Sharp 70GK4245K

Introduction

Somehow Sharp has manage to put together a TV with a hulking 70-inch screen, expansive TiVo Smart system and Dolby Vision HDR support that costs just £479 and yet isn’t completely rubbish.

Need I say more?

Price

Just in case you haven’t got the idea yet, the Sharp 70GK4245K isn’t just cheap by 70-inch and beyond TV standards; at £479 it sits in potential big-screen bargain of the year territory.

Not surprisingly you don’t get a massive feature count for that little money, but what is on offer does include the excellent TiVo smart system, making it easy to find good quality content to fill that all-important huge expanse of screen.

TiVo-toting TVs actually have a habit of being ultra affordable. The 50-inch Bush 50QT24SB costs just £269 at the time of writing, for instance – which is exactly the same money you’ll need for Sharp’s own 50-inch 50GM6245K smaller TiVo model.

The extra 20 inches of screen carried by the 70GK4245K, though, would usually go for a much higher extra premium than £210.

Design

• Lightweight build quality
• Wide foot placement
• VESA wall mounting points

The Sharp 70GK4245K does rather look and especially feel like the incredibly cheap TV. It’s light enough for anyone with a 70-inch wingspan to carry around by themselves without fear of back injury, and the rear panel’s chunkiness harks back to a whole yesteryear era of TV design.

Its provided desktop feet are basic in both look and build quality too, leaving a fairly narrow and crisply finished bezel as really the only design point I could get excited about.

The remote control continues the all-plastic theme, too, feeling lightweight and brittle. Though it does at least try to hide its flimsiness behind a brushed front edge finish and a shiny silver topping applied to its menu navigation buttons.

Note that the provided feet can only be attached quite close to the 70GK4245K’s bottom corners, meaning you’ll need a fairly big piece of furniture to sit it on. VESA mounting points are provided if you’d prefer to attach it to a (not supplied) wall mount, but the depth of the set’s rear don’t make it a very elegant wall-hanging option.

Connectivity

• Three 60Hz HDMI ports
• Two USB ports
• Optical digital audio output

The 70GK4245K’s budget price comes with a connection compromise or two. There are only three HDMI inputs, for instance, where most TVs have four, and none of those three HDMI inputs support 4K at 120Hz with HDR.

The presence of a 3.5mm combined composite video and audio input port, meanwhile, is an unusual find on a modern TV – but rather adds to the TV’s slightly dated first impressions.

Connectivity is rounded out by antenna and satellite inputs, an Ethernet port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, two USBs, an optical digital audio output, and Wi-Fi support for those integrated TiVo smarts.

User Experience

• TiVo Smart system
• Voice recognition and control
• Freely live streaming platform built-in

TiVo has been delivering sophisticated ‘learning’ smart TV operating systems since before many of today’s TV brands were born. So it’s perhaps not surprising to find the latest TiVo OS providing a content rich but also slick, stable and easy to use graphical interface even on a TV as affordable as the 70GK4245K.

The TiVo interface is also built on an extremely effective voice recognition system that’s for me the cleverest around when it comes both to understanding even quite obscure and poorly worded content search instructions, and then accumulating an excellent array of relevant responses.

TiVo’s search system has a depth of knowledge of films and TV shows that goes beyond arguably any other smart platform around to date.

TiVo provides direct access to almost all of the most important and popular video streaming services. The only exception is Apple TV+ – though you can actually access it, albeit rather clumsily, through the Prime Video app.

Yet another string to TiVo’s bow is its integration of the Freely service that lets you live stream the majority of channels on the Freeview HD broadcast platform, rather than from a digital aerial. Freely also provides access to many thousands of hours of content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 libraries.

So overall the 70GK4245K is much more user friendly than might have been expected for its money.

Features

• Tivo Smart system
• HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR support
• 4K HDR VA panel

The main attraction of the 70GK4245K has to be the simple fact that it serves up 70-inch pictures for £479. And I’ve also already covered arguably its second biggest attraction: Its combination of TiVo and Freely smart platforms.

