The Quattron is all about colour though - and does it really stand out? The colours are impressive certainly. Out of the box, though, you'll find it needs taming. Often TVs come preset to impress on the shop floor rather than in the home and it took us a while to reduce the over-saturated colours. Does that yellow sub-pixel make a difference? There does seem to be a greater array of yellow tones on offer and comparing it to a standard RGB display did make us thing that the yellows were more realistic whilst standard screens might be a little more towards green.
But the real question is whether you've had that nagging sense that yellows weren't quite as good as they should be on your TV.
Ironically the colour we had the most trouble with was red and no amount of tinkering gave us the red we wanted — some looked a little orange. But that's not the only thing that the Quattron is about.
There is much more packed into this smart TV. In terms of connectivity you are well catered for across the two connection panels. You get 4x HDMI one of which is v1. An Ethernet connection also allows you to hook-up to your home network to access some types of files, with a USB connection also offering playback, which we'll look at now. The USB connection is at the top of the connection panel which is fine for connecting a USB stick, but you'll need a longer cable if you want to hook-up a larger capacity drive.
We found it was fine with a regular flash drive, but couldn't read a USB-powered 2. From a USB drive the Quattron will offer you photos, music and video playback. The photos and music offerings are fairly standard, but we were impressed with the wide codec support for video playback.
It didn't like all MKV files however, although it recognised the file type, it appeared to play through the file, but no sound or picture appeared. Interestingly, after attempting to run some MKV file tests, returning to regular DTV viewing would leave us with no picture, and we had to disconnect the TV from the power to get it working again.
This technology enables the reproduction of colors that have been difficult to portray using conventional LCD displays, such as the brass color of musical instruments. The addition of the yellow sub-pixel also allows more light to pass through to the panel.
The combination of these factors results in brighter, more vibrant images. Quad Pixel Plus enables the processing of images with higher resolution and less jags in diagonal lines.
But while horizontal resolution appeared very Ultra HDlike, vertical resolution was a different story. In the upper and lower parts of the image, resolution showed no improvement and aliasing was still present see photo 6 , which was disappointing.
On the Sharp, these images had a generally excellent, but inconsistent, level of detail, just like we saw with the test pattern. On various scenes, the detail along the vertically oriented edges of objects had better definition than we saw with the same content downconverted for display on a p TV, or even on the Sharp sets when the Resolution Enhance feature was turned off. But other edges in the image that lay closer to a horizontal position were coarser and more jagged, lacking the smoothness we we saw when played back on the Sony UHD TV.
Still, the overall impression was that the image was slightly sharper than we saw with the Resolution Enhance feature turned off, along with a sense that the pixel density of the TV was a touch finer than on the p display.
With the Resolution Enhance mode active, 4K resolution photos did reveal some added texture when compared to the same image on a regular HD. The weave of the fabric in one photo was slightly better defined on the Sharp than on the p TV in the room, and better than on the Sharp with its Resolution Enhance feature disabled.
When we switched to a high-resolution graphic image, we could see that fine details, such as the whiskers of a cat, looked smooth and well defined when they were in a more upright position thanks to the enhanced horizontal resolution , but these same whiskers became jaggy and choppy as they approached a horizontal position due to the limited vertical resolution , consistent with what we saw in the earlier test pattern.
As a result, the overall image detail was arguably a touch better than the HD image's, but no match for the smooth, seamless detail provided by the Sony UHD TV. We connected our p test pattern generator to the TV to check regular HD performance. First up was our resolution test.
But when we turned the Resolution Enhance feature on, Quattron Plus offered a mixed bag, performancewise. Horizontal resolution was fine, but we were quite surprised to see some loss—as in less than p—of vertical resolution. The concentric circles within our p pattern a different pattern than the one mentioned above showed aliasing on the upper and lower edges, consistent with the loss of some vertical resolution.
We normally use this pattern to optimize the brightness control black level , and it includes a number of boxes with incrementally increasing brightness values emerging from black see photo 7. With the Resolution Enhance feature off, the pattern looked fine, and all boxes were clear and distinct see photo 8, immediately below.
But with the Resolution Enhance feature on, we noticed that the left and right edges of lower near black boxes were blurred see photo 9, the lower image below. As the brightness control was incrementally lowered or raised, the blurring noise incrementally moved to the next box, up or down accordingly. In general, images on the Sharp were bright and richly detailed, and colors looked natural.
