The “Break it Down” Blog

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For anyone in the market for a new HDTV, and has zeroed in on getting an LCD TV you are likely having this connundrum right now… do you get the Sharp LC-52D92U or the Samsung LN-T5265F?

If you decide to start your search by Googling for all Sharp reviews, then all Samsung reviews you will come to one conclusion: they are both excellent.

So how are you suppose to decide? You have to start digging…

Digging always begins with AVS Forum. AVS has the advantage of being a collection of information and posters like anything else… but because of it’s nature, it’s really easy to get mislead by uninformed users complaining about the wrong issue or a user with an axe to grind bitching about the wrong problems and blowing them out of proportion. So simply reading through AVS Forum doesn’t guarantee a well informed decision… but it is a great start and absolute offers insight into some of the more common issues you may have with the hardware.

For reference, here is the Sharp owners thread, and Samsung owners thread. (TIP: Owner threads are threads for posters to discuss their sets where the maintainer of the thread usually keeps the first post of the entire thread up to date with the most important information from the thread. But that doesn’t always happen.)

With those disclaimers out of the way, I will say the issues you will run into are:

• Sharps have “banding” issues
• Sharps have “clouds” (blotches of discolorations)
• Samsung does a bad job deinterlacing
• Samsung has a lot of overscan with component inputs
• Samsung handles HDMI sources poorly
• Samsung has HDMI HDCP handshake issues with some devices (PS3 mostly?)

The good news is that with the rave reviews of both sets across the net, even if you blindly walked into one or the other you’d end up with a great set. However thanks to Robert Heron over at PC Mag for some inside scoop on the Samsung, it looks like the issues listed for the Samsung are actually show stoppers. The HDMI handshake issues on the Samsung is a very frustrating thing that seems random with it’s occurances and one user pointed out that it might be caused by trying to pass an audio signal through the HDMI connection which would explain why the issue seems random… not everyone does that.

The other issues pointed out above against the Samsung end up being a real issue while the Sharp hung in there with excellent inputs, excellent HDMI handling as well as no overscan on component inputs or PC inputs. With Amazon offering the Sharp for $3200 it’s not a cheap set, but it is a great set.

Update #1: Here’s a link to some pictures of “mura” or clouding that was discussed earlier. I’ve read a few posts that if you simply turn the brightness down it can help lessen or remove the effect. Haven’t confirmed this myself. As some other posted have mentioned, the “mura” is most noticable with a solid black screen but you cannot see it when actually viewing content like a movie, TV or game console… so honestly how much of a show stopper is this? Do you sit and watch a black screen often?