Did we miss a press release? Did Sharp join with the producers of Lost to create a new mystery? Because when we watched the show on this 46-inch LCD, we noticed that everyone on the island had turned orange. Even the Others had the same ruddy hue, meaning it's probably some new Dharma plot...
...Or maybe just surprisingly bad color rendering on the LCD's part. We connected this HDTV to every source we could think of - antenna, Apple TV, cable, media center, even Sharp's own BD-HP20U Blu-ray player - and the results were uniformly sub-par. People looked orange, light areas looked grainy and splotchy while standard-def TV looked awful.
At least Sharp's model-of-simplicity onscreen menu system made it easy to tweak the image settings. Bumping down the sharpness (ironic, no?) reduced some of the grain, but we never could overcome the orangey skin-tones-not without sacrificing the fidelity of other colors. Passers-by thought we were being too hard on the set; it does produce fairly dazzling reds, blues, and greens, to say nothing of deep, dark blacks. But once you settle in, it's hard not to get distracted by some obvious image aberrations-like Kate, Jack, and Sawyer looking orange when you know they're feeling blue.