Our Verdict
The narrow viewing angle of the Sony R510C is not ideal in a dark room, even if you sit alone and directly in front of your TV. You will see great blacks at the center of the screen, but not on the edges. The motion blur is good, but the input lag is only average, so it isn't ideal for gaming either.
- Great contrast ratio.
- Low amount of motion blur.
- Worst viewing angle that we have ever measured. The blacks are gray as soon as you are not exactly in front.
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We buy and test dozens of TVs yearly, taking an objective, data-driven approach to deliver results you can trust. Our testing process is complex, with hundreds of individual tests that take over a week to complete. Most of our tests use specially designed test patterns that mimic real content, but we also use the same sources you have at home to ensure our results match the real-world experience. We use two main tools for our testing: a Colorimetry Research CR-100 colorimeter and a CR-250 spectroradiometer.
Test Results
Older Test Bench: This product has been tested using an older TV test methodology, before amajor update. Some of the test results below aren't directly comparable with other TVs. Learn more
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The stand is a prism made of plastic. The TV doesn't move sideways, but it does move back and forth.
The Sony R510C doesn't look bad for a budget LED TV. The bezel is not the thinnest, but the top half of the TV is slim.
From straight on, the blacks are really deep. We had to turn on 'LED Motion Mode' to get close to our 100 cd/m2 target, because without it, the minimum backlight was 157.1 cd/m2.
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You can see some vertical bands when the screen is showing a solid color background. The top and bottom edges are also darker than the rest of the screen.
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Not only do the colors desaturate at an angle, but the blacks become gray even faster. Even if you are sitting straight in axis, it can be an issue on the left and right side of the TV.
Update 01/06/2017: We have changed the methodology of testing. Since this is an old TV which we don't have anymore, we extrapolated the results from 2016 TVs.
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This is very interesting. It actually has the best black uniformity that we have ever seen, but due to its very narrow viewing angle, the blacks on the left and right side appear considerably brighter. The picture was taken at seven feet (we test TVs at a 1.75 ratio of size to distance). For the 48", you will need to be at about 14 feet to not see this.
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The R510C does a good job at displaying lower-quality content like DVDs.
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The Sony R510C does also a good job at upscaling Cable TV.
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This is the first time we review this type of pixel substructure, which explains the very limited viewing angle.
Unfortunately, all movies will suffer from the 3:2 pulldown judder. Most people won't be bothered by this though, because it is a small constant judder.
The picture mode doesn't really matter for the input lag. Game had 45.8 ms and the other ones had 46.5 ms.
The chroma 4:4:4 test was almost a pass, but the pixels overlap a little bit.
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This TV doesn't produce a lot of bass, but it does get loud. The frequency response is good at lower volumes, but it falls apart when the TV is pushed hard. There will also be significant compression and pumping artifacts present at high volumes.
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The distortion increases as the volume increases, but it generally remains in quite a low range.