Not surprisingly the LCD panel delivering the 70GK4245K’s 70-inch pictures is pretty basic compared with the cutting edge powerhouses I’ve seen this year. It’s a 60Hz panel rather than a 100-120Hz one (though I’ll come to an odd wrinkle in this respect later), and while it’s hard to tell whether it’s lit by LEDs directly behind the screen or mounted around the screen’s edges, I can confidently say that there’s no local dimming system in play.

Any light adjustments the 70GK4245K makes in response to changes in the pictures being shown can only operate on a ‘global’, whole-screen level.

The screen is illuminated with regular big ol’ LEDs rather than Mini LEDs, and there’s no Quantum Dot colour system to boost the range of colours either.

The panel appears to be a VA type, though, which would typically lead to a superior contrast and black level performance (but reduced effective viewing angles) than you tend to get from the alternative IPS.

Sharp actually claims a dynamic contrast ratio for its TV of 1,000,000:1 – though I suspect that number is extremely optimistic.

Having spent seemingly more time talking about what the 70GK4245K doesn’t have than what it does, it’s nice to find the 70GK4245K adding support for Dolby Vision HDR along with HDR10 and HLG HDR systems. Especially since budget TVs typically benefit much more from Dolby Vision’s extra picture information than more expensive sets, which have more powerful and sophisticated picture processors.

The 70GK4245K’s set up menus, finally, contain a few hints at a surprising amount of ambition by Sharp’s picture engineers. The set carries the necessary features to support a professional calibration, including 11-point and 2-point white balance correction, plus hue, saturation and brightness tweaks for all six of a TV picture’s primary and secondary colours.

It’s hard to imagine many people paying for a calibration of the 70GK4245K given that this calibration would likely cost more than the TV. But it’s still nice to know it’s possible.

A 10-bit colour option is provided, too, to potentially smooth away any colour striping with HDR video, and Sharp has even provided a couple of Dolby Vision presets than can be fully customised, alongside the usual Dolby Vision Bright and Dark preset choices.

Gaming

• ALLM switching support
• Surprising 120Hz support without HDR
• 14.8ms input lag at 60Hz

Not surprisingly for the money, the 70GK4245K can’t handle the 4K/120Hz gaming graphics now available from PCs and the top Xbox and PlayStation consoles. With 4K feeds it tops out at 60Hz, while retaining HDR (including Dolby Vision) if a game uses it.

Unexpectedly, considering Sharp’s TV only has a native 60Hz panel for video, my Xbox Series X showed that the 70GK4245K could actually handle 120Hz if you keep the resolution to HD and didn’t mind having HDR stripped away.

There’s also support for variable refresh rates (although this only extends to 60Hz with 4K HDR games), and the 70GK4245K can automatically switch into its low-latency Game mode when it detects an incoming game source. This mode gets the time Sharp’s TV takes to render images down to a respectably if not class-leadingly low 14.8ms.

While the 70GK4245K is hardly at the cutting edge of game support, it actually delivers game graphics surprisingly well with good levels of sharpness, more brightness and contrast than you’ve any right to expect; bold colours considering there’s no fancy wide colour system in play, and reasonably fluid, clean motion less affected by judder or, especially, blur than expected.

Picture Quality

• Surprising brightness and vibrancy
• Good sharpness and motion handling
• Some backlight clouding issues

It’s fair to say expectations weren’t particularly high as I fired the 70GK4245K up. It just didn’t seem feasible that such a big TV with such a small price attached could deliver pictures that might actually be really enjoyable. Happily, Sharp’s big bargain wastes no time proving me wrong.

Its HDR pictures instantly look brighter than I’d expected, for starters, delivering a clear step up from SDR. Measurements using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 colour meter show the screen capable of peaking at around 365 nits from around a 25% of screen area HDR signal, but then also maintaining that level of brightness all the way through to bright HDR images that fill the whole screen.

These might not sound like massive brightness figures, but it’s honestly at least a hundred nits more than I’d expected to get from such a crazy cheap 70-inch TV.

More importantly, it really makes what brightness it has count. For one thing it feeds every last drop of light it can into a surprisingly vibrant and robust colour palette. Also, it manages to produce surprisingly deep and convincing black colours for its bright highlights to appear alongside, which instantly has the effect of making those bright highlights look more intense.

