Omar:
#sharp_aquos_lc_60e88un Alright, another chapter my story with this TV.
I bought it!
Picked it up yesterday from Futureshop. Unfortunately, and quite annoyingly, the price they had it in the store was $1999 instead of $2999, meaning the price match was only $20. However, they are running a promotion where if you use a Futureshop credit card you get $150 any bill over $150. So I was able to use that deal.
End result with everything everything, including delivery, tax, etc etc is $1980.
This is by far the most I've ever spent on a TV. But hey, I spend a lot of time in front of it, so why not splurge.
Now as for the TV itself.
Wow. WOW. WOOOOW!This is by far the best TV I've ever laid eyes upon. It is absolutely INSANE. And the best part about it is that the video processing has a very real and direct improvement on the picture quality. This isn't just displaying the source in an accurate way, this TV is taking a pretty spotty source of content and turning into something that looks 10 times as good.
This is particularly important to me since I have a lot of digital media content, and despite being HD often contains issues like compression artifacts and not very smooth playback. The video processing on this set makes these videos look like master Blu-Ray copies. It's honestly ridiculous.
And when you couple that with the amazing 10th generation 10-bit AQOUS panel that has great color accuracy, dark blacks, and overall great response time and you have yourself a winning combination.
This is pretty much the ultimate LCD. It's got all of the top of the line technology without any of the superfluous extras that cost a lot but don't get you anything (e.g. Internet connectivity). I've only seen the top of the line Kuro plasmas and LED tvs in the stores, which I know is a poor place to judge, but I'd argue this TV is on par with them.
The one thing is that all the video processing does introduce noticeable lag. This can be overcome in 2 ways: 1) have the audio run through the TV to your receiver, and 2) put the TV in game mode.
What I'm going to do is while gaming, run the TV in "game mode" since that eliminates the lag and the extra processing isn't really necessary when playing games. And with watching movies on my HTPC, the sound will get synced up so the lag isn't an issue and I get all the benefits of the video processing.
Overall I'm much much happier with this set than I thought I'd be. It has only been one day, so I'll for sure be updating my thoughts as time goes on. But I mean, it looks this good and I haven't done any calibrations yet!
Nov 24, 10