Sharp HJ6725K (4T-C50HJ6725KB) review

The most defining characteristic of Sharp’s latest Roku TV is its price.

£350 (and we have seen it available for even less) is practically peanuts for any 50-inch TV, never mind one which, as in this Sharp’s case, boasts both a comprehensive smart system and a Quantum Dot colour system.

With more than a few other ultra-budget QLED TVs failing to make their on-paper colour advantage count, though, can the HJ6725K buck the trend?

Price

The HJ6725K’s £350 price is so key to its identity that we’ve pretty much covered it already.

It’s a UK-only model, and the 50-inch model we’re testing is the only size in which it’s available. Sharp does sell 55- and 43-inch Roku TVs with slightly different designs and specifications, but this 50-inch set is the only one with the HJ6725 designation.

Similarly sized smart TV rivals for the same sort of money aren’t particularly numerous, but they do exist. While the Sky Glass Air isn’t available in 50 inches, opting instead for 43- or 55-inch versions, it’s hugely affordable given the picture quality and integrated streamed Sky TV service it carries – especially if you buy it with monthly payments through your Sky subscription.

Samsung’s U8000H range, the successor to the brand’s impressive U8000Fs, also includes a 50-inch model that also costs £299, but we’ve not yet had the opportunity to test it.

Design

Handling the HJ6725K while attaching it to its simple pair of included desktop feet reveals it to be unsurprisingly pretty lightweight in its build quality. You hardly need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime to tuck this under your arm and cart it anywhere in your home where you care to use it.

Once you’ve set Sharp’s TV down and stepped back, though, its finish is glossy enough to disguise the plasticky bodywork underneath.

Its screen frame is unusually narrow for a budget TV, too, and parts of its rear, at least, are thinner than most budget TVs. There is a chunkier part of the rear where the TV’s connections, speakers and processors live, but while this might make the TV look slightly awkward if hung on a wall, it’s not something you’ll notice if you’re just using it on its feet.

The HJ6725K’s remote control is as flimsy-feeling as the TV. While you won’t be able to use it for bicep curls, though, its layout is straightforward and its buttons are big and well spaced.

Features

Despite how cheap and compact it is, the Sharp HJ6725K is a 4K TV with HDR support in the HLG, HDR10 and Dolby Vision flavours. It’s built on a 60Hz VA panel with direct LED lighting. Using a VA panel would normally mean we should expect limited viewing angles but better contrast compared with the alternative IPS panel option.

Colours, surprisingly, are delivered by a Quantum Dot system which, on paper at least, should be capable of a wider and more subtle colour range, as well as more brightness than the basic RGB filter system typically seen on budget TVs. We should add, though, that it’s not uncommon for Quantum Dots not to work at all as intended when introduced to TVs at the entry-level end of the market.

The HJ6725K’s provision of a Roku TV smart system is mostly welcome. Yes, the system’s interface looks primitive compared with most of today’s other smart TV systems, and it doesn’t provide as many features when it comes to things such as multiple user profiles and the ability to learn your viewing habits and make intelligent content suggestions. Its lack of sophistication does enable it, though, to be incredibly straightforward and simple to use, and it also runs slickly and stably even on TVs which, like this Sharp, aren’t equipped with powerful processors.

A free Roku App for your phone opens up the possibility of voice search, and the set also works with Google Home, Apple Home, Apple AirPlay and Alexa.

The Roku smart system is well known, too, for its consistent ability to provide all of the key global and local streaming services – though just for good measure, the HJ6725K additionally carries the Freely system, through which UK users can live-stream most of the channels available on Freeview HD, removing the need for an aerial on their house.

Connections on the HJ6725K comprise three HDMI ports, two USB ports, satellite and RF antenna ports, a headphone jack, an optical digital audio output and an Ethernet port.

The HDMIs only support 4K at up to 60Hz (the panel is only a 60Hz one) and don’t handle VRR, though the TV does support ALLM switching so that it can switch automatically to its fastest-responding Game mode without you having to do it manually. In this mode, the screen’s input lag is a very respectable 13.3ms.

The HJ6725K’s USB ports support a wide range of video, photo and music file formats, while built-in wi-fi is provided, of course, so that you don’t have to physically tether the TV to your router to enjoy its streaming capabilities.

The HJ6725K’s audio system, finally, is a straightforward 2 x 10W set-up with Dolby Digital but not Dolby Atmos or DTS:X support.

Picture quality

There’s nothing flashy about the HJ6725K’s picture quality, but as with everything else about this £350 TV, it gets the basics right.

Particularly good to see at this level is a solid combination of brightness and contrast. There’s enough brightness to give HDR content a clear lift in intensity compared with SDR, yet just as importantly, this HDR brightness boost doesn’t lead to dark scenes looking excessively washed out or greyed over.

Blacks do look a touch greyer in HDR mode than they do in SDR, but the difference is small enough to be offset by the extra brightness of the lighter HDR elements.

In other words, overall HDR images contain a wider light range than SDR ones do, with neither dark nor bright areas looking as compromised by trying to accommodate each other as we would have expected with a TV that doesn’t have any local dimming.

