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The Picture menu houses all the usual Picture Mode, Backlight, Contrast, Brightness and Colour settings that comprise the first page of picture options. As we've seen with other 2011 TVs from Sony, they've added an extra Cinema picture preset so we can now, thankfully, calibrate a day and night time mode from the most accurate starting point; and given the calibration controls on offer, it's a welcome addition. Below the standard 'front panel' controls, there are settings for Hue, Temperature, Sharpness, Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction and Dot Noise Reduction. We never found any cause to engage any of the noise reduction options, the colour temperature of Warm 2 proved most accurate and a sharpness setting of 20 was appropriate for HD sources. Options we didn't see on the various 723's we've covered, included the Reality Creation' sliders for Resolution and Noise Filtering plus the Smooth Gradation choices of OFF/LOW/MED/HIGH. We certainly never found a good application for the Resolution slider, that added ever increasing amounts of edge enhancement to images; whilst the Noise Filtering proved fairly ineffectual in doing anything other than removing high frequency noise' from pictures and about the only use for HD material would be in removing intentionally added film grain. We guess some aren't keen on that particular artistic feature so, perhaps, they might use it. Using a greyscale stair step pattern we checked the effects of the Gradation options and, at least on paper, it lived up to the billing making transitions from one shade to another very smooth indeed. Unfortunately any practical use for it was negated by the creation of picture noise in the blacks so its promise wasn't really fulfilled. Further down we have our options for Motionflow and Film Mode, both of which we'll cover in more detail later in the review.
The Advanced Settings area of the Picture Menu houses the controls required for calibration of the KDL-HX823. We have controls over White Balance and Gamma. Virtually every other option we found was either detrimental to picture quality or redundant, save for the LED Dynamic Control that was fairly tame in lowering black levels but harsh on shadow detail set anything above Low. We'd advise leaving Black Corrector(misnomer), Adv. Contrast Enhancer, Auto Light Limiter, Clear White, Live Colour, Detail Enhancer, Edge Enhancer and, the terribly named, Skin Naturaliser set to their 'Off' position.