Woooooow I finally brokedown and bought one.my first bigscreen. My main reason was not due to specifications nor was it due to the wife who is a big Sony fan. But merely the value of this TV when I bought it from Circuit City.
The manual states that to use the PIP with a cable box(which is what I use) that you must use the TV as your splitter as opposed to the normal way of buying a 2-way splitter and have one going directly to the TV and the other to the cable box and into an AUX coax input. The latter worked out better b/c I had a hard time following Sony’s way. Nontheless, my PIP works or as Sony calls it "Twin View". And it is. This is not your father’s PIP. Sony’s PIP begins by placing two different shows side by side w/ equal sizes. You can increase the size of one and decrease the other and choose back and forth which show you’d like to listen to. You also can choose favorite channels that you can preview on the smaller PIP while watching the main show in the bigger PIP. Its a channel surfers dream. Finally you have a Channel Index which I found pointless. It places 3 channels in sequential order on the left side of the screen and scrolls them up or down automatically but only plays in motion the channel that is highlighted. The other 2 are frozen. Then as it scrolls it plays the next channel. Kind of like channel surfing without pressing buttons. There are 4 screen modes. The first is Wide Zoom which fills the screen completely and makes everyone look wider and 20 lbs heavier. There’s normal which puts the screen ratio to the old 4:3 way and adds gray bars on the left and right side of the picture. There Full Mode which looks like the Wide Zoom mode.I can’t tell the difference. And finally Zoom which also fills the entire screen but makes the everyone closer to the screen. Using the last mode I noticed interlacing which has plagued the first bigscreens. You also have a fairly easy to use menu guide. It has icons that allows even the least intuitive to gadgets to adjust the settings. There are 6 icons, Video, Audio, Channel, Wide, Timer and Setup. Video allows the user to adjust brightness, sharpness, color, hue and the Color Temp which you can adjust to the temp of the room. Audio adjusts treble, bass, balance, steady sound(which diffuses those loud commercials), effect(for use with the TV’s surround) and MTS which is choosing stereo, mono or Auto-SAP. Channel is where you program your working channels manually or allow the TV to do automatically. Doing it automatically is fast and efficient but it did catch a few scrambled channels b/c it detected audio. Just clear these up manually. Wide allows you to switch the different zoom modes I previously spoke about but this can also be done with a hot button on the remote called "Wide Mode" instead of going into the TV’s menu screen. Timer sets the time, and when you’d like to set the TV timer either by day, time, duration(which is how most people would do it) and channel. There’s also daylight savings setting here. Finally Setup is where you can adjust parental controls, captions, and language preference(English, Spanish, and French). Parents who use the blocking feature can block SHOWS THAT HAVE A RATING ASSIGNED TO THEM. Not an entire channel. This is done via a 4 digit code. Shows that do not have a rating regardless of their content cannot be blocked.for the TV has no way of detecting whether it is TV-Y or TV-MA. There are 4 settings to use with the Parent Lock, Child, Youth, Young Adult or Custom. The remote is a universal remote which you can program up to 3 other components but is only 4limited to VCRs, DVDs, Cable Boxes, and Satellite Receivers