Sony BRAVIA KDL-46Z4100 46" HDTV LCD TV

For the dollar, for the moment, a great LCD HDTV

Background
First, a quick "expertise" disclaimer:  I am not an audio-visual expert, although I worked as an executive at a television network for five years and picked up a little this 'n' that (enough to be dangerous!).

My family has had only one television set in the house at a time, and it's been a good ol' CRT analog Sony Trinitron for many years.  As the February 2009 government-managed switch over to digital television approached, I began shopping for a DTV.  I started serious research about one year ago, doing a lot of online reading and visiting chain electronics retailers every so often (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.).

I didn't want to spend on the high end, and I wanted screen larger than 42 inches, so that wiped out a few choices.  I also knew I wanted to run my Apple laptops through the screen and was afraid of burn-in, so I leaned toward LCD rather than plasma.
Finally - back to my expertise disclaimer - I focused on Sony models because in all my years at the television network, I only saw one brand of TV/monitor in the offices and production facilities:  Sony.  100% Sony.
While it's easy (and probably wise) to discount manufacturer claims of being "the industry standard", in the case of Sony and televisions, it's actually true.
We have a winner!
I'll skip the details of my research and shopping stories but will summarize like this:
- Samsung LCD TVs may be the market leader in sales but I think their pictures are unnaturally bright and shiny.  I also don't like (don't trust?) that the company hasn't been full force in making televisions as long as Sony.  
- LG is a poor man's Samsung.  *ouch* I know, but yes.
- Toshiba and Sharp.  OK but not top-notch.  And I've never seen a professional shop use Toshiba or Sharp sets for anything, not editing or monitoring or even just as display sets for lobbies or offices.
- Mitsubishi picture quality is nice and their form factors are nice but WWW chatter says build reliability is not A+.
- Panasonic and Pioneer are more plasma-focused.
- I wouldn't consider spending my money on an "off-brand" such as Westinghouse etc.
Time and again, reviewers both professional and amateur rated Sony LCD TVs very highly.  But the biggest consistent proof point for me were my eyes.  Every time I watched Sony LCD TVs, I saw, well, nothing except the picture.  In other words, their sets appeared the most accurate at reproducing whatever signal was being sent to them.  This would match why television professionals use Sonys; they are studio-reference quality, imparting nothing and taking away nothing.  What you send in is what you see.
Toward the second half of 2008, it was also clear that 120HZ refresh rates were become standard, as was full 1080p picture resolution.  
Sony's KDL-46Z4100 fit the bill!  
- Full high-def resolution available at 1080p if you got the source.
- 120Hz refresh rate to cut down on blurring and artifacting in motion.  
- 46-inch screen size.  Perfect for my needs.  (I realize everyone's size needs are particular to their own households.)
- Four HDMI inputs, plus a PC VGA jack, and all the "standard" other jacks: component video, S-video, composite video.
For me, the final clinchers for this model:
- A thin-bezel form factor.  Who wants to look at the plastic surrounding the picture?!  Also, if you intend to fit the TV into a cabinet or amoire, the less frame the better, right?  If a company eventually makes a frameless flat-panel TV, that's what I'm buyin' next :-)
- By late 2008, for whatever reasons - the economy, Sony's sales goals, the competitor - the price on the 46Z4100 had fallen below $1800 easily.  
The price is rightI went shopping on "Black Friday", the day after Thanksgiving (someone remind me not to do that again next year please thank you), hitting the various chain electronics store, trying to find me a 46-inch Z-series Bravia.  Long story short:  no one had it in stock.  (Though I did pick up Sony's S350 Blu-ray player for only $199 at a Best Buy!  Great little unit for the price.  I love it.  For another review...)
Like many of you I presume, I do a fair amount of online shopping.  Love Amazon.com.  Use iTunes.  Etcetera.  But a two-grand flat-panel television done with my One-Click button?  Seems a bit, uh, scary.  The weight, the delicate nature of the merchandise, what if I have to return it - all that stuff.
Still...  No one had my television in stock darn it!  So I visited one of my favorite online electronics retailers, Crutchfield, and lo and behold - a special Black Friday sale!  Crutchfield was offering the Bravia for $1,699, the shipping was by delivery service into your room, and it was free.  And they had it in stock.  
I placed my order immediately and it arrived 10 days later in perfect condition.  Yay Crutchfield!  (Another review ...)
For $1700, this television is a great deal.
It's the picture, stupidOn other LCD TVs, I can appreciate Samsung's "Touch of Color" plastic bezels, Mitsubishi's integrated soundbars, JVC's flip-down iPod cradle-connector, Toshiba's built-in DVD player, and Westinghouse's drop-dead prices.  But really.  What is the single most important feature of a flat-panel TV that's going to be the main unit in your home?
The answer:  The quality of the moving picture it reproduces.  
And while I'm sure some experts can argue me down either quantitatively or qualitatively, my unwavering epinion here is that for $1700, you cannot beat the picture quality of Sony's Z-series.  (I did consider the XBR models from Sony, Sony's top-of-the-line series, but to my eyes the improvement in picture quality versus the higher prices couldn't be justified.  I.e., XBRs don't seem like good values.)
The picture on this Bravia is natural, precise, smooth, rich, and very customizable [for those owners who prefer to mess up the factory pre-sets :-) ].
From my slightly-better-than-basic understanding of how LCD TVs operate, there are several key factors that go into picture quality.  They are (a) the panel's design and construction (b) the chipset used to interpret the signal source and turn it into video images (c) the algorithms used in the refreshing.
If you want detailed descriptions of how the Sony Z-series handles each of these factors, visit the Sony Style website and search for this model, or visit Amazon and search for the model.  Both sites offer fairly detailed explanations (of course spun to advocate the Sony solution). 
I do not have a deep understanding of the actual workings of the set's 120Hz refresh rate mechanism - called "MotionFlow" by Sony marketing - but I will vouch for its effect.  The Z-series looks smoother and more natural than other brands' 120Hz models.  Watch video of scrolling captions, for example, or a running-in-the-jungle sequence from the television series Lost, or high-def action sports video and you'll see.  There is little to no lag, artifacting, or judder.  
The color reproduction is superb.  I haven't tried running one of those reference-standard DVDs through my TV to actually really test it, but to my eyes, and based on my experience at the television network, the Z Bravia reproduces color accurately.  The blacks in particular are great for an LCD.  Compare to a high-end plasma and no, not as black.  But compare to other similarly priced LCD TVs and the Z Bravia's blacks are well-done.
I watch mostly three sources of video into my Z Bravia:

