The Sharp Aquos Quattron TV has one humdinger of a unique selling point: it can supposedly create 1,000 times more colours than rival LCD TVs. While most LCD televisions create all their colours using a red, green and blue (RGB) colour matrix, the Quattron adds an extra yellow sub-pixel, which its makers claim allows it to create shades of colour never before seen on an LCD TV. But do these bold promises hold up to real world scrutiny? This section of our Sharp Aquos Quattron TV review will tell you just that.
Read the rest of our Sharp Aquos Quattron TV review
Sharp Aquos review: Quattron TV verdict
Sharp Aquos Quattron TV review: net connected skills
It’s a simple question: does that fourth pixel put the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV head and shoulders over every other LCD TV when it comes to colour reproduction? The answer, you’ll probably be a tad disappointed to learn, is no. But the TV’s colour reproduction is up there with the very best tellies you can buy, even if it doesn’t noticeably surpass them.
Sharp’s claim that the TV can produce 1,000 times more colours than regular RGB LCD televisions may well be true, but it’s almost impossible to judge that with the human eye. We can certainly say that it’s capable of producing a huge range of colour shades – browsing through a selection of digital photos it’s easy to see how well the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV deals with gradation from light to dark. Some flat screen TVs display “bands” of colour in these gradual shifts, which can be quite jarring when you see it, but that’s certainly not the case with this TV. It produces clean, bright and accurate colour, particularly when fed HD signals.
Whack on a Blu-ray and you’ll see just how well this LCD telly delivers colour. The yellow paint of taxicabs in Casino Royale’s Miami scene on the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV is beautifully clean and clear, while Bond’s skin tones are also accurate and, well, just look right.
The Sharp Aquos Quattron TV uses edge LED backlighting, and while it doesn’t offer quite the same impact on contrast as direct LED backlighting and localised dimming, does deliver very impressively on both the black level and brightness front. The backlight is adjustable, too, so if you crank it right down you can pull the blinds and turn out all the lights and the TV will still display strong, deep blacks, where many TVs’ blacks turn a washed-out grey in such situations. At the other end of the scale, whites and other colours blaze out incredibly brightly from the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV. Watching the North London derby, we were dazzled by the sheer whiteness of Spurs’ shirts.
There’s also 100Hz processing on board. A lot of rival models are now including motion processing technology offering 200Hz or more, so the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV can’t claim to be at the bleeding edge in this regard. That said, its motion processing – which doubles the number of frames per second from 50 to 100 – does a good job with fast-moving content like football, so you don’t get significant motion judder.
The TV has a full 1080p resolution and delivers the sort of sharpness and detail you’d expect from a high end model. You can adjust sharpness, but HD content from Blu-ray, Sky HD or an Xbox 360 looks sufficiently detailed. Object edges look sharply defined, but at the same time the TV keeps a reasonably firm control on noise. You can spot speckles of noise in certain situations (dark, but not quite black backgrounds seem the worst culprit), but nothing too off-putting, at least from a good quality source.
Overall, the Sharp Aquos Quattron TV delivers a truly impressive image, particularly with high quality HD sources. Does its fourth colour pixel represent a revolution in flat screen technology? No, quite frankly – but whatever the technology inside the TV won’t let you down when it comes to serving up excellent pictures.
Read the rest of our Sharp Aquos Quattron TV review
Sharp Aquos review: Quattron TV verdict
Sharp Aquos Quattron TV review: net connected skills
