Hands-On Review: Sharp Aquos LC-52LE700U LED-Backlit LCD HDTV

PLUS
Wonderfully sharp and three-dimensional
Outstandingly deep blacks
Lovely warm colour

MINUS
Blacks are occasionally crushed

Sharp made its first foray into LED-backlit LCD TVs in 2008, with the introduction of its fabulous (and fabulously expensive) Limited Edition XS1 series; these received Gear of the Year honours from this magazine last year. Those super-stylish 52- and 65-inch TVs use full-array LED red-green-blue backlighting with local dimming.

Sharp's new LE700 series offers LED technology at mainstream prices; so predictably, the implementation is less ambitious. The 52-inch model reviewed here sells for $3,000; there are also 40- and 46-inch models for $2,000 and $2,500 respectively. They all use full-array white-LED backlighting, but do not have local dimming, and employ 120Hz frame-rate conversion.

The LE700 TVs also employ a new X-Gen LCD panel design, with wider aperture for higher peak brightness and improved pixel control for deeper blacks.

This 52-inch TV comes with an easy-to-understand remote. While not particularly flashy, the TV's menu system is functional and straightforward. The screen is framed in a narrow black bezel that's halfway between gloss and matte. The same description fits the coating of the screen, which seems moderately good at suppressing room reflections while producing a picture with excellent fine detail. The TV sits on a supplied rectangular base. Cosmetics are conservative yet very elegant. You can sit approximately 45 degrees to either side before you notice any significant fading of the picture.

Settings: When you first power up the LE700, you're asked to confirm whether you're using it in a store or home. Choose home, and the TV defaults into Dynamic picture mode, with backlight maxed at +16, contrast set at +32 (+40 is the max), brightness at the zero midpoint, sharpness at +10 and colour temperature at High (which produces bluish whites). The resulting picture is quite overblown, almost garish. The Standard and Movie picture settings tame the colour, contrast, sharpness and colour-temperature settings, resulting in a more accurate, more pleasing picture. Both settings produce pictures that still look a bit overblown, though the Auto setting actually looks quite good.

But you can do better by using the remote's AV mode button (it's hidden under the flip-up lid near the bottom) to choose one of the User modes, then adjusting picture settings. The test patterns on Video Essentials HD Basics displayed correctly with brightness at the zero midpoint, contrast at 30, and colour at the zero midpoint. You can adjust the backlight control to choose the tradeoff you want between blacks and light output (boosting backlight will brighten the picture, cutting it will produce deeper blacks). In a moderately dim (but not dark) room, I found that the centre position worked well.

I couldn't get the colour test patterns for blue to display correctly regardless of setting, but the centre position was very close. That setting resulted in slightly boosted greens, but the reds were bang-on. The LE700 has advanced colour controls that a professional calibrator could use to make finer adjustments.

Evaluation: With these settings, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist on Blu-ray Disc had lovely warm colour, but looked a bit punchy. Blacks were excellent, and dark areas in the dim interiors, such as Kat Dennings' hair and clothes, had excellent detail.

The high-contrast daytime scenes in Frost Nixon, also on Blu-ray, are a torture test; and the Sharp LE700 handled them well. In the scene where Frost team first visits Nixon's home in California, the blacks in the shadows were satisfyingly deep, although some details, such as Rebecca Hall's dark hair, were crushed. A little segment at the beginning of this scene, where the camera pans across a sign at the entrance to Nixon's estate, shows the difference that 240Hz processing can make. On this TV, which has 120Hz processing, the lettering blurred slightly as the camera moved across it.

Slumdog Millionaire is another torture test, which the Sharp LE700 passed with aplomb. The high-contrast studio scenes looked great. I could see detail in Dev Petel's brightly lit face and in the dimly lit audience at the same time. The night scene where gangsters blind a beggar boy looked slightly murky, but the Sharp TV was excellent at pulling details out of the dark background. The film's intensely warm (almost tropical) colour palette was beautifully produced.

The Shallow Seas episode of Planet Earth on Blu-ray looked stunning. As expected, scenes of bright corral reefs and colourful tropical fish looked amazing. But equally impressive was the LE700's ability to resolve fine differences in tones and colours in creatures camouflaged against a sandy seafloor.

Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals in high-def looked dazzling. There was one flaw: the colour of the Red Wings' home uniforms wasn't deep enough; they looked slightly pink. There was a simple fix: turning the Active Contrast feature made the uniforms look truly red.

The same phenomenon occurred with the Blue Jays Canada Day game. The special red uniforms the Jays wore that day looked a bit pink with Active Contrast turned off, but just right with this feature turned on. However, this adjustment crushed blacks in the umpires' and visiting team's uniforms, robbing them of texture. I'd be inclined to leave the control off.

Similarly, when watching a high-def episode of Without a Trace, dark background details were crushed with Active Contrast turned on, but emerged beautifully with that option turned off. Colours and skin tones were wonderfully natural. Brothers and Sisters looked wonderfully warm, with great three-dimensional modeling of characters' faces.

Blacks on this new LED-backlit TV are excellent, though not perfectly neutral (there's a very faint magenta tint); and occasionally blacks are crushed so that dark details are obscured. But overall, Sharp's Aquos LC-52LE700U delivers excellent colour, detail and depth.