As well as creating a sense of contrast that makes more than a few much more expensive big-screen TVs look flat by comparison. Even if I have to say I still don’t quite believe Sharp’s claims that the 70GK4245K can hit a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1!

The 70GK4245K’s surprising black levels appear to be pretty native to the panel design, too. This can be seen firstly in the way deep blacks are achieved without needing to dim bright elements down.

Also notable is how stable dark scenes look as a result of the 70GK4245K not needing to keep adjusting its backlight output to deliver good black tones, and in the amount of faint shadow detailing Sharp’s screen retains. As long as you avoid the slightly heavy-handed Dolby Vision Dark preset, there’s no ‘black crush’ effect on show with this TV at all.

At the same time, with every picture preset bar Dynamic the 70GK4245K is careful not to bring out more details in dark areas than the creators behind a film or TV show wanted you to see.

I mentioned the 70GK4245K’s colour vibrancy in passing earlier, but it warrants more attention. Partly for the richness it achieves despite having relatively little brightness at its disposal; partly for the impressive tone and blend subtlety it finds in even the most richly saturated areas; and partly because it manages to deliver quite different colour tone ‘feels’ across its best picture presets without any of them – again bar the Dynamic preset – looking unnatural or unbalanced.

The 10-bit colour option for removing striping effects from HDR content seemed surplus to requirement too, simply because the TV never really showed me that it had any banding problems to solve.

The 70GK4245K’s native 4K picture sources look detailed and reasonably sharp. A little crispness is lost over large moving objects, but this is actually surprisingly minor given the trouble many budget LCD TVs have with motion. There are certainly no smeary trails behind moving objects, and judder with 24 frames a second films looks surprisingly authentic too. Even the 70GK4245K’s viewing angle support is wider than usual for a budget VA-type LCD panel.

I should stress at this point that the 70GK4245K is of course not in the same performance ballpark as the best mid-range and premium LCD and OLED TVs. It’s not wholly immune to its price level. But its pictures are certainly massively better than you’ve any right to expect for £479.

I guess it was inevitable that such a cheap big-screen TV wouldn’t escape our test benches with completely flying colours. So it is that while dark scenes benefit from deeper black colours than you’d normally see with such a budget TV, parts of the screen – including a couple of quite central areas – can exhibit some pretty noticeable clouding.

There’s far too much good stuff happening with the 70GK4245K for this to be a deal breaker, but it is enough to just fetch Sharp’s TV up short of classing as an absolute budget all timer.

Upscaling

• Clear and detailed SDR images

Happily – and again surprisingly with such a cheap TV – I can get right back into positive news about the 70GK4245K with its upscaling.

HD pictures are converted to 4K impressively cleanly, without source noise becoming exaggerated, colours losing their natural toning, or the processing revealing its hand in unwanted side effects like haloing around strong object edges or a gritty look to areas of fine detail. The upscaled pictures don’t look soft, despite the fact that they’re appearing on a relatively large screen.

Sound Quality

• Lacks power
• Non-existent bass

The 70GK4245K’s audio performs more in line with its price point than its pictures do. Its speakers don’t have the power to project much beyond the TV’s physical boundaries, for starters, leaving the resulting sound stage feeling smaller than the pictures.

The way sound feels trapped inside the speakers also means that dialogue tends to sound like it’s coming from below the screen rather than up where the talkers’ faces are.

The speakers’ dynamic range is very limited too. Actual bass is pretty much non-existent, and handling of even lower mid-range sounds is sketchy. Not surprisingly, then, dense soundtrack moments tend to sound low on impact and more than a little weedy.

While all of this will have movie fans planning to spend some of the money they’ve saved getting such a huge TV for so little cash on a soundbar, the 70GK4245K’s sound does have one saving grace.

By playing it so safe with its limited volume and bass, its speakers avoid falling prey to nasty crackling or buzzing interference, even during the densest soundtrack moments, ensuring there’s at least a decent level of consistency to the lop-sided sound it produces.

Should you buy it?

FAQs