If there’s one thing consumers look for when making a big-ticket purchase, it’s value. The second thing that’s desired is quality. While the new LE700UN AQUOS LCD TVs from Sharp aren’t exactly innovative, they have a good cost-to-quality ratio – just like a Honda Civic.
Available in four sizes (32”, 40”, 46”, and 52”), the LE700UN LCDs started sexing up store shelves in July, but they have been chastised by everyone from gadget gurus to Smurfs for one particular fault. That elephant-in-the-room is Sharp’s failure to include local dimming (the technology that allows brightening and dimming of different regions of the screen to remain independent from one another). While that might encourage some potential buyers to hold off until Sharp does release this technology in the next generation of sets, other shoppers will be more than willing to overlook this oversight just to have an LCD in their home. Of course Sharp claims that its next-gen Full HD 1080p X-Gen LCD panel with 10-bit processing has enough pixel control to limit light leakage and produce superb black levels.
Undressing the Sharp LE700UN
Besides the fault, what do you get from Sharp’s LE700UN LCD series? On all the sets except for the 32” model, you get Sharp’s proprietary AQUOS Net, which allows users to customize content from the Internet and provides users with real-time customer support. However, AQUOS Net isn’t yet friendly to Yahoo’s widget platform, but you do get access to some pretty useless stuff like Weatherbug and Sudoku. The LE700UN series is also proud of being backlit with Sharp’s UltraBrilliant LED backlight technology “that illuminates the TV to extremely high brightness and contrast levels.” The Spectral Contrast Engine MC provides a contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1 and on the 52” and 46” models there’s a special dejudder feature. While the industry is moving toward 240Hz sets, the Sharp LE700UN LCD TVs are still only offering 120Hz and 176-degree viewing angles.
One positive point on this series, however, is its power saving; depending on the model, the sets exceed ENERGY STAR standards by anywhere from 52% to 68%. You’ll also find four HDMI ports and two component video inputs. The LE700UN series all have ATSC, QAM, and NTSC to give you access to DTV and analog TV. The sets can also be used as computer monitors and they have USB connectivity.
Whether you feel this is value enough for you or not is up to you, but pricing starts at $1,099 and rounds out at $2,799.
