Much Ado About Everything

Here in Canada, Future Shop in Metrotown, Burnaby got the 46″ Sharp LCD TV, 46D62U yesterday. Not even a price sticker is up on it, but I tested a passing employee and he mentioned he believes it’s $3499 and it’s a great bargain – I was impressed he knew about it.

But it’d be hard not to – It’s truly a beautiful set. It’s the best looking LCD in store – better than XBR2 which I used to look for but never once it managed to impress me (never mind the $5000 MSRP). I spent 10 minutes yesterday looking at it – unfortunately there was no remote and I don’t think it has a menu button
so I was stuck with whatever settings there were. There was definitely some red push but I couldn’t see any banding, even with many uniform color screens on FS loop. However I did notice some thin horizontal lines and horizontal banding during some scene transitions – these looked like processing artifacts, compression artifacts or insufficient colour palette (so they probably fall under the technical definition of banding) – I don’t recall seeing this on any other set if FS and I’ve been looking at TVs several days a week for the past 2 years at least (used to ogle Pioneers, but in Canada they’re insanely overpriced, MSRP for 50″ is $5000, even 42″ is $3.5k which is midpoint price for 50″!!).

I looked hard and long but I could not see any horizontal “banding” as presented here – and I had no trouble seeing it in any of the pictures. Nor I could see any vertical “banding”, but not being able to change the viewing material, I would not In Canada most of the logic that guys in US use to determine what to buy does not apply. For example, there’s very little HD content so anyone claiming HD is more important than SD will get laughed out of the room. Same for HD-DVD or BlueRay – DVDs still rule very much (and I doubt US is any different). And some companies put a sticker price on their products that is way over what they charge in US. Examples are Pioneer, Sony and Panasonic, making the US comments such as “but Pioneer or Panasonic is cheaper than Sharp, pick up that plasma” laughable. Personally, I prefer giving my money to companies that actually care about Canadians, such as LG (similar prices but double warranty!). Samsung is weird, their plasmas have prices in line with US but their LCD are WAY overpriced here – I mean, come on, $3.5k for 4092? And ranges of to 2-3k for any of their 720p 40″ sets? You’d be stupid not to pick up great-looking LG42LC2D for 1k less and double the warranty. And Sony, $5k for 46″ XBR2 (2, not 3)? Eh?

Also, BB lets you negotiate? What? Here, they actually ADVERTISE “no commission, no pressure”! That’s right, fixed prices are a feature they use to advertise, as if it’s a good thing. They now own FS which used to allow some negotiation but not any more. And having driven many smaller places
out of business, there’s only Visions that I know of which would allow negotiating prices. So when a moderator on, say, the crazy AVS Forum sees a Canadian posting prices, he or she can safely gloss over the post because MSRP=STREET up here… thanks to US companies, ironically.

However, having followed a thread on the said forum since summer and seeing the red push – which means these are still sets from the first batch, if we’re to believe one of the earlier posts about Sharp doing better QA now – and seeing occasional horizontal artifacting, I am held back from running back to the store and picking one up.