Stunning Realism from Sharp's New LCD TV

The LC-52D92U offers beautiful HD images and good color right out of the box—besting Sharp's earlier models and the competition

by Cliff Edwards

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Deep blacks; good color reproduction; plentiful input options

The Bad: Contrast suffers; speaker must be attached; relatively pricey

The Bottom Line: A well-rounded, full high-definition set that stands out from most of the competition

Reader Reviews

It's a rare feat to deliver a product with just a few flaws in the hypercompetitive world of high-end TVs—a blur of new software and hardware that manufacturers rush to market in hopes of standing apart. That's why I've got to give Sharp credit for its new LC-52D92U. There was very little I didn't like about this stylish 52-in. liquid-crystal display TV. Of course, you'll pay a pretty penny for its charms: The Sharp set sells for between $3,100 and $4,000, well above similarly sized plasmas that can be found for less than $2,000.

In the past year, Sharp has consistently upped the ante as it battles Sony (SNE) and Samsung for the top spot in this growing segment. With the LC-52D92U, it shows. The set offers stunning, very deep blacks and decent color reproduction right out of the box, even before you tweak any settings.

It's a nice-looking set, too. The framing around the screen has a glossy black finish with silver accents at the bezel, lending it a subtle air of sophistication. The screen itself is also a lustrous black, which helps filter the glare from surrounding light that can spoil certain viewing angles. My only gripe with the aesthetics involves a long speaker that attaches to the bottom of the screen. Even if you hook the TV up to an external stereo system, you'll still want to attach this speaker to the bottom of the screen since it hides a rather ugly part of the base.

Trouble in Black and White

Cosmetics aside, the 52D92U delivered high-definition images the way they were meant to be seen—with such realism that you are practically drawn into the picture. I watched high-definition DVDs in the high-resolution 1080 progressive mode on both a Samsung Blu-ray player and Toshiba's HD-XA2 player (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/31/06, "Cool Player, Tepid DVDs," and 3/1/07, "Toshiba's Sleek, Pricey HD-XA2"). During the breathtaking cave scenes in BBC's Planet Earth series, my skin crawled as thousands of cockroaches swarmed over the carcass of a bat. Even though the Sharp TV's frame refresh rate was faster than that of the actual video—a common problem with 1080p—I couldn't find much in the way of the artifacts that usually mar a picture's edge.

That's not to say there weren't issues. The biggest was that in cranking up black levels, you lose contrast at the other end of the spectrum. That means the whitest whites don't show up, and the overall picture is a bit darker than in previous models.

But even the often-grainy images from Comcast's (CCT) analog cable channels were more palatable on Sharp's set, which still processes the feed in its native 1,900 by 1080 resolution, or full HD. There were occasional jagged lines in some moving images, but it still performed better than other sets I've tested. Indeed, the Sharp model sports the new 120-hertz data refresh rate being adopted by many of the top LCD makers to eliminate the motion-blur common to such sets.

Changing Its Stripes

The only odd incident in my weeks of testing came while watching Bravo's Top Chef. The set was hooked up to TiVo's (TIVO) Series 3 HD cable unit (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/11/07, "A New Fix for the TiVo Fan"), and the picture suddenly starting pushing a squiggly red line across the screen. It went away when I changed to other channels, however, and did not reappear on a subsequent evening when I tuned in to Bravo again.