Sharp LC-C46700UN Aquos 46-Inch UltraBrilliant LED HDTV

Review by D. Steffler for Sharp LC-C46700UN Aquos 46-Inch UltraBrilliant LED HDTV
Rating:
Have had this for about a month – wanted to wait to see if there were any downfalls before reporting back. The picture, oh what a picture!!! We found ourselves watching things we don’t usually watch just to see the clarity. Golf for instance (I hate golf), it’s like standing 15ft behind the golfer with a clean plate of glass between us.

I’ve seen complaints that it’s a 10 second wait after turning it on? Really now, to those people I say “get a life”. The fact that it uses something like a 10th of a watt while it’s off comforts the inner cheapskate in me.

After combing thru many reviews and asking questions we came to the conclusion that the “full array” LED is what we wanted … the mirrors and other tricks used to make edge lit screens one half inch thinner were not as important as picture quality. There are no dark spots or shadows with full array, the edge lit TV’s can’t say that (yet). LED lit screens are actually cool to the touch – I know that heat and electronics don’t get along… this has to extend the life of this TV. Sharp gives the LED’s a 100,000 hr life – hope you get the one you want cuz that’s 45 yrs at 6 hours of viewing time a day!

Movement shows like sports have no ghosting or trails. The remote is a good size meaning not too big and makes sense. The on screen setup menu is intuitive and works well. Bot a second computer on ebay and now have internet in the TV room, streaming netflix, hulu, espn3 and internet radio thru the surround sound system. It is beautiful as a computer screen too. A handheld wireless keyboard/trackball remote takes care of computer duty (Lenovo has one).

We have an antenna, if you cable people want to see true uncompressed 1080 HDTV like it was intended, get a rooftop or attic antenna. Did I mention that antenna reception is not only the best quality… it’s free?

My only complaint is related to this antenna service. I would take one star away if any other TV had a better viewers guide (EPG) than this Sharp (they don’t). Regardless of price, all HDTV’s have a dismal record in this one area. The FCC requires an EPG to be broadcast, seen in all the digital to analog boxes that everyone bot for the digital conversion. Unfortunately they don’t require the manufacturer to show it. Could this be a cable company conspiracy? Signed, Elvis.

Review by S. Magee for Sharp LC-C46700UN Aquos 46-Inch UltraBrilliant LED HDTV
Rating:
I bought this item from a very large worldwide chain’s website (not Amazon) and had it delivered.

The first thing you want to know about a TV is the picture quality, and this set is a mixed bag. First, it’s very sharp (pun anyone?) and seems very crystal clear. However, I immediately noticed a strange “shadow” vertical line that I could spot in the image when the content was panning left or right. Upon turning off the cable box and viewing the TV from an angle, I could see the backlighting was not uniform. In fact, there was a vertical band (a line of about 1-inch in width) that was just left of center on the image going from the top to the bottom of the screen, and the corners of the backlight were clearly much dimmer than the center of the set resulting in a vignette effect on all video.

Sharp has been notorious for this “vertical banding” on their LCD sets for years. I have an earlier 42″ model from about 4 years ago that exhibited “vertical banding” to a much lesser degree. Some people get unlucky and get bad sets, others get great sets (perhaps their set exhibits the behavior but they just don’t notice?). The best way to determine whether your set has issues is to disable the OPC (the automatic backlight/brightness/contrast adjustment that is on by default), turn up the backlight setting on the TV, and turn the TV on without an input signal, then view it from a 60-degree side-angle or greater in a dark room. The glow you see is your LCD panel through the backlight, and you’ll be able to see the vignette effect and/or the vertical banding if your TV exhibits these effects.

Another criticism I have is that this TV exhibits a high amount of video lag. When playing video games I noticed a large degree of delay, especially when playing timing-sensitive games like Rock Band. There is a way to “calibrate” your Rock Band game to adjust for the video lag of your TV set, and the lag I would always end up with is around 180-200 ms, which is at the very high end of the range of playability. Needless to say, with all the video games I play I was disappointed in this aspect.

The TV does have a bright display and has a glossy screen. I can only guess the bright picture is from the LED arrays backlighting the LCD screen vs your typical LCD backlight. The brightness is a big plus. However, there’s no other noticeable difference between this “LED” set vs a normal “LCD” set. Don’t expect this “LED” set to do any sort of “local dimming” to improve contrast, because it doesn’t. The “LED” label on this set just means that it’s backlit with an LED array instead of the usual panel backlight, and this has no other benefit other than slightly brighter display, less power consumption, and less weight to the set (it’s noticeably light – only about 50 lbs, which is very light for a 46″ TV).

The benefits of 120Hz weren’t immediately discernible as there were no controls in the menus to enable “smooth motion”, etc. While the TV probably does have 120Hz capability, it seems to lack the interpolation effects you’ll see on similar sets (or at least does a horrible job at it). The interpolation effect from other sets actually produces new resampled frames of video and makes the action super smooth – you’ll notice it while watching a 24P blu-ray disc when the motion is panning left and right, etc, and on your comparable sets it will seem very smooth (even too smooth at times). While most A/V junkies will tell you to disable this feature anyway, it’s nice to have it available if you ever wanted to turn it on, but this set doesn’t seem to even have that feature.

All of the inputs face the back of the TV, sans a small subset of inputs on the side of the TV. This isn’t good if you want to mount your TV on the wall as close to the wall as possible, but for me it didn’t matter much since my mount comes out a couple of inches from the wall.

Overall, this TV was a bust for me. With all the issues I had with it (the vertical banding, the video lag for gaming, and the lack of “smooth motion” options), I decided to return my set and see what else I could find. I’m sure there are sets of this model out there that are great and don’t exhibit the vertical banding I saw in mine, but I got one from the unlucky batch. I’d personally recommend looking into a more trusted brand, like Samsung or Sony.