LC-45GX6U picture quality

Sorry, I read the beginning of that first thread again and appreciate your detailed opinion of the set. I was hoping some others would add their 2 cents as well . One question though, have you watched a movie like Star Wars with scenes of black space? Is it a convincing enough black in those types of scenes in your opinion, or is it too "bright".?


Jeremys, I do have a set on order with PC Mall that was supposed to be delivered on the 13th, but now they say Sharp will not deliver the sets until 10/28! My guess is that Sharp is holding back sets to these e-tailers that are lowballing their prices so that the "expensive" companies can enjoy some sales initially. I just hope I get the set at all - I do have my doubts. But I will wait some time for the $2,000-$2,500 difference in price. In the meantime though it gives me more time to really get a feel for the PQ of this set. Cancelling the order is not out of the question if I feel the set will not meet my expectations. There are some excellent plasmas out there. I do like the true HD pixel counts on this Sharp, however. So, I'm trying my best to pick the minds of current owners such as Sorry. Their comments are extremely helpful for this decision. To be honest I'm primarily worried about the black levels, ie-will they meet my minimum expectations. For sure, it has to be good enough to show a Star Wars movie in a convincing fashion.


Well, thanks to anyone who contributes their opinions, it is much appreciated.


Gooddoc out

Quote:
I actually did watch my 2001: A Space Odessey DVD two nights ago and had no qualms with the blacks. It's not pitch black (you can tell the LCD is on) but the detail was fine.


The 2001 transfer I have (part of the Stanley Kubrick collection) is pretty terrible--it even looks bad on my old CRT set, so I did notice a lot of MPEG artifacts that bothered me. Other more finely mastered DVDs don't show this nearly as much--but when you have a set with as high a resolution as this with such clarity, you're going to see a few MPEG artifacts. The better the source, the better the picture looks.


OTA HD at 1080i/720p looks just fantastic. Same with PC/DVI input.

Quote:
I watched "Lost" last night in a dimmed room; it had a lot of dark scenes.


The detail in the very dark scenes was pretty good but the overall light output was just too much (I don't have the OPC feature turned on and I didn't have any bias lighting.) I found that when I turned the backlight down a few notches (maybe from 13 to 9) that it made watching in the dark room much more enjoyable.


OPC is supposed to monitor the light level in the room and automatically adjust the backlight, but I found that it always seems to set it 1-2 notches too low for my taste. Maybe I should try to get used to it, but for now it's turned off.


One other thing I haven't mentioned which I've been very happy about is the wide viewing angle. I always thought the smaller LCDs had a fairly small sweet spot and that they dulled out pretty quickly on either side (maybe not as much as a plasma display but stilll suboptimal.)


We have one viewing position that is very oblique to the screen off to the right. (I'd say 55 degrees to the center of the screen.) The picture from this viewing area is just excellent and very close to the quality from dead-on-straight. We've had this same setup through a number of displays and this unit literally looks the best from that angle since my old CRT.


Another nit pick as I'm setting up my universal remote with the display--there don't appear to be any discrete codes for switching to a certain input. So if I'm on Input 1 (component video) and want to switch to Input 4 (HDMI), the only way I've found to reliably program that into the remote is as a macro: push digital (that switches to the unused internal tuner), then Input (pause) Input (pause) Input (pause) Input to get to Input 4. That's very clunky--maybe someone know a better way to program that or to get direct entry.

Quote:
I haven't experimented much with the OPC on my 37G4U, but I adjusted all the setting using AVIA in a darkened room PRIOR to activating OPC (including backlight), and it seems to adjust the backlight very well now for all lighting conditions. You might want to try that.


I've commented on this in another thread, but I would agree that the viewing angle on these newer Sharps is just awesome...much better than many other LCD's I've seen in the past.


As for the discrete codes, I PM'd Mike53 and he kindly sent me everything he had for Aquos codes. It indicated that the inputs had no discretes, so I was stuck using a similar macro on my Pronto to the one you are using...clunky but it works. The other problem is that the unit will not respond to any additional codes for approximately 5 seconds after turning the unit on, so a single macro for turning everything on and switching to the right inputs takes too long.

Quote:
Assuming the black level on my 37G4U is similar to the 45GX, it takes some careful adjustments with AVIA, etc. to get the black levels and shadow detail looking good. Out of the box, the settings crushed the blacks. Now I'm seeing plenty of detail and deep blacks...not as good as my Sony XBR CRT rear projection HDTV...but very good. I used the first 15 minutes of "Underworld" as my torture test. Looked good.


I also found you have to adjust each input carefully. I used an LG DVD player with AVIA to calibrate the composite, component and HDMI inputs separately. This works for the DVD player, and gets the other sources (ie. Moto 5100 w/component outputs) close enough for small tweaks.