Sharp LC40LB700X LED television

The Sharp LC40LB700X is a 40in LED-backlit LCD television with great picture quality, vivid colours and an integrated Blu-ray disc player. It’s the most powerful all-in-one television we’ve seen, and its sharp and colourful images help to make it a great buy.

LCD televisions with integrated DVD players have been on the market for a long time; some recent models include the Teac LCDV2655HD and the Teac LCD228HDM. Sharp is the first company to offer a TV with an integrated Blu-ray player. The LC40LB700X is also the company's first LED television.

Because the Sharp LC40LB700X uses LED backlighting — rather than LED edge-lighting like Samsung’s Series 7 (UA46B7100) and Series 8 (UA46B8000) televisions — it is roughly as deep and as heavy as a regular LCD television.

The section-specific local dimming boosts the screen’s contrast ratio to an impressive 2,000,000:1. The Samsung panels claim an extra million, but at these numbers it’s all a little frivolous anyway.

Setting up the Sharp screen is a breeze — having the BD player integrated saves the effort of plugging in an extra cable. If you do have other devices to plug in, though, the Sharp LC40LB700X LED television has three HDMI ports as well as VGA, component, composite and S-Video.

Picture quality from the screen is excellent — it’s among the best LCD panels we’ve seen, with vivid colour and high levels of image clarity. As a 100Hz panel — Sharp’s implementation is called Fine Motion Advanced — motion is well handled, even on low-quality television broadcasts. We watched a game of gridiron on ONE HD at 1080i resolution and found the motion rarely jittery or unsettling.

The quality of the integrated Blu-ray player is acceptable but not stellar. Picture quality is as good as any other player we’ve seen on the market, with great levels of fine image detail and brilliantly clear DVD upscaling, but our main gripe was the slow speed of the player. Even when loading a regular DVD the player would sit and think for a few seconds before acting, and on-screen menus were slightly sluggish. Only having to use one remote control is a big bonus, however. It’s important to note that there’s no internal memory for the Blu-ray player, so to use BD-Live features you’ll need to insert a flash drive in the television’s USB port and connect the TV to your network through the Ethernet port.

Thanks to its efficient LED backlighting, the Sharp LC40LB700X snags a six-star energy rating; eco-friendly features like backlight dimming and automatic shutdown help reduce the television’s power consumption.

For what we think is a reasonable price compared to other plasma and LED television screens of similar quality, the extra bonus of an integrated Blu-ray disc player makes the Sharp LC-40LB700X a great value-for-money proposition.

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