Tour & Design

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The front of the Sharp AQUOS LC-65E77UM features a standard black glossy frame. It's a bit thinner than the average black glossy bezel, but not quite as thin as the LG SL90.

Back

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The back of the LC-65E77UM isn't particularly interesting. The ports are located on the bottom left corner of the little plateau it has. This means they're indented a good eight inches or so from the actual edge of the TV. **

Sides

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The left side of the LC-65E77UM is featureless. The right side has a few side-facing ports and the on-set controls.

Stand/Mount

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As you can see in the above images, the LC-65E77UM can, in fact, be mounted. Sharp didn't have any non-mounted models for us to photograph. We'd assume they involve a pillar that connects the TV to a large, flat base.

 

Aesthetics

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The LC-65E77UM is a nice-looking TV. It's not the most gorgeous design we've seen, but it has a small bezel and no obnoxious design fluorishes. The trend for TVs is to have a clean, understated design, and the LC-65E77UM does this well.

Performance Features

Display Size & Technology

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The Sharp AQUOS LC-65E77UM uses a 65-inch LCD display. This TV uses Sharp's 10-bit ASV Superlucent panel and 10-bit processing engine. According to Sharp, this should minimize gloss and boost contrast.

 

 

Formats & Resolution

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The TV is 1080p, meaning it won't balk at your Blu-ray collection.

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio

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The LC-65E77UM has a few features that should help out its contrast ratio. First, it has the Spectral Contrast Engine, which is so called because it's powered by ghosts. In theory this feature will provide spooky blacks and frighteningly bright whites, but we'll leave the final vedict to our CS-200 ChromaMeter.

Color

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The LC-65E77UM doesn't have any features that deal specifically with color.

Motion & Refresh Rate

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There's a 120Hz refresh rate on the LC-65E77UM, which should help motion performance. Of course, different TVs handle higher refresh rates differently. On the show floor, playing the demo tape, the LC-65E77UM looked great. We look forward to getting the TV into our lab, to see if the average consumer unit will look as good playing non-demo content.

Viewing Angle

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The LC-65E77UM appeared to have a great viewing angle for an LCD. We were able to get well outside of 45° before we noticed a drop in contrast. We'd be very interested to know if these new screen technologies are creating impressive viewing angles, or if there's some sort of show floor trickery going on. If the former is true, LCDs, as a technology, are getting really impressive. Once we get some of these TVs in to test, we'll know the answer to this, and other questions, for sure.

Connectivity & Media

Audio & Video Ports

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From what we saw, this TV has a good array of ports. On the back there's three HDMIs, a VGA input, two component video ins, a composite video in, an S-VIDEO port, a 3.5mm audio input, two analog audio inputs, an analog audio output, and a digital audio output. There's also the RF input over on the right.

The side has a fourth HDMI, a second composite video input, and a third analog audio input. There's also a service port for you to ignore.

Media & Other Connectivity

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The LC-65E77UM doesn't have any additional media functionality. 

Placement

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The ports are all located about eight or so inches away from the actual edge of the screen. This is a bit inconvenient. Typically the ports are indented a few inches, so side-facing cords can hang behind the edge of the screen where they won't be an eyesore. We can't think of any compelling reason why the ports would be located this far away from the edge.

Audio

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There were no stats available that had anything to do with audio.

Controls, Menu & Remote

Remote

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The remote, unfortunately, was not available on the show floor.

Controls

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The on-set controls consist of the standard offerings. You'll find the power, menu, input, channel, and volume buttons towards the bottom of the screen's right edge.

Menu

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Although we weren't able to see the menu on the show floor, we'd assume it was the standard AQUOS menu.

Conclusion

 

Series Comparison

E Series

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The E Series is full of 1080p LCD HDTVs with 120Hz refresh rates. They have several energy saving features as well, such as automatic backlight dimming based on the room's lighting conditions.

This series is kind of annoying to document properly, because it steps on its own naming conventions. The majority of TVs follow the format of LC-xxE77UN. There are two exceptions. One is the LC-65E77UM, which ends with an 'M' instead of an 'N.' The other exception is the LC-40E67UN, which looks like it should be an ancestor model to the E77 series. This will likely confuse people who aren't smart like we are.