Sharp Aquos LC-80LE844U

Display Size & Technology

As you might have noticed, this LCD HDTV is quite large. It measures 80 inches diagonally, which is typically not a size that’s been available as a consumer item. One might say the screen size is the main selling point of this TV.

Formats & Resolution

The TV has a 1080p resolution, if it sticks to its specs. Most manufacturers are decking out their high-end displays with 4K2K resolution or better, so 1080p seems like a strange choice on such a large display. What’s interesting is you can actually see the grid that separates the pixel clusters from a pretty far distance: maybe six to eight feet away from the TV. If you’re sitting the recommended ten feet away or further, however, we don’t foresee the pixel spacing being a problem.

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio

The demo reel on the show floor wasn’t really focused on portraying deep blacks or high contrast scenery. From what we could see, the blacks didn’t look offensively bright, but they were pretty crushed. Hopefully this was due to some processing they’d enabled for the show floor.

Color

One of Sharp’s biggest initiatives is the Quattron system, which inserts a yellow element into the typical red, green, and blue. They claim this improves certain elements of color display, but at most it will just result in yellow being stronger than it should be.

This being said, compared to some of the other TVs we saw on the show floor, we thought the Sharp Aquos LC-80LE844U had some decent color performance. Other TVs had all their processing turned on, which resulted in bright colors being crushed into smears, but the LC-80LE844U actually appeared to be (somewhat) calibrated. Of course, every shot in their demo video prominently displayed

Of course, this is just our impression from the show floor—we weren’t able to bring the CS200 to the show to do some impromptu lab testing. Check back for our full review if you want to see the LC-80LE844U run through our regular testing process.

Motion & Refresh Rate

The TV re weren’t any specs available on the motion performance. It clearly had some kind of motion voodoo enabled, however, because some scenes appeared choppy while others appeared unnaturally smooth. Assuming we can even fit this TV into our lab, the first thing we’ll do is turn off all these processing features.

Viewing Angle

The viewing angle on this TV looked pretty good. We were able to get to about a 45° angle before the picture was noticeably dimmer. This was a pretty informal test, however, so we’ll reserve our full judgment for after we have our test data.