Looking over the judges' comments regarding this TV's image quality, I see "contrasty," "washed out," "blotchy," "grainy," "dreadful," and "ugly." Several times I wrote the term "oil painting" to describe the visual effect--and not as a compliment. Add to those shortcomings a performance score of Fair, and it's easy to see why the Sharp LC-46D64U finished dead last in our tests of nine recent 46- and 47-inch HDTVs.

The set's audio quality wasn't bad. We noted clean sound without noise or distortion, though the LC-46D64U lacks the forcefulness of a truly excellent TV sound system.

The LC-46D64U has some nice touches, such as Sharp's Aquos Link Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) support that allows it to control and be controlled by other Sharp devices. An option called Optical Picture Control automatically adjusts the TV's brightness to match the room's ambient light level, though that feature did not perform spectacularly well. When its settings are properly adjusted, the TV will shut itself off after 15 minutes of receiving no signal or after three hours of detecting no user interaction--a power-saving feature that might help prevent image retention, too. The set's Audio Only option lets you arrange to use the TV's sound without switching on its LCD, in case you want to use your DVD player to listen to CDs (not a bad idea considering the LC-46D64U's image quality).

The Sharp is reasonably easy to use, but not exceptionally so. The text displayed in the on-screen menus is small but readable, and the menus themselves looked good. Unlike other sets' menus, the Sharp's main menu doesn't disappear when you adjust a video setting. Fortunately, that's not too much of a problem, since the menu doesn't take up much of the screen. The nicely shaped remote becomes backlit at the touch of a button, but some important controls (including menu and mute) have annoyingly small buttons--and while these buttons light up, the labels that identify them don't.

The trilingual manual (66 pages of English) is helpful, despite a text-heavy design. It's printed on a grayish paper that doesn't do much for its readability, but you can always download the PDF version from Sharp's Web site.

Sharp's LC-46D64U gets some of the little things right. But it gets the most important element of all--image quality--badly wrong.