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At just £430 in shops – or as little as £300 if you dig about online – you don’t have to look very hard for the potential appeal of the Sharp LC-32DH510E.

It sits towards the bottom of Sharp’s current output, a large step below the flagship, LED-lit and Quattron-driven LE821/LE811 ranges.

With its normal CCFL backlight, the LC32DH510E also sits underneath the LED-powered 32LE320E, while its HD ready resolution puts it beneath the 1080p LC-32FH510E in the overall pecking order.

The price-busting ethic is all too apparent in the TV’s design. Viewed straight on, from distance, it doesn’t look too bad, with its glossy black finish and reasonably attractive little arc of grey in the middle of the bottom edge. However, get up close and the finish starts to look and feel plasticky and lightweight.

The backside, meanwhile, sticks out a mile and suffers from bits bulging out all over the place in seemingly random fashion.

While the 32DH510E isn’t going to win any design awards, it does have one or two surprising features up its sleeve.

The 32DH510E’s features appear to be a rather eccentric mix at first glance, but the longer you live with them, the more sense they make.

To start with the bad news, though, the set is painfully short of picture fine-tuning tools. The menu just offers a tint adjustment, noise reduction options, a colour temperature adjustment, a backlight adjustment, a small selection of predictable picture presets, and bog-standard contrast, colour, brightness and sharpness options.

You might not expect many sophisticated tweaking options on a budget TV, but the extreme flexibility offered by some of Toshiba’s recent budget offerings show you what’s possible.

The 32DH510E doesn’t have much to say for itself in terms of picture processing, either. In fact, there really doesn’t seem to be anything of note beyond the simple work entailed in converting standard-definition material to the screen’s HD Ready resolution.

Another disappointment is the 32DH510E’s lack of a Freeview HD tuner, although standard-def terrestrial reception is all you might reasonably expect at this price.

Good EPG

Things start to look up a little with the electronic programme guide. This is well presented, with clean text and a solid – if uninspiring – amount of information presented onscreen at once.

It’s great, too, that the picture from the programme you were watching when you pressed the EPG button continues to play in the top left corner. The only disappointment is that you can only set viewing reminders from the guide, rather than selecting programmes to record.

Record? That’s right. For in a move we really didn’t expect from such a cheap TV, the 32DH510E carries timeshifting via USB. In other words, if you stick a storage drive (minimum 1GB) into the TV’s USB port, the set can record the programme you’re watching to it.

This function takes two forms: straightforward pausing of live TV that starts when you press the relevant button on the remote, or an ‘always’ mode that continually records the channel you’re watching, dumping the recording and starting again when you switch channel and just deleting the oldest parts of recordings on the fly when you hit the capacity of your USB drive.

This system works rather well, accepting the majority of USB drives we tried it with and recording programmes immaculately. This result is really no surprise, since the recording system simply stores the direct digital bitstream carrying the channel data, so there’s not really any room for quality to be lost.

USB capability

The last surprising feature of the 32DH510E is also connected with its USB port. For it can play a startlingly wide variety of multimedia files: JPEG, BMP and PNG photo files; MP3, AAC, PCM (.WAV) audio files; and most unexpectedly of all, MPEG 1/2/4, H.264, DivX and XviD video files.

Connections-wise, tthere are a couple of Scarts (one RGB), a component video input, a digital audio output, a headphone jack, a composite video input and two HDMIs. The latter is a bit disappointing, perhaps, but is in line with many other sets at this sort of price. More frustrating is the absence of a D-Sub VGA port

Let’s now go back to the point we made at the start of this section, that the 32DH510E’s slightly odd mix of features actually makes sense in the end. For given its low price, it could very well find itself as a second-room TV rather than a main living room TV.

And in that context, it appears eminently sensible to focus on practical multimedia capability and an easy recording system ahead of stuff like an HD tuner and endless picture processing/tweaks.

Our first experience of using the 32DH510E is, of course, its remote control. First impressions of this are mixed, as a rather crowded look and cheapo finish are offset by a comfortable and attractive, rounded-off shape and a bold black and white colour scheme.

Extended use reveals it to be an average tool that’s good when it comes to navigating the onscreen menus, but less intuitive and easy to learn when it comes to such things as selecting different AV inputs, calling up the EPG and using teletext.

The TV goes into auto install mode when you first switch it on and you’ll be surprised by how attractively presented and straightforward this process is. It only really lets you set up language, auto-tuning and whether you want to run it in shop or home mode, but it certainly sets an inviting early tone.

This continues, even arguably improving, when you head into the proper onscreen menus. They’re also bright, colourful and clean, and feature a nifty circle of icons that cycle around when you push left and right on the remote, with each icon bringing up a different list of options.

It doesn’t harm the 32DH510E’s ease of use that there aren’t that many features in the onscreen menus to have to find your way around.

