Sony Bravia KDL-50W829B review – 55in now £630 on Amazon today

Whatever content you end up watching, the W829 does a fantastic job of making it look good. 2D picture quality was excellent out of the box, with bright, detailed pictures. Colour accuracy was superb, helped by the Neutral colour temperature setting which prevents a cold blue or warm yellow screen cast. Images were slightly muted, though, and enabling Live Colour would often push things too far in the other direction.

Despite being an LCD set, black levels were also impressive, with very little light bleed during dark scenes. The backlight doesn’t bleed into the image and there were no bright spots in corners or at the edges of the set. We noticed that images weren’t quite as sharp as our reference Samsung set when watching HD broadcasts, and despite playing with the sharpness and Reality Creation menus it was impossible to match it on the Sony set. You certainly couldn’t call pictures fuzzy, but they simply aren’t as crisp as the competition.

There’s room to improve things further in the settings menu, which contains a whole host of image processing options. The most important is Reality Creation, which adds extra detail to images without creating much excess noise or digital artefacts. It works incredibly well, scaling standard definition content to 1080p resolutions and even sharpening some HD content, although it does introduce a few artefacts during fast-moving panning shots and action scenes.

The W829’s standard motion smoothing setting is likely be the preferred setting for most people, as it reduces stutter but doesn’t make video overly smooth so that it looks like a TV soap opera. True Cinema is best used when watching films, while the Impulse mode ensures the smoothest possible playback at the expense of brightness. You’ll have to watch TV in the dark, though, as the image is significantly dimmer than the other presets.

The W829 also supports 3D video, with two pairs of active shutter glasses bundled in the box. Sadly, we weren’t too impressed with the depth effects. Although there was very little flicker and pictures were bright, Avatar never felt as if it was jumping out of the screen at us. Unless you’re a real fan of 3D films, we don’t think this is a major concern.

When we originally reviewed the W829, it’s closest competitor was the similarly priced, 50in Panasonic TX-L50ET60B – which is a 2013 model. The TX-L50ET60B had fewer smart TV features than the W829 and limited image processing, but there were still plenty of picture quality settings to adjust. Now, however, you can pick up Panasonic’s 48in AX630 4K set for £900, which makes the decision a little trickier.

Right now though, we still think the W829 is a better deal. It produces beautiful images for the price, needing very little in the way of calibration or tweaking to get the best results, and Sony’s smart TV interface is one of the easiest to use. With prices hovering around £700 with a sound bar thrown in too if you shop around, the Sony Bravia KDL-50W829W829B is a fantastic buy.