(i)  over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts using a Terk HDTV antenna
(ii)  DVDs and Blu-ray discs played on a Sony S350 Blu-ray player
(iii)  the display signal from an Apple laptop, DVI-to-HDMI
So the source signals going into my Z Bravia are mostly digital-into-digital.  In the case of Blu-ray discs, it's as high-quality and uncompressed as a consumer can get:  1080p 24 frames-per-second digital through HDMI.  When watching a well-encoded Blu-ray disc movie, the Z Bravia's picture could be described as awesome.  I've barely changed any of the factory settings.  You can choose among factory pre-sets (e.g., "cinema", "vivid", "standard").
As a somewhat random example, I was watching La Femme Nikita (a still-very cool movie!) on Blu-ray on my Z Bravia and there was a shot of an archway of a building in Paris and it struck me:  "I'm in Paris looking out a 46-inch diagonal window at this archway."  It looked so real.  That shot wasn't a video, it wasn't a painting, it wasn't even a photograph.  It looked like I was looking through an extremely clean window at the real thing just outside my family room.
When used as a monitor for my Apple laptop, the Z Bravia performs well.  I wouldn't say "awesome" exactly because I see some rough-ish edges to details on such things as desktop icons.  However, I don't know that much about computer video drivers and resolution settings etcetera to know if it should look that way or could be improved by fiddling with preferences and settings.  I will note that when I view digital photographs on the Z Bravia using iPhoto on my laptop, the pictures are stunning.  Way better than they look on the laptop's own thin-film display (of course; it's a laptop display) but also meaningfully clearer and sharper than on other external flat-panel compute displays.
We've also played some computer games on my Mac fed into the Z Bravia and the imagery and colors were fantastic.  Based just on that, I could recommend this TV for computer gamers who want to use the Bravia as a second monitor.
Jack me in
A fault of many flat-panel TVs I've shopped is the so-called "jack pack", or the set of inputs that the TV offers.  All of today's current flat-panel TVs will be obsolete very soon - that's just the nature of the industry/market - but one way to ensure that a TV goes out of date faster is to limit its inputs.  Equipment and fashion changes and suddenly a few months later you find you can't plug what you want into your TV, or you have to utilize less-than-state of the art connections.
The Z Bravia is state of the art (for today at least).  There are four HDMI inputs offering the latest version of HDMI.  There is a PC input (VGA) that also has an accompanying L/R RCA input for accepting the [analog] audio from your computer along with the video signal.  There is more than one component video input and there is also an S-video input (remember S-video?) and a composite video input (wow, to think we used to watch video through composite connections! the quality is awful!).  While the quality for the composite and the S-video jacks is bad, that's the fault of the standard, not Sony's implementation of the standards.  Really, if you have this TV, you will want to watch as much HDMI and component video as possible.
The composite video and one of the HDMI jacks are on the left side of the TV, which is convenient for frequent plugging and unplugging, especially if you put the TV inside a cabinet or amoire.  Why some manufacturers put all the inputs on the back side is beyond me.  It's like putting all the cupholders in a car only in the backseat.  BTW, the feel of the jacks is solid and tight, not flimsy or loose.  This isn't the case on all brands' TVs.
Remote control and other stuffHere's my epinion of a few other aspects of the 46Z4100:
I've yet to meet a remote control for consumer A/V equipment that I truly love, and the remote for this Bravia TV is no different.  It doesn't suck.  That's about the best I can say.  
The remote is a long-ish candy bar-style unit that has a nice index finger-indentation on the underside.  The buttons are clearly labeled but there are too many, and too many not-frequently-used ones, so I find it cluttered up.  There's a backlight button that lights up everything when you press it - handy when you're watching in the dark.  And you can run other Sony equipment and, claimed, other brands' equipment if you do the code-input thing, which I don't have the patience for.  (It is cute that the secondary buttons for operating a DVD or Blu-ray player are hidden behind a plastic sliding panel on the bottom fourth of the remote's body.  Not a bad touch, if kinda low-techy for a solution.)

