Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U LCD HDTV Review - Performance: Motion

The LC-46D64U did not impress us when it came to looking at moving images. We found that moving objects on the screen had a slightly jerky feel, especially compared to the newer generation of displays. Although it did a good job of processing videos with 3:2 pulldown, it was unable to display a 24 frames per second image.

Motion Smoothness (5.75)
Smooth movement in video is vital to getting the look and feel of a movie or TV show right; if the movement is either jerky or smeary, it can ruin the image. The Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U veered more towards the smeary side of things; we found that fast-moving objects left a smeary trail behind them in the default mode. Enabling the Fine Motion mode that this display offers helped to some degree; it made motion sharper and better defined. But the motion just did not look as smooth as it did on other models that offer 120Hz refresh rate; there was a definite improvement with the newer models that include it.

Motion Artifacting (6.0)
Many video processing modes make the motion sharper, but mess up the image in other ways, either blurring the image or otherwise messing it up. We didn't see any evidence of that with the Fine Motion mode, though; it did not seem to add any problems to the video, and it definitely made the video look better.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps (5.0)
Some TV shows and all movies are shot at 24 frames per second, then converted to the 29.97 frames per second of video through a process called telecine. Most modern TVs can detect this and try and restore the 24 frames per second look of the image through a process called a 3:2 pulldown. The Sharp did an excellent job of this; with the Film Mode enabled for our test sequence that we use to try this out, we found that the video had a clean, smooth look that definitely captured the feel of film. The LC-46D64U was less successful at displaying a true 24 frames per second video source, though; when we tried this with a Blu-ray disc playing on a PS3, the Sharp was unable to display the image.