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  • Tour & Design

  • Performance Features

  • Connectivity & Media

  • Controls, Menu & Remote

  • Conclusion

  • Series Comparison

  • Tour & Design
  • Performance Features
  • Connectivity & Media
  • Controls, Menu & Remote
  • Conclusion
  • Series Comparison

Tour & Design


The front of the LC-68LE920UN is made of a single piece of glass, with metal around the rounded edge. It's an impressive looking display with a clean design.

**

Back**


The back of this display is not that interesting; the only things to see are the VESA screws around the center of the display (for ataching it to a wall mount) and the ports which are located on the right side of the body.

**

Sides**


The LC-68LE920UN is a thin display: it is just 1.6 inches thick on the panel itself. The connector for the stand is thicker, but can be taken off for wall mounting.

**

Stand/Mount**


The stand of this display has an interesting design. The base and pillar are both clear plastic, as if Sharp was trying to make them as invisible as possible. While they came close, they didn't quite achieve a 'magical, floating TV' look.

**

Aesthetics**


The LC-68LE920UN is an attractive display, with a clean, simple design that doesn't detract from the main business of the device: showing the images on screen. It isn't as innovative as Sony's monolithic design or as thin as LG's 6.9mm thick LCD HDTV, but it is a very attactive and striking display.

Performance Features

Display Size & Technology


The panel in the LC-68LE920UN is a Full HD one, which means it has a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and can display every pixel of a 1080p image. The panel uses an array of LED lights around the edge of the display as a backlight, which helps the display keep its svelte profile. This lighting setup does preclude the TV from localized dimming, however. Local dimming is a feature that allows the TV to dim the backlight in selected areas, allowing dark portions of the screen to appear darker.  Localized dimming can often lead to lost detail, however, as bright details in those dark areas are often dimmed as well, leading to decreased detail.

Sharp has introduced a few new technologies on this display, including an extra color. Most displays use three color elements for each pixel to create the colors on screen; red, green and blue. The LC-68LE920UN (and all of the displays in the LE920 series) add a fourth color: yellow. The theory is that adding yellow elements to the pixels that form the image allows the display to show a wider range of colors, and can provide more accurate and subtle colors. Sharp refers to this technolgy as QuadPixel. Without our full suite of color tests, , it is hard to tell if it does what Sharp claims, but it certainly looks promising in the demos.

**

Formats & Resolution**


The LC-68LE920UN is a 1080p display, so it can cope with every HDTV format currently in use, including 1080i, 720p and standard definition. It cannot display 3D images, though; Sharp has not yet announced any support for 3D HDTV.

**

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio**


Sharp has not released any figures for the contrast ratio of this display, but the demo unit on display had very dark blacks and and bright whites, indicating a good contrast ratio between the two. We'll have to wait until we can get one of these displays into our labs before we can draw any real conclusions.

**

Color**


The demo unit we looked at had very attractive color, and the extra yellow on the pixels seemed to make a difference to the color range displayed. However, it's hard to get a sense of actual performance on the show floor. We'll reserve any real conclusions for when the display is in our testing labs, after it's been run through of our torturous testing process.

**

Motion & Refresh Rate**


The LC-68LE920UN includes Sharp's own AquoMotion 240Hz motion processing, which the company claims has been upgraded from previous models to produce smoother movement. Again, we were not able to test this feature, but the demos that Sharp were showing looked good.

**

Viewing Angle**


The demo version of the LC-68LE920UN that we looked at had a good viewing angle: the contrast between blacks and whites looked good out to a wide angle.

Connectivity & Media

Audio & Video Ports


The LC-68LE920UN has a good number of ports for receiveng audio and video from a number of sources, including 4 HDMI ports, one component video port, one composite video input, and a VGA port for connecting to a computer. There's also a single analog audio input.

These ports are all located on the right side of the back of the display, with the digital ones being on the vertical and the analog ones on the horizontal. As well as the video inputs and outputs, there are two USB ports for connecting USB thumb drives or other devices.
**

Media & Other Connectivity**


The USB ports mentioned above allow this display to play back audio and video from USB thumb drives or other similar devices. In addition, this display includes an ethernet port which allows it to connect to the Internet and display streaming audio and video from services such as Netflix or Amazon Video.
**

Placement**


The ports and sockets of this display are a little awkwardly placed: they are set back from the edge, so you will need to reach around the display to get to them. This could be especially awkward if the display is wall mounted, since there will only be a small gap between the display and the wall. Further, some of the ports are downward-facing, which is always means you'll either have to stoop down so you can see what you're doing, or end up blindly fumbling around for an embarrassingly long time.
**

Audio**


Two small speakers are located in the bottom of the display body. We were not able to test these.

Controls, Menu & Remote

Remote


The LC-68LE920UN's remote was not available on the show floor.**

Controls**


The LC-68LE920UN is controlled through a set of touch controls on the bottom right of the display front. The labels of these controls do detract a little bit from the clean look of the design: we prefer the illuminated labels used by some other manufacturers that fade out when the controls aren't in use.

**

Menu**


We were unable to access the on-screen menus of this display.

Conclusion

 

Series Comparison

LE920 Series


The LE920 series is the flagship of Sharp 2010 HDTV lineup, with LED backlights, 240Hz motion processing and Internet streaming. Models are available in 52-inch, 60-inch and 68-inch sizes.

Meet the tester

Richard Baguley

Richard Baguley

Contributor

@@rbaguley

Richard Baguley is a veteran writer who has written about technology ranging from Alphabet to Zip file utilities. He has contributed to pretty much every major tech publication, including Amiga Format Magazine, PC World, Wired, CNET, Toms Guide, Forbes, and many others. He lives in the Boston metro area with his wife, dog, and an indeterminate number of cats.

See all of Richard Baguley's reviews

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