Hopefully this ends up in the right subforum - the sheer amount of them are staggering. :3
I have a Sharp LC-42SB55E LCD TV, which I purchased some time before Christmas. It's generally been working fine except for a few oddities and quirks that I came across, and one of them is really making my satisfaction with the device drop.
It has some form of "brightness balancing" that you can't disable anywhere. Except it's not "balancing" as much as "exaggeration".
Whenever scenes get dark, the TV gradually lowers brightness further, so that often stuff gets too dark to see. And likewise, when scenes get bright it raises brightness. In audio terms, loud sounds would become louder and quiet sounds illegible. Raising the brightness setting just moves it to the upper end of the gradient, making bright stuff gets really bright and dark stuff grey (and equally hard to see as earlier). This has lead to much frustration in PS3 and 360 games, where dark-against-dark scenes are common.
At first I thought this was a pure bug. I mean, perhaps the developers thought to make a "brightness normalization" feature and they just botched a logic check someplace, making it work in reverse. But from what I can tell by reading the manual and doing some Google roadwork, it doesn't seem to support any easy way of upgrading its software. There is a 'Current software info' tab in the settings, but Googling the terms there turn up mostly blank, with the occasional Russian site match.
Is this a known "feature" LCD TVs can have? Should I take it to my retailer and ask for a firmware upgrade, and hope that isn't such a cheapo TV that it has such functionality removed?
I live in Sweden, and at least on the Swedish/European Sharp site all support pages eventually say to contact whoever you bought it from "and they'll be happy to help you." So there's no way to ask Sharp support, and I *truly* doubt that I'll find that level of expertise at the local store.
I appreciate any insight I can get - this TV lets me down more every day.
I have a Sharp LC-42SB55E LCD TV, which I purchased some time before Christmas. It's generally been working fine except for a few oddities and quirks that I came across, and one of them is really making my satisfaction with the device drop.
It has some form of "brightness balancing" that you can't disable anywhere. Except it's not "balancing" as much as "exaggeration".
Whenever scenes get dark, the TV gradually lowers brightness further, so that often stuff gets too dark to see. And likewise, when scenes get bright it raises brightness. In audio terms, loud sounds would become louder and quiet sounds illegible. Raising the brightness setting just moves it to the upper end of the gradient, making bright stuff gets really bright and dark stuff grey (and equally hard to see as earlier). This has lead to much frustration in PS3 and 360 games, where dark-against-dark scenes are common.
At first I thought this was a pure bug. I mean, perhaps the developers thought to make a "brightness normalization" feature and they just botched a logic check someplace, making it work in reverse. But from what I can tell by reading the manual and doing some Google roadwork, it doesn't seem to support any easy way of upgrading its software. There is a 'Current software info' tab in the settings, but Googling the terms there turn up mostly blank, with the occasional Russian site match.
Code:
Version: DVB_SHARP_DLH LC_42SB55E_V2.03 PQ Version: 0.15_0701
I live in Sweden, and at least on the Swedish/European Sharp site all support pages eventually say to contact whoever you bought it from "and they'll be happy to help you." So there's no way to ask Sharp support, and I *truly* doubt that I'll find that level of expertise at the local store.
I appreciate any insight I can get - this TV lets me down more every day.
