Sharp Aquos LC40CT2E review

You get both analogue and Freeview HD tuners built into the LC40CT2E, so at least you’ll be able to view high definition broadcasts without the need for a set top box. However, the initial auto-scan that’s run when the TV is turned on for the first time only searches for analogue channels. You then have to figure out how to manually run the scan for the Freeview HD tuner. Of course you’ll only have to do this once, but it’s still slightly annoying.

While we’re on the subject of the Freeview HD tuner, it has to be said that this TV has the ugliest EPG we’ve seen in a very long time. Even looking past the dated presentation, the EPG is annoyingly sluggish in use and also lacks a preview window.

When it comes to picture quality, the Sharp lives up to its name and renders very sharp HD images. However, black level response is disappointing. In the current LED-obsessed TV market it would be easy to put this down to the fact that the Sharp uses a traditional CCFL light source, but we’ve seen CCFL TVs do much better before.

Dropping the brightness to turn those dark greys into blacks results in a significant loss of shadow detail, and when watching a movie like Dark City, where much of each scene is in shadow, that’s simply not acceptable. Of course the black levels also affect the vibrancy of colours, which meant that Coraline on Blu-ray lacked the impact that its strong colours bursting out of dark scenes should create.

The situation doesn’t improve when you turn to standard definition content either, with pictures looking dirty. The sharp, crisp images seen with HD sources are completely absent when watching SD footage. Even high quality standard definition feeds like BBC1 on Freeview seemed to suffer from excessive compression artefacts. At least sound quality is above average for an LCD TV, there’s a bit more oomph to the low frequency effects than is the norm.

The Sharp LC40CT is a very cheap 40in TV, but the image quality simply isn’t good enough.