Though we had witnessed some unusual red fringing on edges of the horizontal thin white lines of our overscan test pattern an effect of the Resolution Enhance process , any concerns about the affect of subpixel sharing on real-world video were allayed.
We paused on several highly detailed scenes, including a detailed cityscape, and here we did see some slight effects of the loss of vertical resolution, with a touch more jaggies along the diagonals of the building lines than we saw on the p TV in the room. But perhaps the more significant detriment of the Quattron Plus processing showed up as we were playing the "Dark Knight" disc, and also with "Gravity.
And given what we saw with our black levels pattern, we paid close attention. We paused on several dark scenes in "The Dark Knight" such as the screen shot in photo 10, below and toggled the Resolution Enhance feature on and off to what effect the processing would have on real-world video content. There was no mistaking it— the problem was there, and visible. With the Resolution Enhance feature off, as we see in the highlighted area shown in photo 11, an image with dark shadow detail —along with distinctive film grain overlaid on it—looks normal.
Like most other TV makers, Sharp improved its Internet suite significantly for The main Apps menu appears as a strip overlaid along the bottom of the screen, and in addition to the streaming options it provides a shortcut to Aquos Net with widgets like news, weather, photos, and traffic , Aquos Advantage Live, and USB and DLNA access. Sharp's suite is a step behind the suites from Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic in terms of streaming-content offerings Amazon Instant and YouTube are missing and design--although Sharp does get the newer Netflix interface with search and a browsing grid.
The addition of Vudu Apps makes up for a lot, but unfortunately it resides in a completely separate interface with many apps Twitter and Picasa, for example that duplicate ones found in Aquos Net. Vudu's interface is clean and easy to navigate, and its apps are generally well-implemented, although they occupy the whole screen and so you can't watch TV while using them the exception is a stock ticker. Standouts include access to numerous full episodes of PBS staples "Nova" and "Nature," albeit in painfully low quality; Wikipedia; and a solid selection of podcasts.
We love the fact that apps show star ratings, although we couldn't figure out where they came from, and we wish categories were finer given the numerous choices. Check out the Vudu Apps site for a full listing of available apps, but know that most of the premium show-based apps such as for "Dexter" and "True Blood" have clips and not full episodes. The main Aquos Net interface, on the other hand, needs work.
It occupies half the screen and widgets live in that "console," an arrangement that works fine but doesn't accommodate custom widget sizes.
Worse, the widgets can be hard to find; the main "Add widgets" menu only lists a portion of those available, while the Aquos Network houses some more. The design seems outdated, the menus are crowded, and there's no obvious way to rearrange or customize widgets' placement in the console.
In Sharp's favor we liked having a traffic widget--still uncommon among TVs and a boon to commuters--and appreciated the quick response times throughout. Next to Vudu Apps, however, the main Aquos Net apps seem like a poorly executed afterthought. We'd appreciate the ability to tweak dejudder beyond the two presets, but we'll take a color management system, especially one that works as well as Sharp's, over that extra any day. We like that the OPC ambient light sensor is prominently displayed in the main picture menu, and that Netflix and Vudu allow full picture control.
The Sharp's bay has all the necessary connectivity options, and we appreciated not having to use breakout cables for the analog jacks, as is the case with many thin LCDs and plasmas these days. Its full-array LED backlight deserves much of the credit: while it doesn't deliver the black-level benefits of local dimming, it does improve uniformity compared with edge-lit models.
That backlight also appeared to improve black levels and color in dark areas compared with Sharp's edge-lit inch model. The Movie setting of the LCLE73U is the most accurate out of the box, with a relatively linear grayscale and gamma. Also, Movie's default color gamut is Expanded, which Sharp tells us is designed to show off the effects of the extra yellow pixel. In Expanded green, cyan, and yellow color points are quite a bit outside the HD color standard, which is typical of such modes on other TVs.
During our calibration , Sharp's color controls were able to bring those color points back into line, although green and blue ended up undersaturated and the grayscale was still a bit minus-red in the midrange. Overall however the LCLE73U set up quite well, and there was little detriment or advantage we could spot related to the extra yellow pixel. Black level: The LCLE73U turned in a solid performance in this area, delivering better black levels than the inch Vizio and inch Sharp, though falling a bit short of the Samsung UND and Vizio, and shorter still of the plasmas.
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