What I liked:

1) slim, black, minimalist design enclosure. It looks cool.

2) The picture is the best, a notch or two above my

Samsung LCD. The image is sharper and the tonal range

is wider. Blacks are really black and whites are really

white. The millions of colors in between look good too.

I’ll start out by saying that I’ve only had this TV a few days. I will also say that I could be wrong about the possible options for changing what I dislike about this TV, or in my description of what causes it- but in my research so far I haven’t found any reason to believe so. I’m always interested in hearing more information if I don’t have the full picture though.

All that said- I personally just don’t like this set so much. I bought this to replace a broken Sony XBR6 (also 32″), and this has been my experience so far, the good and bad.

Good:

- Picture quality: The picture quality on this thing really is amazing. Very deep blacks, crystal clear image. I had to tweak the settings a bit (I’ll get to my thoughts on that shortly), and never quite found a setting that I thought was perfect, but even with that being the case the picture was stunning and I can tell that with proper calibration it’s probably one of the best 32″ sets you can buy as far as PQ goes right now.

-Picture settings. I’m actually kind of split on this. The picture definitely needs to be tweaked from store settings, and the good thing is that this set provides probably the most extensive set of options for calibration than any other set I’ve seen- so chances are you CAN get it where you like it. It’s kind of a double edged sword though because there’s so many settings that unless you really know your stuff it’s difficult to figure out how to get the perfect balance.

Bad:

- Sound: Sound on 32″ flat panels has never been known to be that great, but I almost immediately felt that the sound was very hollow and tinny compared to the xbr6. I messed with the audio settings- turned on the surround simulator and upped the bass a little bit. That helped, but I still found it lacking.

-Build quality/Styling: This is something that may just come down to opinion (styling is for sure), but I was rather unhappy with both of these things compared to my xbr. The build quality feels cheap and not very sturdy by comparison, and the styling in general I just felt was bland. The same feeling extended to the system menus for me- I like the design and look of the Sony’s much more, whereas the Sharps feel more like a 90′s computer menu or something.

-Remote: Weird choices for how they laid the remote out… the button to switch ‘av modes’ (basically profiles for picture settings etc) is enclosed in a little drawer so you have to open that whenever you want to switch between your movie/game/custom modes etc. In general I also feel the remote is just kind of ugly…

-Motion processing: This was the big one for me. Everyhing else being as is (although the styling still bugs me), I would have been willing to keep this set just for it’s image quality. But this was a deal breaker. I’ve read on other sites that the Sharp ranks low in this area, especially compared to Sony, and I completely agree. Now this is where I believe it’s possible i’m missing some information but I haven’t found it yet. With TV based content it looks fine, but what seems to be the case is that you cannot turn off the ‘film mode’ image processing for any progressive signal based content (480p/720p/1080p). You can see the setting in the menu, but it is disabled (along with one other setting for the black levels I think)- and YES I am in ‘dot by dot’ mode.

What this effectively means (at least as far as my eyes can tell), is that there is no way to turn off the ‘soap opera effect’ on blu-ray content (and probably progresive-scan dvd as well I haven’t tried that yet). I looked this up on forums and messed with every setting possible and I just could not get rid of it. Some people don’t mind that effect, some like it, some say it’s not even noticeable, but to me it sticks out like a sore thumb and I just hate it. So for me, I think this set will be going back in favor of the xbr9 or un32b6000 (hoping that doesn’t have any similar issues).

So I’m giving this set a 3 stars- if I could I’d probably give it 3.5. I’m not that concerned with the fact that it’s led or not, or that it doesn’t have local dimming- all I care about as far as that stuff goes is picture quality, and this set is extremely high up when it comes to that. Unfortunately I just found almost every other aspect of the set, most notably the inability to turn film mode off on blu-ray content, to be unsatisfactory. It’s a great value for the price, but at the same time, I can see why the price is much lower than the competitors in it’s class.