After adjustments that included turning down the LCD's backlight, setting color temp to Low, and turning on the Active Contrast, the grayscale tracked reasonably close to the industry-standard 6,500-K benchmark (see "Test Bench"). Good thing, since this Sharp, like last year's models, doesn't lend itself easily to ISF-type grayscale calibration. On the other hand, the user menu does include Sharp's Color Management System (CMS), which lets you adjust saturation and hue of all six of the primary and secondary colors, a great feature for achieving overall color balance.

Performance I started critical viewing by cruising the HD channels on our cable box - and was stopped cold by the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The first thing that struck me was the nearly inky quality of the black skin-tight tennis shirt and skirt worn by Venus Williams in her match against Alona Bondarenko. It popped solidly against the green-and-blue court markings, but on close-ups, every detail and ripple in the shiny fabric was evident. Meanwhile, Bondarenko's tennis whites were crisp and natural, with even the white stitching laid bare by the Sharp's 1080p display. Colorful banks of red, yellow, and green flowers at the back of the court vibrantly leaped off the screen.

Moving on to a Discovery HD episode of The Desert Speaks, I found scenes from the Galapagos Islands mostly looking natural. But some long shots of the rugged brown terrain took on the somewhat busy quality that I sometimes see in LCDs when the processing can't handle a noisy or heavily compressed signal. Interestingly, the set's digital noise reduction (in its low setting) did a decent job of cleaning up noisy 480i content on DVDs and standard-def broadcasts, though these looked a little softer than I've seen on some other HDTVs. But the NR had no discernible effect on artifacts in poor HD broadcasts.

That wasn't an issue at all when I spun the Blu-ray Disc of the movie Layer Cake, a tense gangster thriller about a cocaine dealer (played by Daniel Craig) whose retirement plans go astray when he gets an offer he (literally) can't refuse. The special-effects opening sequence under Craig's narration looked spectacular as the camera transitioned from one varied scene to another, showing at times the bright red-and-blue sign-age of a tattoo parlor in Amsterdam and the hot-red dress worn by a rival dealer's girlfriend, or the white-backlit shelves behind Craig as he strolls through a stylized faux pharmacy. In a dark scene at Craig's safe house, I could easily make out details in the shadows behind him and his technician as they worked cutting drugs. Later, the TV clearly revealed subtle differences in the flesh tones of his assembled gang, even making evident the stubble on the face and bald head of his dark-skinned enforcer Morty.

Bottom Line With this new LCD, Sharp has gussied up the outside while retaining the best elements from last year's LC-52D62U, including superb blacks and shadow rendition. Notably, our sample exhibited none of the serious picture-uniformity issues we encountered with that model, nor did it suffer the egregious and unfixable grayscale of the more upscale LC-52D92U (both reviews are at soundandvisionmag.com). I'll warn you that at least one recent report suggests this new model was still showing the banding issues of the 52D62U, but our unit was excellent among LCDs in that regard. Then there's the question of cost: Its $3,800 list is awfully high, and you'll have to shop around to find a deal near $3,000 or less. But it's worth the bother. The sleek and sexy Aquos LC-52D64U deserves a good, long look.

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