This is an old article from 2006, several of the links in this article may no longer be functional.
Initial Impressions
Well, the obvious first impression is “wow”. The TV is simply huge. The Box is comes in weighs in at just over 200lbs, while the TV itself comes in around 175. It comes with a small set of speakers attacked to the bottom, but those are easily removed to bring the weight of just the TV itself (no stand, no speakers) to 140lbs. From Sharp’s “Detailed Specs“, you can see that the TV itself is roughly 62″x36″x6”, only 6 inches deep, making it ideal for wall mounting.
For inputs you have 1 DVI-I, 1 HDMI, 2 1394’s, 2 HD component (Y/Pr/Pb), 1 S-Video, and 3 Composite Video RCA. It also supports Cablecard and ATSC/NTSC over the air. It boasts a viewing angle of 170-degrees, which we’ve tested and is true. As far as other features, it has an integrated TV Guide function and alot of other nice features, but for those of us interested in the pure Hi-Def capabilities of the TV they aren’t terribly relevant.
First Setup: Windows PC
Well, being that the LCD has a native resolution of 1920×1080 and offers a DVI input, our first tests were in simply hooking a computer up to the TV via DVI. A basic DVI cable from our NVidia QuadroFX 4500 to the back of the DVI got us working at first, but problems quickly arose.
At first our computer would only broadcast at 1024×768. We tried several modes but the NVidia driver wouldn’t raise the physical resolution above that, simply slip into a virtual scrolling desktop mode. After digging around, we finally found the TV had a menu option to select a resolution. The TV, it seems, is unable to automatically switch resolutions, making it difficult to use as a computer monitor. Even with this discovery, tho, we were unable to get the TV to run at anything over 1280×1024.
The DVI-I input on the screen is (artificially) caps out at 1280×1024. Anything higher than that gives you the “Incompatible Signal” error on the screen. None of these resolutions fill the 65″ of the screen either, unless you enable one of the stretching modes. The best we got was to run 1280×720 (WXGA) and enable stretching. That preserved the aspect ratio, but the display was rather “blocky”. You can refer to the LC-65D90U Operation Manual (PDF) on page 83 for a full list of supported modes via DVI-I.
Second Attempts: DVD-to-HDMI Cables
The next idea was to use the HDMI input. Here is the next shortcoming of this TV: Only a single HDMI input. With the advent of HiDef on everything from DVD players to next-generation consoles, HDMI + HDCP has become the standard for Hi-Def signals. Having merely a single HDMI input on the TV means you’ll have to invest in an external HDMI Switcher or switch devices to the Component inputs.
Anyway, we got a DVI-to-HDMI cable and used that to connect the computer up to the HDMI input on the TV. Viola, 720p and 1080i came up without any trouble. 1080p was a different story. We fought with the options on the Nvidia card for hours before giving up. Was it the Cable, which (according to it’s packaging) was only rated for 1080i? Was it the Video Card? Was it a Hollywood-chip in the TV restricting it because it wasn’t HDCP’ed? We didn’t know. For the time being, we simply enjoyed 1080i and did some experiments.
In short, 1080i is workable. For showing movies it works pretty well. For showing slideshows of pictures, it works pretty well. For trying to use it as a large computer monitor, it doesn’t work so well at all. The interlacing effect makes trying to read moving text (such as dragging a window or scrolling a window) virtually impossible.
A Change of Direction: DVD Upscaling
Around this time we got sick of fighting with the 1080p aspect of the TV and instead turned our focus to the other input we expect to be using: DVDs. We have a Sony DVP-NS75H DVD/CD Player that support 720p/1080i upscaling over HDMI.
For the first pass, we simply connected the DVD player via RCA inputs to the TV and let it run. It did work, but seeing our Standard Definition videos blown up to 65″ with the TV’s internal upscaling (to the 1920×1080 LCD resolution) looked horrible. We had to enable the scaling to remove the blackbars on the sides of the screen, but each pixel of the video was blown up to quite visible proportions.
We then switched to using the HDMI cable so that the DVD player would do the upscaling. This was significantly better, but there were still quality problems. Simply running old NTSC video at that size (65″) means that pixels become blocks. The DVD player did fix alot of this with some internal processing of it up to 1080i, but it’s still “fuzzy” at best. For us, tho, this will be how we leave it connected.
Back to the PC
With some success under our belt with the DVD player, we returned to the issue of the PC. From Sharp’s LC-65D90U website:
Sad Conclusions
We tried different video cards, no luck. We tried laptops, no luck. We tried 1080p rated DVI-HDMI cables, no luck. We tried different Nvidia driver versions (from 81 on up to the new 93 betas), no luck. So how does one get this to work?
After a few phone calls to Sharp Technical Support, we found out you don’t. The LC-65D90U only supports 1080p via over-the-air Broadcast stations. All other inputs (HDMI, Component, etc) are limited to 1080i. This is mentioned nowhere on Sharp’s website (that I can find, if you find it let me know), and in fact just the opposite is stated in most places. Mentions of 1080p are all over the information for that TV but very little information in the User Manual talks about 1080i or 1080p (A search of the PDF only matches 1080 in 2 places). The only place I’ve found it so far is on Crutchfield’s website, a 3rd party vendor, who spells out the maximum resolutions in the fine print.
Conclusions
Not truly supporting 1080p significantly reduces the value of this TV. It reeks of manipulative marketing (“The first LCD TV to do 1080p! *cough cough* only on all those 1080p broadcast stations“), and relegates this TV back to the rest of the 1080i stock for the rest of us.
It is however, probably the largest LCD on the market and, aside from that, the picture quality and resolution are pretty good. Showing video from your PC in 1080i has some value, albeit far from what true 1080p would offer. Is it worth the $10,000 pricetag? Probably not, when a good projector would do the same thing at true 1080p. But if you’re looking for a no-burn-in physically-large display to hook up to a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/DVD player or to a computer for a presentation, this is an option. Again, the price is a big issue.
So what’s this TV good for? Evidently, viewing 1080p broadcast stations. But where is a 1080p broadcast station? All of the satellite & cable providers I know of top out at 1080i, and I believe most ATSC stuff is 720p or 1080i. It seems the 1080p capability is simply a marketing gimmick to promote the product, that really has no useful application they way they’ve implemented it.
Combine the faux 1080p with the single HDMI input, the inability of the DVI to automatically switch between video modes, the poor built-in upscaling, and the price tag, this TV really doesn’t seem to fit into any market. It’s not worth the price tag as a true-HD display, unacceptable as a computer monitor, unacceptable in any large home theater due to it’s lack of HDCP inputs, and the visuals are bad with non-highdef products.
If you have any other insights, then please contribute them here in the comments, or in the forum. As it stands right now, we’re preparing to return this for something that can truly display 1080p.
