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Comment by csmithuk | Hacker News Reader

I thought that when I bought my Bravia EX but it's a pain in the ass. iPlayer is poorly maintained and it barely plays anything on a good day, the thing is impossibly slow for the first minute when you turn it on and it's the fussiest thing I've ever seen when it comes to media playback. The TV bit is pretty good but I didn't really buy it for that as there is literally nothing on TV in the UK. Oh and it randomly decides to inform the watchers that it's going to turns itself off even though every option in it is set to not automatically turn off.

It's no Triniton to make a comparison.

I've had zero experience with other smart TVs so this might be the best user experience out there -- please feel free to confirm this or not as I was thinking about getting rid of it.

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To be honest, I can only compare it to Samsung because that's all my parents and my friends have. My GF's parents have a Sony.

I found Samsungs menus and control scheme to be unbearable and the owners often struggle with it too.

I usually play media directly from my PC via UPNP and that works. The built-in Youtube app is okay for the occasional video, too. Other than that I only play DVDs and Blurays and the media libraries of german TV channels (they are usually not available via built-in apps to the same extend) via a connected Rapsberry Pi.

A big plus is that my TV is able to put out DD 5.1 it receives via HDMI on it's optical output.

The picture qualities beats every other (LED) TV I have seen. It even came with halfway decent factory settings. Don't ask me how much time I spent trying to adjust the colours on my parents TV. But they grew to like the candy colours...

>I found Samsungs menus and control scheme to be unbearable and the owners often struggle with it too.

I have my doubts about Apple succeeding in the TV business. But maybe they will, just like in phones. Not necessarily because they're so good, but because everyone else is so bad.

I still remember the remote control of my last Sony VCR. It let you record up to 8 different programs, you put them into "slots". Horrible. Quite the opposite of how TiVo does it.

But the real absurdity of the Sony remote came when entering start/stop times for recording. The remote had a number pad (most remotes did, to allow changing channels). But the number pad couldn't be used to enter start/stop times. Instead you had to push up/down arrows, and IIRC separately for each "digit" of time. An utter fuster-cluck when it came to usability.

So maybe Apple is the future?

Which EX is it (particularly the second last digit that indicates the model generation)? The first ones to get iPlayer actually use the MHEG system to deliver it so it is possibly less well supported by the BBC as that version of iPlayer only used on that year's Sony TVs and for Freesat and Freeview. I have a KDL-yyxXz23 which is used the next version of iPlayer which seems to work pretty well to me. The Amazon/Lovefilm service also works pretty well. Even newer Sony's get Netflix too I believe.

The Sony will wake up/turn on to the input it was turned off on so you could always supplement it with a recent internet TV box of some sort (Apple TV/Roku/Recent Sony Blu-ray/Recent Samsung Blu-ray...) whichever appeals to you.

I haven't evaluated recent models or competitors recently although I did buy an LG Blu-ray player/Freeview HD HDD recorder with internet features that not only probably had privacy leaks but also the usability was pretty catestrophic.

Disclaimer: I used to work in Sony TV Product Planning in Europe and did some of the business development for the internet services in Europe.

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