Dont know how you say the EX400 has far superior contrast. In the showroom I didnt find any difference between these two. Moreover I have found the blacks are grey on the sony. I have never seen any sony lcds producing true blacks, its alrways grey on the dark scenes.
I think you are quite intentional always to prove sony is better always and Panasonic is far behind than anything. I have observed these in many of your posts before..unfortunately its true.
Well the fact is the SPVA panels have far better contrast,even objective data shows that.
Also one needs to adjust the tvs to their optimum settings.
Higher the contrast ,more perception of depth.
Their is also a lot more in how the tvs achieve good blacks,mosts tvs Dynamic contrast implementation is either by dimming or crank up the backlight.
Also our eyes can play tricks.If you see two identical tvs with TV "A" with backlight setting set much higher then TV "B" ,in dark scenes where majority is black TV "B" will show better blacks.
But if the scene has lots of bright images and you are judging the blacks levels by say looking at blacks bars of a movie,then the tv "A" will appear to have darker blacks (subjectively) even though in reality its blacks will be worse then tv "B",because the way our eyes react to bright light.
Lastly a tv can either show better blacks by crushing details in shadow area ,or vice versa.
@shredder
Well i not against IPS or LG,which again has its own advantages.For a monitor,still camera/DSLR ,mobile phone,laptop i would prefer a screen with IPS period.
But just not for tv(unless it was like LH90) .
Remember the plasma camp use to used the poor contrast ratio of lcds as their main marketing tool,now the lcds based on VA or PhotoAlignment are in the same league as most plasmas and better are good in daytime.
Where as the IPS hasn't made much of a progress in black levels ,not to the same extent as VA based, which have improved black levels by 200 to 400% in the last 4 years,even without aid from backlight.
Already the NEXT gen tech such as AMVA5 with 3x more contrast is stated to launch some time next year,so is the samsung Bluephase lcd which claims to have response time faster them any other lcd tech.
Which should steal the market share from IPS.Most first tier lcd makers are choosing VA based panels.
Philips who used to use IPS panels before for their high end tvs are using only VA based for 09 and 10 models,same goes to toshiba.
But with respect to LG,well other manufactures like philips do better then LG using the same panel.
LG is let down by its image processing,although good,not as good as the competition from samsung/sony/philips.Its TRUMOTION is a joke and i am not the only person in this forums who finds the same.