Great Bedroom HDTV

I got really lucky and managed to snag this set of Craigslist for a mere $350! The seller told me the DVD portion was broken, hence the low price. After I got home I took it apart and found that somebody had stuffed THREE DVDs into the player. Once I got those out, I had a perfectly working Sharp LCD/DVD combo TV.

The set itself has a pretty good picture with HD sources. We used regular rabbit-ear antenna for a while and it delivered a solid high-def picture. As for hooking it up to other sources, we now have Comcast HD box connected via DVI>HDMI and it looks great. My older CRT HD set still looks better, but if all you're doing is watching in the bedroom or a kid's room, it's more than enough.

I also took the liberty of hooking up my XBOX 360, via component, but that didn't look very good to me, it was pixelated and a bit washed out. HDMI is a different story though, when connected that way it was a much better picture. If you want to connect a computer, you're going to need to convert from VGA or DVI to HDMI. I've tried this and you can also get a nice picture with that method, though you're going to have to turn on the "overscan" feature if you want to fill the screen.

The built-in DVD quality is pretty nice, much better than hooking up a standard DVD player via component. Don't even bother with that if you have my same component issue as stated above.

Sound is good... but I wish it had the feature that makes commercials more quiet. Some shows are louder than others, and the volume is rather inconsistent.

The channel-changing lag is evident as some other reviewers point out, however if you use a cable box, or HD receiver this becomes a non-issue. I actually didn't find it to be that big of a deal, but I know some folks need to hop channels quickly.

All in all, this is a great starter LCD/HD set. I recommend it for bedroom or a kid's room, but definitely not as the center of a home-theater setup.