At first I thought the sound was below average. After tweaking the settings it sounds very well now. If you're and audiophile you will however need an amplifier with separate speakers. KDL40EX523 I have not had a problem with the 60 Hz. I suppose it might be somewhat of a problem if I watched more sports. It is the Internet interface that is the weakness of this TV. I have 40EX523 with integrated Wi-Fi. No need for a separate dongle on this one. Charging time for most of the internet programs are quite slow - much slower than my beloved Roku box. Netflix interface is very bad. You can not search and it is even difficult to see the titles of many of the films on the screen because they are so small. The Sony picture is much worse than Netflix Netflix on the Roku box. KDL40EX523 Colors on the Sony Netflix are a bit washed out and the picture is not sharp. The Sony picture on both Hulu and Amazon seem almost as good as the Roku. Again, the interface for both Hulu and Amazon's much worse than the Roku. Crackle is not even worth using. It takes forever to load, then reload to keep, despite fast internet download speeds. It's almost impossible to go back to where you left off in a movie. It works so bad that I'm surprised that Sony includes in the first place. They must work well and get rid of. I would recommend buying this TV without Internet connectivity (40EX520) and do not bother with heavily overpriced internet dongle. Do yourself a favor and buy a Roku box for $ 79 and use it to stream TV shows and movies. It is far superior to anything Sony has to offer on this TV. Sony engineers have studied the Roku box and interface, and use what they learn this rather pathetic internet offering to improve. KDL40EX523 Unlike the Internet, this is really a very good, satisfying television.
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The form factor is thin. However, it's so thin that all of the ports come out back at a right angle, there is no bevel where they go in parallel to the back of the TV. Why is this an issue? If you mount the TV on a wall you may find that your cables themselves will prohibit you from using a wall mount that's slim. I have a new LG LED TV and what they do to get around this issue is use a proprietary dongle for the cables, you hook up a tiny dongle into the port instead, then that hangs down and you hook the cables into said dongle. No issue with mounting it very close to the wall when you have this. With this Sony, you may have to use a tilted wall mount to give you the clearance you need, or a wall mount that leaves a few inches of room between TV and wall. Or I guess you could buy a more expensive 45 degree HDMI cable and then it would probably work with just about any wall mount.
The TV has Skype built in, but you need to buy the Skype camera/mic from Sony for another $130-150 for that to work. Out of curiosity I hooked up a Logitech USB webcam up to the TV to see if it recognized it and you could Skype with that, it didn't work. Not shocking, but good to know.
I'm glad Sony has finally abandoned forcing their Memory Stick down our throats by integrating it into all of their products--no memory stick port on this TV. There are USB ports you can use a standard USB media reader to use.
The TV does split screen, and does it fairly well. KDL40EX523 I can watch my HD cable box and HD antenna simultaneously (or HD cable and computer that's hooked up simultaneously, etc); I occasionally have gotten a "feature not supported" when trying to tune the channel and I can't figure out what I did out of order. Split screen is a feature that some other manufacturers seem to be removing, the aforementioned LG LED I bought doesn't have it...so don't take it for granted!
It only has one component input... so at the moment I have no DVD player hooked up, it's basically going to force me to upgrade to a Blu-Ray with HDMI. The industry trend seems to be reducing the number of component inputs to 1 and increasing the number of HDMI inputs.
The remote is decent. I used to really dislike Sony remotes, but this one is workable. The buttons are well laid out, well sized. It has buttons for Netflix and Qriocity, but no Pandora and no way to reprogram any buttons. It's not a "universal" remote, you can't program your stereo. KDL40EX523 I think the primary reason for this is the TV itself has built in "synch" capabilities to control other Sony devices such as your Sony stereo, etc., so of course if you have a full Sony line you're good but if not you'll need another remote. The TV has a feature called "control for HDMI" (which is branded as "Bravia Sync") which will send a control signal to a device through the HDMI. For the most part this only will function with Sony devices but I don't think it's necessarily closed to other devices, they just don't support it. KDL40EX523 So for example if you have a Blu-Ray hooked up via HDMI it could pause/start/play/etc your DVD through your TV's controls. It would be nice if my Comcast cable box was controllable by this, but I have a feeling I'll be canceling Comcast before they ever support this feature.
KDL40EX523 The TV has a built in guide that populates over the air station information if you have a digital antenna hooked up. It works. I didn't have to configure it for my location, it just worked. It identified the stations, and filled in the guide data. It's nice to have a really functional guide for antenna stations as well as my cable box.
