Now, what will you get when you mix-and-match the capable Bravia V with the latest bells and whistles from Sony? The D-series, of course. This near-clone is identical with its above-mentioned sibling right down to design and basic tech specs. If you are attracted by stunning pictures of the former and have spare cash at your disposal, this Sony may be the one for you.

Pros

Though the KLV-40D300A offers no advantages over the Bravia V in terms of contrast and response time, it's the most affordable series in the 2007 range to feature Motion Flow. Fancy name aside, this is Sony's implementation of the popular frame rate-doubling function. A rather new innovation found mainly in upper mid- to high-end models, it's designed to smoothen out onscreen motion by interpolating and inserting intermittent extra picture frames. This addresses LCD's design bottleneck and bridges the performance gap delivered by the plasma TVs.

For the color critics, there are wide color gamut backlighting and a true 10-bit LCD panel under its collective suite of Live Color Creation technology. The latter is theoretically capable of putting out a billion shades without resorting to various dithering processes--common workarounds employed by lower-end panels. Without going indepth, software dithering works by displaying two close colors at high-speed interval or combining adjacent pixels to simulate the desired shade. These have the tendency of introducing artifacts such as flickering, among others.

Moving on, you will have access to a generous collection of five 1080p-enabled video inputs. That's three digital HDMI terminals and two sets of analog component-video sockets. To further push the envelope, there is also 24p True Cinema which accepts native film-based 24 frames per second video signal via HDMI. Compatible with its own BDP-S1E Blu-ray player, this eliminates unnecessary video conversion and, at the same time, promises judder-free pictures. Rounding up the comprehensive feature set is Bravia Theater Sync or HDMI-Consumer Electronics Control.

Cons

We have said it before and we are going to reiterate it again. Since Sony has always been associated with catchy designs, we are definitely expecting a little bit more from the Japanese company in the panel's overall aesthetics. For starters, a black piano treatment is most welcome and will probably give the set a much-needed facelift over its current matt finish. After all, this is a midrange model and looks do play an increasingly important role in this category. Well, at least according to the way the Koreans are positing their equivalent offerings.

Bottomline

At S$3,999 (US$2,630.07), the KLV-40D300A is priced S$600 (US$394.01) more than the recently reviewed V300. However, if you compare this against other brands and comparable makes in the market, it's not hard to appreciate its competitive pricing and rich feature set. This is one of the rare exceptions from Sony, if you are been eyeing its extensive product lineup from the VAIO laptops to Cyber-shot digital cameras.