Jesse Skeen
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Apr 24, 1999
- Messages
- 5,038
This is a video I shot (sorry I can't figure out how to embed it here) displaying an annoying "feature" on my Sharp TV- as you can see, the backlight dims whenever the picture goes black or close to it. It gets really annoying during dark scenes in movies or credit sequences when text fades up and then down on a black background, as well as on the computer in a case like this (I had watched an on-line video that went to a black screen when it finished.)
For almost TWO YEARS I have been trying to get Sharp to come up with a way to defeat this, but their "customer service" people are so dense that they don't even seem to understand what I'm talking about! I've posted this video and forwarded it to them in a last attempt to get them to address this- if nothing comes of it, then I'll buy another company's TV when it comes time to upgrade this one. I chose Sharp mainly because it had both active 3D and is also fully compatible with PAL (European system) video with no conversion needed, but this auto-dimming has really gotten on my nerves. (It happens with anything connected via HDMI, Component or standard Video inputs, as well as on over-the-air TV in the rare instances those go to black. It does NOT do it when watching Netflix or Vudu through the TV's built-in apps for those.)
Strangely I've seen very few complaints from others about this. It seems to be getting more common, as before this I had a Vizio that had a setting to COMPLETELY shut off the backlight in cases like this, luckily that one was able to be disabled (but I had several more unbelievable problems with that TV that caused me to dump it and get this one.) I know the 'soap-opera effect' has been discussed a lot, where the TV processed filmed material to make it look more like video with a higher frame-rate. That's actually a bit hard to defeat on this TV as well, as the "Game" mode is the only picture mode that totally eliminates that- on all other picture modes, even if you have all the 'motion enhancement' settings turned off, there's still a bit of frame interpolation going on.
So has anyone else experienced this unwanted auto-dimming 'feature'?