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Reviews and guides for all of the best all-in-one home cinema systems in the UK |
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Sharp HT-X1H ReviewThe Sharp HT-X1H is a fully featured, beautiful looking all-in-one home cinema system, offered at an incredible price tag. Comprising of all of the bits you'll need to set up your own home cinema experience, it includes a DVD player, a seperate amplifier unit, an FM radio tuner and a set of 5.1 speakers for full DTS / Dolby surround sound. It also comes packed with a large number of nifty added-value features, such as the ability to play MP3 and WMA CDs, audio CD support, JPEG picture support to slideshow your photos, and composite video compatibility. All of this is enclosed in a box that is good enough to make you want to weap - slim, stylish and sexy: with its cylindrical speaker design, slot loading CD bay and bright, colourful LCD display the Sharp HT-X1H is certainly not an ugly beast. But does it perform? On the surface it certainly seems to. It supports the right audio decoding formats, with decoders for Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1 and even Prologic II to make your VCRs sound nice. Video output is by RGB SCART, so the picture quality from the DVD should be crystal clear. There's an S-Video input for routing your Playstation or PC through to your big screen, and it provides a phono input so you can even put the sound out through the full speaker set too, or route your MP3 player through it. All wonderful on paper. But unfortunately that's pretty much where the joy ends. This machine, despite all of its trimmings, is a budget system. For a start, there is no progressive scan feature, which would make the picture quality clearer and sharper and is built in to a large number of devices these days. More importantly though, the images you do get from the Sharp HT-X1H are bleached, overly bright and uncomfortably unnatural, and the artifacts are more obvious than with other more expensive players. This is a major flaw - if you're going to dish out on a home-cinema system to compliment your beautiful new TV, you're going to want to make the most of your TV's quality, and this unit will not do that. It would be more comfortable on a smaller CRT. So what about audio? The Sharp HT-X1H's audio quality almost saves the day - its clear, loud, deep and well balanced. Although lacking a little in the crispness, the effects are hardly noticeable and all of the films we tested it on were a joy to listen too - clear and vibrant. The sound is also very configurable for its price tag, with all of the standard knobs and dials to play with. 
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Conclusion The Sharp HT-X1H succeeds on all of the points that will get it into the average living room and impress the neighbours, and all at a budget price. Unfortunately it fails on the bits that matter most to film buffs - video quality. If you've got an average size monitor and are looking for a beautiful compliment to your living room furniture, reasonable performance and great sound, look no further. If you're wanting something to make the most of your DVD collection and your big screen TV, maybe you have to go a little more expensive. Resources |