Sharp GM6245K (43GM6245K) review

Much as we love getting our teeth into the latest and greatest hunks of glorious high-end TV technology, it’s also a great day at What Hi-Fi? towers when we happen upon a massive TV bargain.

Happily we’re having one of those days right now, thanks to Sharp’s 43GM6245K: a 43-inch TV that somehow manages to combine both TiVo and Freely smart systems with good picture and sound quality for less than £250.

Price

The 43-inch GM6245K’s price in the UK (the only territory where it’s available) is its single most eye-catching feature. Just £249 for a 43-inch TV is seriously cheap under any circumstances, so by the time you add to the bargain one of the most user-friendly smart services around and surprisingly good picture and sound performance, the value appeal becomes pretty much off the charts.

That’s not to say there isn’t any competition out there at the same sort of price. Bush’s 50UT24SB delivers a decent 50-inch picture and TiVo smarts for just £270, for instance, while there are also TVs out there from multiple brands sporting Roku smart systems that also deliver 43- and 50-inch screen sizes for less than £300. The 43GM6245K, though, ultimately has more going for it than any of its similarly cut-price peers.

Design

Looked at from a typical viewing distance, the GM6245K is pretty easy on the eye for such a cut-price TV.

The grey finish of the slightly wider bottom edge contrasts neatly with the slender black used for the rest of the bezel, and Sharp has managed to make a design feature of its logos, with the words Aquos and Harman Kardon (more on this one later) appearing very stylishly in the bottom left and right corners of the screen respectively. The two blade-style feet that Sharp’s TV sits on boast a pleasingly shiny finish, too, while at the same time presenting such a slender profile when the screen’s viewed head-on that you barely notice them.

The surface delights do hide a couple of classic giveaways of the GM6245K’s ultra-affordable nature, though. Namely, that it’s really quite chunky around the back by modern TV standards, while its exceptionally lightweight chassis reveals that it’s made almost entirely from pretty low-grade plastic.

While these build issues raise concerns about the quality of what might be going on inside the set, though, they’re not really obvious to the naked eye once the TV has been set in place.

Features

Despite how cheap it is, the Sharp 43GM6245K is much more than just a 4K 43-inch screen. It uses a VA type of LCD panel, lit directly from behind, for starters – a combination that typically delivers better contrast than the IPS and/or edge-lit alternatives commonly used in the budget TV world.

Sharp actually claims a huge dynamic contrast ratio for its TV of 1,000,000:1 – an on-paper figure that you can very much expect not to see with real world content, but which does at least suggest that the GM6245K’s light output can adjust to changes in source content to a greater extent than you would expect to find at the this price point.

Colours are delivered by a Quantum Dot system that is also not something you could normally expect to find on a sub-£250 43-inch TV – though it’s worth saying that other budget TVs that use Quantum Dots don’t always make a success of it, seemingly compromising other aspects of their performance in their eagerness to embrace the expanded colour range and brightness available.

The GM6245K’s panel only supports refresh rates up to 60Hz, so there’s no support for the 4K/120Hz gaming feeds now delivered by the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X or premium PC graphics cards. There’s some solace for gamers, though, in that Sharp’s TV does carry a dedicated Game picture preset that reduces input lag to just 15ms.

There’s also support with both gaming and video sources for high dynamic range formats that extends beyond the basic HDR10 and HLG platforms to include the premium Dolby Vision system. This supplies compatible TVs with extra scene-by-scene image data to help them deliver more accurate and dynamic-looking results.

The GM6245K’s connections include three HDMI ports (one capable of passing Dolby Atmos sound on to soundbars or AVRs using HDMI’s eARC technology); two USB ports; a 3.5mm headphone jack/audio line out; an optical digital audio output, and mini composite video and audio inputs. This adds up to a slightly more comprehensive roster of connections than you might necessarily expect to get on a £249 43-inch TV.

The unexpected surprises extend, too, to the GM6245K’s audio system, with the Harman Kardon logo at the bottom right of its screen frame showing that Sharp has promisingly worked with the respected third-party audio brand in developing this TV’s 2 x 12W speaker system.

Last but certainly not least on the GM6245K’s feature list is support for both the TiVo and Freely smart TV systems. TiVo provides an admirably straightforward and engaging interface for most of the TV’s streaming apps, which include such big hitters as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and YouTube. It also carries arguably the most comprehensive and easy-to-use content searching/finding service in the TV world, built on TiVo’s quarter of a century of working on intelligent content recommendation experiences. This now incorporates an impressively flexible and helpful voice recognition system – not bad for a sub-£250 43-inch TV.

The only issue with TiVo’s smart platform at the time of writing is that it does not provide direct access to the Apple TV+, Discovery+ or Paramount+ streaming services. There is a workaround, though, in that they are all now available via the Amazon Prime Video app.

Freely, if you’re not familiar with it, is a relatively new (launched in 2024) streaming service backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 that carries a claimed 70,000+ hours of on-demand content but also, more importantly, lets you live-stream many of the channels carried on the Freeview HD broadcast platform, potentially removing the need to have an aerial installed on your home.

