Although flat-panel LCD TVs have been hanging around even longer than plasma models, their small-size screens have garnered less attention. But things changed in the past year: LCD TVs started zooming up in size, undoing the myth that the technology is good only for small displays in the kitchen, bedroom, or office. Today, you can find flat-panel LCD TVs plenty big enough for home theater use.
The widescreen, 37-inch LC-37G4U, a step down from Sharp's largest LCD models, boasts a resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels and comes with a separate A/V switching and control box, a set of detachable speakers, and a table stand that pivots about 30° in either direction. All the pieces have a high-tech, silver finish.
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The external AVC System, or A/V switching and control box, is about the size of a DVD player and has pretty much every type of connection you'll need to hook up high-def sources like a satellite receiver or cable box, including the new all-digital HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) and DVI (Digital Visual Interface) inputs. There are also dual RF antenna jacks for tuning in analog off-air TV broadcasts and cable programs — you'll need a separate HDTV tuner to receive off-air digital broadcasts. About the only thing that seems to be missing is an S-video jack. There is one, but it's located beneath a front-panel door that also conceals a PC Card slot for viewing digital photos stored on flash memory.
Sharp's slim, silver-toned remote control is packed with buttons but has a clean layout and a fully backlit keypad. Once I located the important controls, like Input and View (display) Mode, it was easy to find them again in a dark room. To switch sources, you press Input and either scroll through a list of options using the arrow keys or step through them by pressing the button again.
Display modes for standard-definition (480i/p) programs include Stretch (properly displays 16:9 format images), Sidebar (displays 4:3 images with gray sidebars), Smart Stretch (stretches 4:3 images to fill the screen), and Zoom. Any of these can be selected by pressing the View Mode key. There are no display options for high-def programs — the set simply locks into Stretch and stays put.
SETUP Sharp's plentiful setup options made it easy to tweak the set for best performance. If you plan to use the speakers (I left them in the box), you attach them to either side of the set using the supplied screws and then plug the wires into terminals on the sides. Aside from basic settings like brightness, contrast, and color, you can select from five different color-temperature settings and adjust the overall output of the LCD panel's backlight.
But the real kicker proved to be the Color Management System, which provides three submenus — Hue, Saturation, and Value — for fine-tuning color balance, with six color channels available within each menu. You can store custom picture settings in the User preset or modify any of the other four presets and save your changes. This is helpful because it lets you recall adjustments you've made for different program sources, like DVD and HDTV.
PICTURE QUALITY Before I so much as touched a control, I was impressed by how bright and crisp the image looked with daylight streaming in my windows. Not only that, but picture contrast was good compared with most other TVs, looking anything but washed out in all that sunlight — even from seating positions well off to one side of the couch. This is definitely a TV that's made for daytime viewing.
After making adjustments in both its user-accessible and hidden service menus (see “in the lab”), I settled back to watch The Thin Red Line DVD on a Bravo D2 player via a DVI connection. The TV easily displayed the rich range of colors of the Pacific islands locales without emphasizing certain tones. Subtle colors — as in the bluish beach rocks, light-tan huts, and reddish-brown skin of the native islanders — came through clearly. The AWOL hide of the spacey Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel, obviously preparing for his next big role, as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) looked sun-baked without being too red.
As good as the Sharp's color reproduction was, all was not perfect. Having watched countless movies on a similar-size tube TV, I found it hard to overlook the difference between that set's smooth, solid picture and the grainy texture of the Sharp's image. Viewed up close, colors were also smeared in shots with motion, although this wasn't as evident at a normal seating distance of 8 feet or so.
I was wowed by the Sharp's ability to consistently convey solid blacks on everything I watched. Even so, shadow detail was missing in the interior shots of the island's huts in The Thin Red Line, with the dim areas coming across as a flat, dark mass. And in a later segment, where the uppity Witt is disciplined by his superior, the dark backgrounds of the interrogation room lent the shots an unintended chiaroscuro effect.
Thanks to NBC's almost round-the-clock coverage of the Summer Olympics, I had plenty of great HDTV to watch. The swimming and gymnastics events that I caught looked fantastic — onscreen graphics were so crisp, it was like looking at a computer monitor. And hard-edged fields of color in the omnipresent signage and uniforms of the Olympians were strikingly crisp and clean.
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As with DVD images, bold colors like red and orange were well balanced with other hues, and picture detail was very good. It wasn't enough to distinguish pool water from the tears that both streamed down the face of Romania's Camelia Potec after she clinched first place in the 200-meter freestyle, but I could see the details in a German swimmer's tribal-pattern tattoo as she lunged from the starting block.
After experiencing this set's great handling of HDTV, I actually found it depressing to go back to watching analog cable channels. The TV seemed to exaggerate video noise in some programs, however, including a baseball game on ESPN2. Selecting the High digital video noise-reduction setting helped remove horizontal bands I was seeing, but at the expense of picture detail.
BOTTOM LINE Sharp's LC-37G4U is the first flat-panel LCD TV I've tested, and overall I was impressed. At $6,000, it faces stiff competition from plasma sets that offer more screen real estate for the money, but none of those are as light as the 43-pound Sharp, and few can match its performance in brightly lit rooms.
In the Lab
Color temperature (Low color temperature before/after calibration)
Low window (30-IRE) .............. 5,834/6,480 K
High window (100-IRE) ........... 5,544/6,578 K
Brightness (100-IRE window before/after calibration): 57.1/56.2 ftL
The Sharp measured within 1,000 K of the 6,500-K standard on both high and low windows with its Low and Medium/Low color-temperature presets. Additional service-menu calibration resulted in a more accurate alignment, although grayscale tracking varied within 900 K of the standard — a higher than usual fluctuation. (Calibration needs to be performed by a qualified technician with specialized equipment, so discuss it with your dealer before purchase, or call the Imaging Science Foundation at 561-997-9073.)
A minor degree of red push measured with the color-decoding error pattern from the Avia test DVD was easily corrected with the set's Color Management System. Picture overscan was average, measuring around 3%. With the sharpness control set to just below the midway point, resolution was maintained and there was no sign of edge enhancement.
— A.G.