The player's impressive detail talents are backed up by excellent colour reproduction. It brings a richness and vitality to bright, bold shades, but handles the subtler stuff with an equally assured hand, making shading look smooth and getting skin tones spot-on.

What's more, dark scenes retain a lot of detail, blacks are profound and 24fps motion is silky smooth. While it's true the Pioneer BDP-LX71 and Panasonic DMP-BD55's pictures look fractionally cleaner and sharper, the Sharp measures up very well.

If only DVD playback was as impressive. Unfortunately, there's been very little improvement since the BD-HP20H and movies still suffer from soft edges, noise and jagged edges.

Powerful audio

Listening to high-resolution soundtracks through a competent receiver is a sensational experience: Indiana Jones' Dolby True HD soundtrack is sharp, distinct and expansive, with forthright dialogue and crystal clear rear effects.

Music from the analogue outputs isn't bad either, delivering vocals with a smooth tone and achieving a good balance across the frequency range.

Improvements needed

The Sharp BD-HP21H is basically its predecessor upgraded to Profile 1.1, with Sharp making no effort to improve upon the other things that bugged us the first time round – in some ways it's made worse by the stripping away of several of the HP20H's connections.

There's still no DTS HD Master Audio decoding or MP3, WMA and DiVX playback, but the biggest disappointment is the lack of BD Live support.

The Sharp's shortcomings are compounded by the fact that it costs the same as, if not more than, a handful of much better BD Live players on the market, which doesn't equate to good value in our book.

On the plus side, though, its picture quality is superb and Quick Start is really useful and welcome, but it's not quite enough to earn our unreserved recommendation