The fact that there isn’t any local dimming in the HJ6725K shows that its decent contrast has to be a result of the native capabilities of the panel.

That’s an impression underlined by the fact that, despite dark areas achieving deeper blacks than expected, they also retain plenty of shadow detail. In fact, you might see a little more detail in dark areas when watching HDR than content creators wanted you to see – but this is preferable to the alternative, and isn’t severe enough to leave dark scenes looking noisy and confusing.

The presence of so much subtle detail in dark areas means that dark scenes enjoy pretty much the same sense of depth as bright ones. Add to this the minimal greyness they’re affected by compared with many budget TVs, and even a slight green undertone to dark scenes can’t stop the HJ6725K from delivering a really consistent image that’s easy to become immersed in. That green tone is in fact so faint that we find ourselves pretty much tuning it out after we’ve been watching the TV for a few hours.

Inadequate backlight control can mean that deploying Quantum Dots on really cheap TVs such as the HJ6725K can actually lead to pictures that look more washed out and flat than those of old-school RGB filter TVs. Not so with this Sharp Roku TV, though. It’s instantly and gratifyingly obvious that the HJ6725K is capable of delivering a wider, richer colour range than most TVs in its class, delivering an obvious uptick in vibrancy and saturation when the TV switches from SDR to HDR content.

Unusually for such a cheap TV, the HJ6725K carries a dynamic tone mapping system designed to make incoming HDR signals make maximum use of the screen’s capabilities. And even more unusually for such a cheap TV, this system works well for the most part, resulting in noticeably more dynamic HDR10 images than you get without it, yet without the more extreme images looking forced or strained. The only tone mapping issue is that it can cause subtle shading details to become ‘whited out’ in the very brightest parts of the picture. The benefits of the tone mapping system comfortably outweigh this solitary negative, though.

Colours don’t lose saturation in bright or dark HDR scenes either, and skin tones are rendered with enough subtlety to stop actors turning into mannequins. There can be a slightly coarse look to areas of HDR shots that contain especially high levels of subtle detail and texture (trees, bushes, meadows and so on), but this is a minor point that doesn’t devolve into actual noise. The worst that can be said of it is that in conjunction with a slightly slow response time from the LCD panel, fast-moving scenes can look fractionally blurry with 24p footage. There’s no real issue with judder with such footage, though, despite the TV not having any motion processing to its name.

The HJ6725K’s brightness, contrast and colour make it able to function unusually well in both bright and dark room settings by budget TV standards, and it’s balanced and controlled enough in its HDR Dark setting to deliver as good a sense of ‘creative intent’ as you’re going to get with a budget TV.

There are inevitably other limits to the HJ6725K picture performance. For all our talk of how contrasty and bright its pictures look, and how this helps it handle HDR better, we’re clearly not talking about anything like the brightness and colour range/volumes you can get with more expensive TVs. It can’t give you anything like a full sense of HDR’s capabilities; it just handles what it can deliver exceptionally well.

Also, while the Dolby Vision Normal setting takes great advantage of the extra picture information Dolby Vision can provide to deliver more dynamism and control than the HJ6725K does with more basic HDR10 feeds, the Dolby Vision Dark mode can reduce brightness to a point where shadow detail starts to be crushed out of the picture.

And, last but not least, the HJ6725K’s effective viewing angles are very limited, with black levels in particular dropping off a cliff if you have to watch the TV from an angle of as little as 20 to 25 degrees off axis.

Provided you can sit pretty much opposite it, though, the HJ6725K’s pictures can overall be considered better than we would expect for the price.

Sound quality

In terms of audio, the HJ6725K again opts to do the core stuff well rather than showboating badly. So while the staging is only stereo with no real attempt to add a 3D feel, and while there’s no dedicated subwoofer in the speaker system to help it churn out really deep bass, its sound is actually enjoyably clean, balanced and engaging.

Voices retain good clarity even in the middle of dense action scenes, background effects remain background effects rather than becoming too dominant in the mix, and high-pitched effects don’t sound harsh or warbly.

Low-frequency sounds aren’t especially deep, but they don’t succumb to crackling or buzzing distortions, and also tend to sound nicely balanced with the rest of the sound.

The speakers are sensitive enough to bring out faint sound details without overstating them, too, so that the soundstage always feels busy despite not really pushing far forward or beyond the screen’s left and right edges.

The HJ6725K can flatten off a bit early when faced with the growing density and dynamics of a big action sequence, and sometimes its speakers pretty much give up on trying to recreate the deepest bass, but we prefer this 'leave it alone rather than mess it up' approach.

Verdict

While any £350 50-inch TV is going to come with significant performance strings attached, Sharp’s HJ6725K Roku TV does an unusually astute job of delivering all of the picture and sound quality basics well, resulting in a sensibly well-rounded and balanced performance that works precisely because it doesn’t try to be too spectacular.

Add in Roku’s basic but dependable and comprehensive smarts, and the HJ6725K is exceptional value for money.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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