Back in the Netherlands we got our first Television together, we bought it begin 2006. It is a JVC LT-37M60ZU which is a 37″ LCD Television and it is still a very good TV although you could see that over time television got better due to the innovation. In November we start to have some issues with the picture quality of the TV with purple stripes on the monitor which made us decide to look for something new.

Since we watch television via satellite we also have a setop-box in our living room. For more information about this see the following post (The TopField box we had in use was not a very stylish and good product. It got warm better to say really hot during operation and sometimes the picture froze and a reboot was necessary. There for it would be a good solution if we could have a television with a so-called DVB-S2 Tuner integrated which could also handle the CA-Module to encrypt the signal.

So that limited our choice a bit. For the size we had the limitation that it needed to fit on the TV-Closet which meant that it should not be wider then 125 cm. So with all that information in hand I started watching the possibilities and after the Consumer Electronics Show in January I had my wish list completed. The TV should have integrated Wireless LAN, 46″, LED-TV, DVB-S2 Tuner and important it should fit in our living room.

That left over 2 possibilities for us either the Samsung 46ES8090 or the Sony 46HX855. If it was just for the features the Samsung had one this battle but when we both checked out the Samsung in a store it looked cheap and the new ‘stylish’ stand wasn’t as nice as it looked at the pictures. So we decided to wait for the Sony and after reading reviews and seeing more pictures the Sony got our favor but we wanted to see it before we decide. The Sony was officially launched at the 10th of May so we needed to wait.

Samsung 46ES8090

Sony Bravia 46HX855

The Saturday after it was out we went to our local MediaMarkt which had one in the box but they didn’t want to show it, too bad for them since I probably would have ordered it right away. So later that day we decided to visit another MediaMarkt and on our way there we saw a Expert-TeVi which is a smaller electronics shop. We entered the store 2 minutes before closing and we saw, decided and bought the Sony for a great price.

After coming home I started to set up the TV and in less than 60 minutes I mounted the sound bar, cabled everything and setup everything. I was surpassed since I thought the satellite programming would take some time. But although it is a German Television it’s possible to set it to the Dutch regional settings which enables the FastScan functionality which CanalDigitaal uses. This sets the channels automagically in the right order. So setting up was easier than I imagined.

The days after I’ve played more with the SmartTV options and I know it aren’t the most important things on a TV but it’s just nice to control your TV with your iPhone or iPad, surf on the web and see tweets related to the program you are watching scrolling on your screen.

I was also able to reduce from 4 remote controls in the old situation (JVC, Samsung Home-Theather, TopField and AppleTV) to only one (Sony) in this new setup. I always hated the multiple controls but with HDMI-CEC this isn’t necessary anymore. Also I found out that we are able to use HbbTV. HbbTV stands for Hybrid Broadband Broadcast TV and combines a Digital TV connection with a Broadband Internet connections. It enables the use of watching special content and the quality is better than I expected on such a big screen.

So far we are both happy with the TV and we already start watching some of our Blu-Ray discs again because the image quality is a couple of times better than that what we had on our former TV. The shift from HD-Ready to FullHD really makes a difference. I hope we can enjoy watching movies on this TV at least as long as we did on the JVC, that’s should be somewhat like 6 years.