Is a large price tag a guarantee of a quality product? Well, hopefully we'll be able to answer that after we've looked at the Sharp Aquos LC-52XS1E, a 1080p HD LCD TV that uses LED backlighting that sells for £9000. Despite the price, the stand isn't included ...

Build Quality & Design

To put it mildly, we were hoping to find more features on this TV. Three HDMI inputs isn't a lot, especially when most of the competition provide four, or even five of these. By the same token, there's no Ethernet port giving access to online content or files stored on the local network: so no DLNA support for the XS1E either, then. There's just a single USB port to play MP3s and look at JPEGs.

We had thought that the arrival of a new high-end model like this might have been a good opportunity for Sharp to launch a new, more attractive interface, but the menu system is the same as on the rest of its range. We also found that it was rather slow in some places, especially when adjusting sharpness, where we sometimes had to wait several seconds before being able to return to the menu.

The remote control is quite useful, and, thankfully, backlit, making it perfect for a Home Cinema session in a dark room. It's very classy, with a brushed aluminium finish--and probably why the whole TV costs so much ...

The speakers are detachable, and you can remove them in favour of a Home Cinema speaker system if you prefer.


Image Quality

In many ways, it's the moment of truth for a TV when we start watching our first movie.  We're always a little apprehensive when we slide that first disc into our Blu-ray player, sit back and wait for it to start ... especially when we then discover that the image quality is absolutely awful! A quick look at the menus showed that this TV was, in fact, configured to look good in a showroom, rather than in the home, and we were left wondering why Sharp would ship a TV with these settings. Going back to the default settings, we soon realised that the XS1E activates a dynamic contrast mode that 'improves' image quality, but produces results that are less natural. As per usual, we had to tweak each one of the settings to get a more realistic picture, and then we started again.

The first thing we noticed was that blacks really are very black. At just 0.04 cd/m², it's very hard to tell them apart from a perfect black. White levels fluctuated between 180 and 229 cd/m², giving a very impressive contrast ratio of 6300:1. What's less impressive, though, is the variation in white levels due to the dynamic backlighting. The brightness of the LEDs changes from one scene to the next to the next to provide the right amount of light in different areas of the screen. Unlike on the Samsung B7000, the dynamic backlighting here is subtle enough to not suddenly produce bright flashes in one part of the screen or the other, and you can only see it at work by looking very closely. Nevertheless, we would have preferred to have been able to completely deactivate it, especially given how expensive this TV is.

HD films look excellent, with natural colours and striking contrast. On the other hand, SD content lacks precision. You need to turn up the sharpness a little to get a good result, but that produces a shadow around very contrasting areas.


Another negative point, more important this time, is how narrow the viewing angles are. Moving around to the side of the screen, blacks very quickly dip to grey and colours change. On this particular front, the XS1 is behind the rest of the competition.


Finally, there's also a small amount of ghosting, which puts the XS1 up there with other 100 Hz TVs, but behind 200 Hz TVs which provide a notable improvement. The XS1 doesn't include any kind of interlacing system like its competitors do with features like Motionflow, HD Natural Motion, TruMotion and Motion Plus.

The PC mode works perfectly with a computer connected using the HDMI cable. However, we measured an input lag of 92 ms, or six frames, which is much too high to be able to play games online.

We had hoped to see images like we'd never seen before on the XS1, or at least images to rival the best of today's TVs, but we have to say we were disappointed. The picture quality is good, of course, but there are too many small problems: a little ghosting here, narrow viewing angles there, poor quality upscaling, the always-on dynamic backlighting ... With so many niggling faults, the XS1 can't hope to join the big boys.

Sound Quality

With its small bar dedicated to providing sound, the XS1 provides the best sound quality we've heard to date on a TV. Thanks to its size, it can produce decent bass sounds that are much better than its competitors. At last--real sound on a television!

Power Consumption

Our first surprise was discovering that this TV requires 0.65 W when on standby: that's not a lot, but it's a still more than the 0.1 W used by other TVs.

When it's switched on, it uses 180 W, an average figure for LCD TVs. Using LEDs for backlighting doesn't save much energy. When manufacturers claim that this is possible, then they're nearly always claiming figures that involve dynamic backlighting, which reduces brightness a lot. If we keep light levels the same, our current tests don't allow us to benefit from any significant saving from the switch to LED.