The Perfect Vision

Sharp XV-Z20000 Calibration Notes and Technical Ratings

Calibration Notes | Technical Ratings

Calibration Notes

Sharp could not supply the service-menu access code in time for this review, so I was unable to perform a full grayscale calibration. However, the gamma controls offer a way to do it--sort of. There are red, green, and blue controls for overall gamma, white detail, and black detail; adjusting the overall and white-detail RGB controls got much closer to D65 than selecting a color temperature of 6500 alone. However, the black-detail RGB gamma controls did nothing, they were completely ineffective. The CMS (color management system) allowed me to bring the primaries and secondaries much closer to correct than they were out of the box. Black level was astoundingly low at Medium iris setting, but peak white level was pretty low in this case as well. Opening the iris to its High Brightness setting increased peak white nicely (19.95fL vs. 10.75fL), but it also increased black level--not to an objectionable degree (0.011fL vs. 0.003fL), but the peak contrast ratio was significantly lower in this case. In a completely darkened room on a relatively small screen, I chose lower black level and higher peak contrast ratio over peak white level. Wide variation in ANSI white measurements indicated poor white uniformity. Resolution via HDMI was excellent, but component exhibited some strange behavior: the highest frequency 1080i burst looked much like the 2 on/2 off burst, and all patterns looked quite a bit softer than HDMI.

Technical Ratings

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