Picture

As with its features, the 43-inch GM6245K’s picture quality is far better than we would have expected from such a cheap TV.

Its contrast, for instance, while predictably not achieving anything like 1,000,000:1 levels of exuberance with real-world images, manages to deliver simultaneously both richer, deeper, more neutral-looking blacks and more brightness – especially with full-screen bright HDR clips – than you’d normally get at this price level.

The black bars above and below wide aspect ratio films and TV shows look a bit greyer than we’d ideally see, perhaps, but this greyness is less noticeable in the main image area. Dark scenes become greyer-looking if you have to watch the GM6245K from an angle, too – though this is a limitation common to the vast majority of VA-type LCD TVs. And, actually, the angle you can get to before the drop in contrast becomes really ugly is a bit wider here than we usually find with budget TVs.

The level of greyness hanging over dark scenes is limited enough to stop them looking flat or unconvincing, especially as Sharp’s set manages to hold on to impressive amounts of subtle detailing in even the darkest picture corners. There are also no obvious distracting instabilities caused by the TV’s dynamic contrast tools, despite the TV managing to deliver (especially with Dolby Vision sources) surprisingly punchy and backlight blooming-free highlights even when they appear against mostly dark backdrops.

The GM6245K’s pictures are impressively sharp for its price, too. Native 4K sources actually look 4K despite the compact (by today’s standards) size of the 43-inch screen, helped by some good colour tone definition in bright scenes and less interference from judder and motion blur than budget TVs usually manage. That’s not to say there’s absolutely no resolution loss during camera pans or over fast-moving objects, but the occasions where you might spot a little softness creeping into an action-packed scene are rare enough to feel like surprises rather than a constant distraction. And there’s certainly no sign of the aggressive judder with 24fps films or the sort of smearing effect over fast-moving objects that so many similarly affordable TVs seem to produce. And that’s despite the GM6245K not having any dedicated motion processing to help counter potential motion issues.

We mentioned that colours in bright scenes are delivered by the 43GM6245K with good subtlety for a budget TV, and this is backed up by precious little sign of the sort of banding/striping issues that some HDR TVs – even some much more expensive models, in fact – can suffer with when trying to show subtle colour blends. Skin tones, too, look unusually natural and nuanced, avoiding the jaundiced or plasticky finish often seen with budget and even mid-range TVs.

This doesn’t mean colours are perfect. They’re not the most vibrant we’ve seen, despite the Quantum Dot influence, and during dark scenes colours sometimes start to exhibit clumping, as the TV struggles to deliver subtle tonal differences as effectively as it does during bright scenes. A faint pinkish tone occasionally creeps into the picture too, but this is rare and sufficiently subtle when it occurs that many viewers may well never even notice it.

While these issues might be a reason to spend a chunk more cash on stepping up to a good mid-range TV, though, they’re all pretty puny complaints by the standards of the 43GM6245K’s price point.

Sound

The Harman Kardon-designed audio of the GM6245K incorporates a two-way speaker system, with separate bass/mid-range and treble drivers designed to deliver a cleaner, clearer sound. For the most part, it works pretty well.

For instance, the TV can get louder than most budget TVs without succumbing to distortions or harshness. Dialogue is delivered with enough power and clarity to always remain totally intelligible, yet despite some high-pitched voices sounding slightly sibilant, speech in films and TV shows typically doesn’t sound too bright or detached from the rest of the mix. Voices also benefit from a mild vertical lift, so that they seem to be coming from the onscreen action rather than from the speakers built into the screen’s bottom edge.

The GM6245K is able to project sound a likeable distance beyond the physical confines of its bodywork too, enabling it to get more benefit from its ability to play Dolby Atmos soundtracks than you might expect from a two-channel speaker system. Certainly, there’s enough about its staging to create an effective sense of ambient sound effects existing somewhere beyond the more specific effects at the heart of an Atmos mix. This also helps the sound appear cleaner.

Some treble sounds can become rather shrill, though, and a general lack of bass can leave big movie moments feeling a little weightless and thin. Though the GM6245K does at least acknowledge its bass limitations rather than trying so hard to find low frequencies it can’t sensibly support that it forces its speakers into distortions or dropouts.

An odd quirk of the GM6245K’s sound finds it emitting a nasty raspberry sound whenever you skip tracks on a Blu-ray disc. While we felt a bit affronted by this problem while skipping to and between favourite test scenes for this review, though, it obviously isn’t something that will often trouble anyone in regular viewing conditions.

All in all, while inevitably not perfect, the 43-inch GM6245K’s sound once again performs better than we’d expect from such a cheap TV.

Verdict

Is the Sharp 43GM6245K good enough to give good mid-range or premium TVs sleepless nights? Nope, not really. Is it good enough, though, to humble the vast majority of other similarly ultra-affordable TVs out there? You bet your bottom £249 it is.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 5

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