Yep... I found one in the Sony Store today; looks like there is about a 1 inch bulge above the base. Ikea here we come.
I went through the manual tonight and am starting to get ever more concerned about image quality watching SD tv. My parents have digital cable so I imagine the image quality will be fairly good (the cable box has S-video out so will use that), but my concern is with the de-interlacer (what Sony calls Digital Reality Creation, or DRC).
I'm used to running with adaptive de-interlacing on our PC graphics cards, where the deinterlacer dynamically switches between weave, bob and proprietary algorithms depending on the content.
The DRC controls seem to be pretty primitive by comparison -- the menus let you choose from "Interlaced", "Progressive", and "Cine-Motion". The manual just says that Interlaced is recommended for moving images, Progressive is recommended for static images, and Cine-Motion is recommended for movies.
There are two comments that I find really confusing in the manual :
1. "DRC creates a high resolution picture with 4x density, for high quality sources (eg. DVD, satellite)".
This comment implies that you would not want to use DRC for low quality sources, but there is no "Off" selection.
2. "Cine-Motion provides an optimized display by automatically detecting film content and applying a reverse 3:2 pulldown process. Moving pictures will appear clearer and more natural looking".
This is all well and good, but if you are in Cine-Motion mode and it does NOT detect film content, what mode does it run in ?
EDIT -- my assumption is that I would tell my parents to normally leave it in Interlaced mode and flip to CineMotion when watching a movie. Or, if lucky and CineMotion falls back to Interlaced when it does not detect film content, they just leave it in CineMotion and don't worry about it.
My parents are in their 80s so they aren't going to be constantly fiddling modes to get the best image; if they would get a better picture on average with a less fancy TV (eg. the non-HD 32FS120) then maybe that's what I should get.
I just figured that with my dad's eyes going he would probably need a bright image (deinterlacing helps there) and to be able to sit closer to the screen (deinterlacing REALLY helps there) -- my only concern is that there seems to be general agreement that you take a quality hit when watching SD on an HDTV... although this particular Sony (or maybe 4:3 HDTVs in general) seems to have the smallest quality hit.
There is also just a chance they will go for HDTV channels, in which case the HD unit is a no-brainer
Any ideas ? Anyone own a Sony with DRC ?
Thanks,
John