The 32DH510′s multimedia features offer the only potential point of confusion, but they’re mostly well handled. The only daft thing is the random button used to activate the USB recording feature, making us think that Sharp hasn’t bothered to come up with a dedicated remote control for the 32DH510E, instead merely adapting a more generic model.

Bright and breezy daytime HD broadcasts look refreshingly natural. The lack of any heavy-duty processing gives them a pleasing, almost CRT-like simplicity, although longer viewing reveals a few issues that some healthy processing might have been able to improve.

The screen also pumps out more brightness than many affordable 32in/26in CCFL LCD TVs, which gives the impression during predominantly light, colourful sequences that the picture is pretty dynamic.

High-def material looks sharper and more textured than you might expect from a non-1080p TV, revealing all those tell-tale little bits and bobs like skin pores and the weave in clothing. Or at least this is the case if you turn off the set’s noise reduction tool.

Shifting from HD studio and sports footage to Blu-rays in some ways makes us feel even better disposed towards the 32DH510E. The sharpness seems even more defined, despite the set having to downscale full HD feeds to its 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution; pictures still look punchy and detailed, colours look bright and motion is handled well without any obvious processing to help it out.

Black level

However, Blu-rays also allow us to home in on a couple of notable shortcomings. The set’s black level response, for instance, is pretty underwhelming, in that dark parts of the picture look rather grey and lifeless, even if you ramp down the TV’s backlight setting.

Having spotted this, we also couldn’t resist shifting our viewing position to the TV’s side, and low and behold, the familiar (with LCD TVs) fairly dramatic loss in contrast and colour soon materialised.

The other problem concerns colours. For despite the picture being quite good at pushing brightness, hue can look unconvincingly anaemic.

A lesser but still noteworthy issue during some Blu-rays is that the 32DH510E’s pictures are a touch noisy. It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of this, but one contributing factor seems to be that the way the screen over-brightens dark parts of the picture is causing it to emphasise digital noise that would normally be lost in darkness.

Oddly, for a screen with a slightly lower native resolution than most TVs we see, the 32DH510E’s standard def performance is one of the more disappointing we’ve seen for a while. Noise levels are quite high, and there’s noticeably more motion blur on show – something we guess was probably inevitable given the screen’s lack of such processing options as 100Hz.

This can result in standard definition pictures also looking slightly softer than they might, and flesh tones looking a bit waxy and the overall palette seems even weedier.

The set’s big bottom does not, sadly, help the audio performance. Bass is just as lacking as it is on more slender flatscreens, the mid-range is rather thin and cramped and treble tones are harsh.

It’s not bad, as such, for a 32in set, it’s just disappointingly average.

Value

We’d hoped that the 32DH510E’s reasonably affordable price might be the first step towards it being a real bargain.

But by the time you’ve taken the average looks, inconsistent pictures and par-for-the-course sound into account, the price seems merely fair, rather than remarkable.

With Sharp having proved that it’s still got innovation in its heart with its Quattron TV range earlier this year, we had high hopes for the brand’s 32DH510E, despite it residing in the lower reaches of the brand’s latest TV range.

It doesn’t get off to the best of starts thanks to its rather old-school and cheap design, but it’s passably well connected and the onscreen menus are exceptionally engaging.

We applaud Sharp, too, for building USB video recording and expansive USB multimedia playback into a relatively affordable TV (an ideal feature for the second-room market).

However, while pictures occasionally look attractive and natural with the right sort of bright, colourful, HD material, they’re rather patchy overall, thanks to sporadic noise, colour and motion-handling problems, while sound is no better than average at best

We liked:

The set is reasonably affordable for what’s on offer, and the USB recording is a great feature that works well once you’ve learned the rather obscure button you need to press to start recording!

The file flexibility of the USB playback feature is good, meanwhile, and pictures look natural and unprocessed; brightness levels are high; and HD pictures can look very sharp and detailed.

We disliked:

The set’s build quality is unimpressive, with one of the biggest and ugliest back ends you’ll ever see. We wouldn’t have minded a third HDMI either and there’s no D-Sub PC jack.

On the picture side, with precious few adjustments on offer to help us out we were left unable to tackle a few inconsistencies, such as washed out and sometimes off-key colours, black level shortcomings, and a below-par standard def performance.

Verdict:

If you’re in the market for a second room TV that goes big on multimedia convenience and enables you to record video without needing an external box, then the 32DH510E is almost uniquely well qualified to do the job.

However, don’t expect these convenience features to be accompanied by any state-of-the-art performance. In fact, while pictures have their moments, there are times when they feel quite dated in the colour and motion departments, especially with standard definition sources. And Sharp has provided next to no tools for you to attempt to improve things.

Its sound is absolutely as average as that of most other budget 32in TVs in town too. In other words, it’s a TV that seems to have chosen practicality over performance a little too one-sidedly for comfort.

The 32DH510E might have counted as a decent effort from a B-list brand, but classes as something of a disappointment from a top-flight manufacturer.

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