Bigness begets bigness. Most of us don’t have the pay packet or the house to contemplate spending the price of a saloon car on a TV. But imagine, for a moment, that $70,000 is within your budget and you have the space to accommodate a 70in screen. This set might seem a perfectly reasonable way to fritter away a few dollars.

It may be supersized, but the Sony’s spec is no better than that of a premium 32in screen. It has 1920 x 1080 Full HD screen resolution, three 1.3a HDMI ins, a fistful of less-fashionable inputs and twin tuners. There’s a meaningful 11 watts per channel of audio power, too, though the idea that such a screen won’t be incorporated into a substantial sound system is a fanciful one.

Its considerable 76kg bulk having been wrestled from its enormous flight case by an entire team of wheezing reviewers, the Sony simply dominates one of our larger viewing rooms with its presence.

It’s big; but is it clever?
Less serious-minded folk than us have observed how a few inches can make a critical difference, but the novelty of the ’3500’s gargantuan proportions is strongly appealing. When it comes to performance, though, the Sony’s quite a bit bigger than it is clever.

As you would expect, the ’3500 does its best work when dealing with a 1080p/24fps Blu-ray source – but despite a painstaking tour of the labyrinthine set-up menus, we were unable to rid the screen of an unwanted and troublesome suggestion of orangey magenta in what ought to be clean whites.

Black tones are inconsistent, no doubt a result of the screen’s rather uneven backlighting, and, despite the almost ridiculous size of the screen, there’s a surprisingly confined ‘sweet spot’ for viewing – sitting off-axis by even a fairly modest amount results in a loss of depth and detail.

Delivers sound with a spacious focus
Of course, there’s also plenty to enjoy in the Sony’s performance. It describes details, particularly in textures, very well and can handle motion of all but the most vigorous kind better than an LCD panel of this size has any right to. And it delivers sound with a spacious focus that’s as good as any flatscreen we’ve heard.

In strict performance per dollar terms, a television set that costs as much as a top-of-the-line projector, a big projection screen, a most agreeable surround sound system and a nice comfy sofa to enjoy it all from is a bit of a non-starter.

But the KDL-70X3500 is a rich man’s folly and, taken on those terms, it’s one of the finest wastes of money we’ve ever seen.