Sharp Aquos LC-42LE320E

The Sharp LE320E offers a 42'' display backlit using Edge LED technology and has an MVA panel, the AU Optronics T420HW07.  This entry-level TV also has a blur reduction filter which runs at 100 Hz and a great built-in media player.

Build Quality and Design

Apart from that 100 Hz mode, the LE320E only has the bare minimum: three HDMI ports, two SCART sockets and one each of VGA and composite video.


In keeping with the rest, the remote is very basic, and it's hard to believe that this is really the best Sharp can do.  The photo above compares it to the remote found on a combined TV/monitor sold by Phillips two years ago, and the likeness is striking!  There are only a few slight differences between the two remotes.

Once again, the on screen menus are ageing somewhat, but above all, they're too blue and look about four years out of date!  Then again, they don't have that many options, apart from basics likes brightness, backlighting, contrast, sharpness, colour temperature, tint and saturation.  


Sharp has decided to use a glossy plastic frame that's about 4.5 cm thick ... and black at the front but white at the back.  It's a somewhat original choice, and at least it's different from what all of its rivals are doing.

Despite the manufacturer's best efforts, the glossy finish still picks up reflections, so you need to be careful to keep the LE320E out of the way of direct light sources.

You can plug a USB key or an external hard drive into a port on the side of the TV.  Fortunately, the media player is compatible with both NTFS and FAT32, meaning it can play files that are larger than 4 GB.  The bulk of the HD videos we tried worked without a problem.  Subtitles that are encapsulated inside videos did work, but not very well: the second line of dialogue always ended up off the screen.  Subtitles that are outside the container file worked fine, although it's impossible to resynchronise them with the video.

Ghosting and Input Lag

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

Our tests didn't start well: the LE320E's MVA display had a relatively high ghosting time.  We measured an average of 28 ms, which puts it right at the bottom of the table.

There were no problems connecting it to a computer, but with an input lag of 66 ms, or four frames, gamers won't be impressed.  Nobody else need worry though.

Image Quality

There aren't many TVs that put in a good performance in Standard mode, and the LE320E is no exception, with colour reproduction problems, an average colour temperature of 11000 K and problems with the gamma.  Fortunately, some of these problems can be fixed by switching to Cinema mode, but not all of them.


Even after we tweaked it, the colours weren't perfect.  We set the backlighting to 51 to get whites of 200 cd/m², chose a warm colour temperature and turned off all of the filters, but the average deltaE was still 5.4.  That's pretty disappointing for a recent TV.  The contrast ratio is a little better: we measured blacks as dark as 0.15 cd/m², making it 1600:1.  That's good, but a lot of other TVs do much better.

For movies, upscaling SD sources is acceptable, but a modern games console will do a much better job.  In HD, the LE320E has a very sharp picture, but the colour problems we mentioned above can spoil things.  The motion blur reduction filter does what it's supposed to, but some viewers will prefer to leave it switched off so they can avoid the 'camcorder' feel that it can create.

Clouding on our test unit

The panel on the model we tested suffered from clouding: patches of white caused by the LEDs used in the backlighting system are visible in the corners of the screen and can be very irritating when you're enjoying a film.

This is a defect that can affect displays from the same range differently, so the every LE320E sold won't necessarily suffer from this problem, but it's impossible to tell without trying one out in a shop.

Audio Quality

It seems Sharp decided to try and make some savings on the speakers it built into this TV: there's no bass and the sound becomes saturated very quickly.  Even a cheap set of speakers will do a better job than this.

Energy Consumption

The area in which the LE320E gave the best performance was energy consumption.  On standby, our equipment indicated that it required 0 W.  Thanks to the LEDs around the outside, it only needs a strict minimum when switched on: 64 W!