Sony's 3mm Thick XEL-1 OLED TV Finally Revealed, Japanese Launch this December

Comment on Sony's 3mm Thick XEL-1 OLED TV Finally Revealed, Japanese Launch this December I live in Tokyo and I just bought two of them. One for my wife, one for myself in bed. We have mounted them on swivel stands by each side of our bed. So the 46" Sharp LCD R Series came off the bedroom wall and went into the study. At 1mn:1 contrast ratio the picture quality of the XEL-1 is staggering and at 3-5ft away the screen is more than sufficiently sized for very comfortable viewing. The Japanese spec differs from the pending US spec. in that it has Ethernet but only one HDMI input (US will have 2). The Ethernet allows you to use the Sony X-Menu to connect to your home server and when set up properly (DLNA preferred) allows you to directly access your photo and music collection including i-tunes AAC files; the XEL-1 cannot yet handle MPEG-4 codecs which is somewhat of an initial oversight as even the most basic wmv files are MPEG-4; so you can really only watch movies that you have made with your handycam and uploaded to your server, as opposed to downloaded movies that you might have saved on your server. If you are an i-Tunes user Sony sucks historically for the most part, but in Japan the SonicStage software got a ver. 4.4 release that allows for import of AAC files from i-tunes (but not locked files of downloaded music from i-tunes store); so I imported my 35GB of CDs I painstakingly had recorded over the years into i-tunes into SonicStage and spent a weekend or so uploading CD sleeve images from Gracenote. While the Sony XEL can playback the i-tunes music directory, it cannot show the CD sleeve like i-Tunes, but if you set everything up in Sonic Stage 4.4 you can see the CD sleeve on the XEL-1 as well during playback. So apart from the limitation of only being able to view MPEG-2 video through the network, the network function in the Japan spec. actually works quite well with a weekend of preparation sitting at your home server machine. The US spec doesn't look like it will come Ethernet enabled as Sony assumes US consumers will give them a hard time with network compatibility glitches while Japanese consumers keep quiet and are lower maintenance. The TV in and of itself is phenomenal and once you get one you will be converted, never to go back to LCD, let alone high-end HD plasma at 500,000:1 contrast! The network function is actually great as sometimes its nice to have access to your own music library without having to have an Apple TV HDMI'd into your personal TV and without having to handle that silly little mac remote. For sure it is annoying that they didn't put a DVD player in the base of the XEL unit, since the chipset can scale full 1080i through HDMI already; but that's life. OEL burn rate is twice LCD but those are merely stats as I have no intention of watching TV everyday for 3 hours for 30 years to make a claim back to Sony. The burn-out stats. are semantics; in practice OEL is now a viable commercial product. For once the US version will be pricier than the Japanese version by about 10-15%. The TV is a pleasure to watch and with Front Surround sound, a pleasure to listen to as well. If you can't afford it you'll have to continue to watch Monday night football in 100,000:1 contrast on your Full HD 50" LCD TVs....its a hard life!