Home > Consumer Reviews > Sharp LC-46X20E - 46" Widescreen 1080P Full HD LCD TV - With Freeview

bought to replace an earlier Sharp LCD 37" television, this set is now in the corner of my lounge and looks very nice. The slim frame means that it doesn't look that much bigger than the 37" even though the picture is larger.
Good bits - very nice picture on SD - better than the earlier set maybe because the tuner and/or picture processing is better. Great picture on upscaled DVD.
It has an auto-brightness feature which turns the brightness down when the room's dark - seems to work well too!
The remote allows you to select either analogue or digital tuner - useful for me as the digital reception is a bit hit and miss on C4.

Bad bits - the response to the remote is a bit slow and you don't get the "curtains" effect when you switch off.

Oh, and this is a big set, whereas I could manage to move the 37" easily on my own, this one is a "two-man lift".

So, not perfect but great for the price

It's pretty simple really, if the majority of your viewing is of DVD's upscaled to 1080 or HD tv then this is a belter. If however you watch analogue telly & a lot of older films with little digital enhancing then this set is pretty unforgiving. You can adjust the picture a lot but it'll drive you nuts in the process.
With quality images however this is superb, a little adjustment is needed as thing s are a bit dark at first, but once done the picture is crisp & very lifelike. Blacks are far better than usual with an LCD, colours are vibrant & there are no problems with motion smearing or blocky images.
There are a lot of options to choose from. Sound is not bad but you're really better off using your surround amp. there are inputs for 3 HDMI leads & the results are worth the investment.
It's true the remote is slow on changing channels & a swivel on the stand would be nice but these are minor niggles.
The set is well made & the slim frame means this looks smaller than the 42' plasma I used before it. It really comes into it's own with movies as there is a real cinematic feel to both the size & the picture.
This is a great set & offers an awful lot for the money.

Hi,

I intend to edit this review over time to give a long term review. As of time of writing I have had the set just over a week.

Colour: good
Brightness: excellent
contrast: so so
standard definition upscaling: excellent

This TV was an unexpected purchase as I was intending to get a Sony kdl40d3500 or kdl40v4000. However two things concerned me, the SD reproduction on the d3500 is rather grainy, whilst the v4000 is also rather pricey. By chance I saw this set for a similar price to the 40v4000, but most impressive was the SD picture on the Sharp. When I first saw it it was playing a blue ray disc, which looked good, but I then asked them to swap it for a DVD. To my amazment there was no difference?? I think this suggests that the HD picture on this set is not as good as the cristal clear reproduction on the sony, but also it was clear that the SD picture on the Sharp was head and shoulder above anything I had seen (panasonic sets look blurry with SD) on any other TV.

Now I have had the TV at home for a few days I can confirm that the SD picture is excellent. The first thing we watched was Braveheart on film 4 , it was truly cinematic. I simply could not believe how clear the SD picture was on such a large screen. We use cable, and I guess a good SD signal is key as some of the lower quality channels and older recordings are obviously poorer quality.

I have yet to connect an HD source to this set so I reserve final judgement on how it will perform, but for now the SD picture is alone anough to recommend this TV.

There are some negatives though:-

the freewview tuner interferes with the picture from cable as a blue box keeps popping up every minute or so, to stop this just remove the aerial lead (i think freview will work fine, this is just a problem if you use sky or virgin as well as freeview).

Contrast, it is OK especially with the contrast enhancment. Sharp quotes 2000:1 (which is very poor these days), but on the front of the set it says 10000:1 (which is OK, but compare to SONY 40V4000 33000:1). I think this latter figure is with the contrast enhancement on. The result is that bright scenes can look washed out, and dark scenes look grey or smokey. Contrast enhancment (my guess) is basically adjusting backlight brightness to compensate for light and dark pictures, so in scenes with half dark half light images the contrast enhancement can't help (incidentially I believe sony has used this trick as well).

The manual, well all three actually, the TV comes with three very thick manuals, which frankly do not help much at all. This TV has numerous options in a well thought out pull down menu style, but the manual does not explain thier function at all. How does contrast enhancment work, what does OCP acutally do, what is Y-C enhancement, motion control etc. etc.? All these options they have spent time and money including and the end user is left guessing. All the manual can tell you is how to turn them on and off. Most frustrating it turning the TV on and off, with standby 2 enabled (?) the TV can take minutes to come on from standby, but the manual does not say how long is normal to wait. In short be prepared to surf the net for others opinions on how to use your rather complex TV.

Colour (like no other?) well it is rather hit and miss, set the colour for one scene and you will find it swamped by the OCP varying brightness. Again with so many unexplained options I am still looking for the best settings to use. Sharp - please add independant RGB control this would help enourmously to calibrate the set which IMO is not set up as best it could be.

In theory this TV can have its firmware updated, but I doubt Sharp will bother.

Will let you know more soon

Sharp was not one of the brands I'd normally go for. A friend bought one and we were both not very impressed with the picture. It was going to be returned, then I got the Digital Video Essentials DVD and tuned it up. The difference was amazing, and unlike other review here, we both thought SD performace was impressive. That also seems to be the general consensus on avforums. Basically it looks great and I'm thinking of getting one for myself, although being a CRT fan, I had previous thought I wouldnt like any LCD picture, and was going to wait another year or so, before going LCD.

I bought this TV after looking at loads of reviews on several websites, most of which said that the sound was poor at best. Some even said that at 1080p the picture quality wasnt that good. I'm happy to report that in my opinion both are close to perfect. I haven't tried using the built in freeview but normal analogue doesn't look very good, BBC2 seems the worst for some reason. I'm using Sky+HD, xBox 360 (HD) & a Sony BDP-S350, all 3 are giving outstanding images and sound. Considering you can now get this TV for near £700 from several online and highstreet outlets then it becomes even better. A quality full HD LCD, 46", 3 HDMI ports and a low cost.

SD Image Quality -5/10
SD Sound - 7/10
HD Image Quality -10/10
HD Sound - 9/10
Gaming - 10/10
Price - 10/10