Sharp LC-60E77UN LCD HDTV Page 2

The LC-60E77UN includes four HDMI 1.3 inputs that support Deep Color (increased color bit depth), xvYCC (expanded color gamut, sometimes called x.v.Color), and Consumer Electronics Control (CEC), which is a standard feature of HDMI that Sharp calls AQUOS Link. No commercial video content created using Deep Color or xvYCC, but some HD camcorders use them, so the TV can display your own content from such a camcorder in its full glory.

On the other hand, CEC can be useful. This function sends control codes via HDMI to any compatible devices. It turns them on and off and sets their inputs or outputs automatically as required.

User Interface
The remote is a universal model that can control up to four devices in addition to the TV. It has a backlight that only illuminates a few of the function buttons. This is very odd, since all the buttons look translucent and could easily be illuminated. Not only that, the labels for the backlit buttons are printed on the body of the remote, so you can’t see them in the dark.

The buttons are well separated but rather small. The layout is mostly good, but the AV Mode button, which selects the picture mode, is hidden under a flipdown cover at the bottom of the remote. As usual with TV remotes, there are no dedicated input-selection buttons, but a Source button brings up a list of inputs on the screen.

I’ve always liked the organization of Sharp’s menu system, and the picture controls are visible as soon as you enter the menu. However, I’ve always hated that the menu remains on the screen as you adjust a picture control, obscuring the image you’re trying to tweak.

Another thing I don’t like about the picture controls is that they link to the preset picture modes, not the inputs. For example, if you adjust the controls in the Movie mode, the same settings will apply to all inputs to which the Movie mode is assigned. The only exception is the User mode, which you can set independently for each input.

Setup and Testing
The Brightness, Contrast, and Sharpness controls were fairly close to correct in Movie mode. I brought Contrast down a couple of clicks and Brightness up one click. Sharpness was fine at its default setting, but if I increased it by even one click, it induced ringing (white halos around black lines on a gray background).

As I mentioned earlier, using a blue filter to set Color and Tint is unreliable with LCD TVs, and this one has no blue-only mode, so I had to set these controls looking at skintones. I used a pre-release version of the new HQV test disc, which includes a photo of seven people with different skintones—three African-Americans, two Asians, and two Caucasians (including one ginger). Tint was fine at its default value, but the color saturation was too high, so I toned it down a bit.

Starting with the Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark Blu-ray Edition test disc, the LC-60E77UN’s video processing proved to be excellent all around, including 2:2 and 3:2 as well as edge-adaptive deinterlacing. Even better, turning on the set’s frame interpolation didn’t cause any artifacts in the jaggies test ring that consists of alternating horizontal lines of white and black. Most LCDs with frame interpolation cause all sorts of ugly artifacts in this ring.

I turned to the unpublished FPD Benchmark Blu-ray test disc to evaluate the Sharp’s frame interpolation, and I saw virtually no difference between setting Fine Motion Enhanced on or off for most of the tests. In only one test, the clarity of scrolling letters was improved slightly by turning it on, but either way, motion blur wasn’t bad at all. Clearly, the Sharp’s frame interpolation is very gentle, and it introduced no visible artifacts, apart from the interpolation effect itself. I generally like frame interpolation, and I used it for most of the viewing discussed in the comments to follow. Some videophiles object to what it does to the look of films, but here the effect was relatively subtle.

Some clips on FPD Benchmark are fairly dark, which gives you a good opportunity to check an LCD TV’s off-axis performance. As with all such TVs, the Sharp’s apparent black level rose and colors shifted as I moved away from the center, but not as much as some I’ve seen. Still, I wouldn’t want to watch this set more than 20 degrees or so off axis.

Real-World Performance
Chapter 8 of Mission: Impossible III on Blu-ray opens with a pan across a long staircase, which is a great test of a TV’s 1080i deinter- lacing capabilities. Sending this image to the Sharp at 1080i, the stairs were almost moiré-free, which was among the best I’ve seen. The color still seemed a little oversaturated, so I turned it down a bit more, and the shadow detail in the catacombs was OK, but not great.

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Sharp Electronics
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