it is, everything we needed to plug into this Sony got plugged in and worked. No unplugging over and over, so no hassles switching between sources.

6) Built-in QAM tuner. All things told, this didn’t work out to be a huge deal after all. We’ll probably always use our cable box, but it’s nice to know there’s an alternative if the need arises.

I considered and compared HDTV’s in 37-to-42-inch sizes from Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. Sony had the only ones with every feature we needed. Also vital is that it looks excellent off or on, and has some features you don’t really notice, like automatically adjusting the brightness based on the room’s current lighting. Again, I’ll hold off skywriting its praises until after it’s lasted for a few years but for the moment, I’m very pleased we picked this HDTV.
Rating: 4 / 5