LCD TVs

I recently purchased two 1080p LCD TVs, one to replace my 10 year old RPTV and another to use as a den TV and game/PC monitor. The living room TV is a Samsung LN46A550 and the den TV is a Sharp 32D64U. I figured the Sharp would make a good PC monitor and a lot of reviews I read said it would do 1080p over VGA, which I could hook up to the Xbox360, leaving plenty of inputs for other things. That didn't quite turn out to be the case.

I figured I've been using LCDs as PC monitors for ages now and it's about time for TV tech to finally catch up. But there are some pretty big differences, so I thought I'd do a quick comparison. Both TVs are hooked up to the same PC at the same time over dvi->hdmi, so they have the same signal and both calibrated with Lagom LCD test images. This attempts to produce a uniform gradient across RGB levels, but does not attempt to calibrate color temp - both sets are set to standard "neutral" temp. I took a quick photo of some large text to compare:


On the left is the Sharp D64U and on the right is the Samsung A550. The bright spots are dust on the screen reflecting the flash and both panels appear defect free. The first thing to note is that both of these TVs separate a pixel into upper and lower halves, but there is a clear difference in how these subpixels are arranged (and even used).

There seems to be this consensus in reviews that the Samsung has better picture quality than the Sharp and side-by-side it's easy to notice a "softness" in the Sharp picture immediately (despite that the Sharp is actually smaller and should look better). The closeup of an anti-aliased '3' shows some interesting differences in the subpixel structure. The Samsung always renders both halves of subpixels at the same level which always creates a square pixel, but the Sharp does not. The Sharp does this zig-zag of RGB over both halves for dark pixels and alternates only blue on bright pixels. I haven't found any settings that control this to turn it on or off, but pixels rendered this way are always fuzzy. For scaled SD content, this actually benefits the Sharp as some of the compression noise is fuzzed away, where the same noise is clearly visible on the Samsung. However, I suspect this is also why high definition pictures on the Sharp, while they look good at a distance, still can't compare in quality.

This does present a problem in using it as a PC display, since a dot-by-dot image is always high definition, the image is always fuzzy. Bringing up a webpage, the text on the Samsung is crisp and clear like on a computer monitor, but on the Sharp, it's a barely legible (headache inducing) mess. To add insult to injury, Sharp removed the 1080p support over VGA in the 2008 S firmware models. Now, why would anyone remove support for the native resolution, essentially limiting it to 720p as the only VGA widescreen resolution?

Ok, two strikes for the Sharp, but perhaps it's still usable as a TV? I tried watching DVDs over 480p component and within an hour ran into what is known as the component blinking issue. The display intermittently blacks out for about 2 seconds and then shows the component input info in the upper right as it reacquires the signal. Sometimes this happens rapidly (5-10 times back-to-back) and sometimes about once an hour. Reading the D64U owners threads on avsforums suggests the problem is fairly common and some owners have had success rolling back to an older firmware resolve it. But like others, rolling back the firmware for me has only reduced the frequency that it occurs.

Unfortunately, the shipping and restocking fees would have been almost 1/3 of what I paid. Since OTA and HDMI do work, I'll be using it as an unplanned bedroom TV instead.

On the other hand, the Samsung has met my expectations for a living room TV replacement (and Rannie can no longer say my TV is small!). While calibrating with the Lagom images, it managed to render all of the black level and white saturation tests, while still maintaining a very deep black - something even my PC monitors have a hard time doing.

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