Going out on a limb here, but I think I am like most TV consumers and just want to watch what I want to watch - OTA programming, my DVD player, whatever - and don't want to fiddle around with the TV's preferences interface.  You buy a big-screen TV to watch the signal you pump into it, not to play with the interface for setting the skin-tone hue.  That said, this set's interface (called "CrossBar" or something by Sony marketing) is unusually esthetically pleasing.  I've seen some preference/setting interfaces on other TVs that, my gosh, seemed like they were designed by the guy that designed Pong or Pac-Man.  Sony's pref/setting interface is like a layer that scrims over whatever you're watching, and it scrolls and moves pleasingly, and it's relatively intuitive.  You don't want to have to play with these controls frequently, but when you do have to muck with them, it's good that they're clear, easy to use, and look cool.

The instruction manual is pretty good.  It comes with one of those fold-out large-sheet "Quick Set-up" guides for those owners who don't want to RTFM but are willing to scan a one-pager.  
The "SONY" logo in the center of the bottom frame of the TV lights up in white whenever the set is turned on.  I like it.  It is easily turned off in preference settings.
Other than the remote control, the only "accessory" the TV ships with is a stand.  No cables, no wall mount, nothing else.  The stand is plastic and metal and was very easy to mount.  It holds the Bravia securely and can be adjusted just slightly for vertical tilt but nothing else.  It does the job.  However, it's worth nothing that when used, the window along the bottom of the frame that catches the remote control's IR beam is just a few inches above tabletop or shelftop.  This was an issue for me because I placed a Yamaha soundbar in front of my Sony and the Yamaha speaker unit blocked the IR window.  I had to elevate my TV by placing a thick piece of wood underneath the stand so that the remote's IR beam hits the little window.
Did you hear that?
I don't use the built-in speakers on my Bravia.  Instead, I run all audio through the aforementioned Yamaha soundbar. 
I did try the built-in speakers for a few minutes, watching OTA broadcasts just to see how they sounded using the TV's own speakers.  The built-in speakers are nothing to write home about.  They sound like small, thin, built-in speakers.  Could you use them for watching regular TV?  Sure, like local television news broadcasts or informercials.  But would you want to listen to your DVDs or Blu-rays or high-def programming that way?  No.  You will want to run the audio from the set into a proper home-theater system or soundbar.
Doing so is easy.  The Sony's audio out jacks are digital optical, digital coax, and analog RCA.  Through prefs, you can set the audio-out to be variable (i.e., use the TV's remote volume control to raise/lower the audio) or fixed.  I have the audio-out set to fixed and change the volume via my Yahama soundbar's controls [since the sound is coming out of the Yamaha anyway, not the TV's speakers].  I am very happy with the audio set-up I have, but just in case you are planning to utilize the Bravia's built-in speakers, be warned that they are nothing above-average.
Keeping up with the Sonys
The following criticism is not really a knock against this Bravia.  It's just reality in the consumer marketplace of home electronics.  The fact that I got this TV for $1700 is, in part, because it's not the next state of the art.  The next models coming up have 240Hz refresh rates (yes, doubled!) and LED backlighting (better contrast and black levels) and lower power consumption (save the planet!).
In other words, the KDL-46Z4100 is already out-dated.
But unless you buy the latest models right when they come out - and pay accordingly - you know that everything you buy is old the second you buy it.  The trick, of course, is to know just how out-dated you're wiling to be and at what discount or price savings.   I'll sell you my old Apple iMac for a couple of bucks ... but you probably couldn't run any contemporary apps on it at the speed you'd want.  I know that's an extreme analogy but you get it.  
I feel that at this price, at this time in the market segment, this particular model is a great buy.  A great value.  Would I have paid $2,800 for this set?  That was its original MSRP back in mid-2008 when it first came out.  No way.  The value wasn't there at that price.
My bottom line is that you should get this TV if you want to spend about this much (less than two grand but over $1500) and care mostly about picture quality and reliability.  Again, it's worth repeating that in my five years as an executive at a television network, the only monitors and TVs I ever saw in the office and at the production facilities were Sonys.  They are reliable, solid, and designed well.  This particular model's picture quality is superb.  It will last as long as you need it to.
Happy shopping!