Best large screen available

I recently bought a Sharp 80" 632 model.

I wanted to upgrade from my 65" DLP set that was about 5 years old, but working fine.

Samsung sets were the ones my eye was always drawn to in store displays. I liked the combination of modern set design looks; sharp images; and bright bold colors.

Samsung sets get pretty costly, once you get above the 55" level and reading about them here on AVS showed that Samsung tends to have issues with their larger LCD panels. Banding seems to be a problem in particular.

I had seen the Sharp sets and was not overly impressed. Their initial 70" sets had really bad backlight uniformity - visible as dark corners on most sets I saw. This was supposedly with full array backlighting, which was not impressive to me.

Sharp seemed to fix the backlight issue with the 80" current models, maintaining full array backlighting, while the smaller sets went to edge lit LEDs.

PQ still seemed to notch or two below the Samsung, but the size was really impressive.

I ended up getting the 632 for about 1/3 the price of the 75" Samsung. I really didn't want all the bells and whistles that the Samsung flagship model offered, just the screen size.

The Sharp has exceeded my expectations. Once dialed in (and it does require some dialing in from the factory settings) it produced an excellent image - bright, colorful, and good detail.

I added a Darbee Darblet video processor to the system and I think that little device really narrowed the gap between what I liked bout the Samsung sets and the Sharp.

Good luck on your search. New stuff is coming out all the time and manufacturers seem to be getting back into the big screen business, after capping out at 55" for a few years.

If you want a large consumer television, check out the 90 inch Sharp. I believe that is largest flat screen in the consumer market right now. I have not heard much about the pic quality but there is a thread devoted to the set.

As for picking the 80 inch model or the 75 inch model, that is very subjective. I have heard (not seen for myself) that the samsung has a very nice image. I would imagine that it is better than the 80 inch sharp, which is nice by itsleft, but has it pitfalls. I also understand the 75 inch samsung is fairly expensive. What may be a better comparison is the 90 inch sharp $9K to the 75 inch samsung $9K or the 80 inch sharp $4.5K to the top of the line samsung 65 inch model approx $4k.

I believe some of the magnolia stores have the 90 inch sharp on display or call your local AV store to check it out.

It looks great in the Magnolia Audio room at BestBuy.
It's not a Quattron, but it's difficult to tell the difference with their display setup...