Product Review: 60" Sharp Aquos LED HDTV

Purchase a Sharp Aquos 60-inch 1080p 240Hz LCD HDTV from Amazon.com

So, a funny thing happened during my last business trip.  I got a phone call from my wife.  She was a little upset because she turned on our television – a Mitsubishi 55″ Rear Projection TV – and everything was pink.  No matter what channel she turned it to, the entire set was pink.  Now, this particular television was about seven years old.  Not ancient, by any means, but it had been moved once or twice and had lived ‘at the beach’ (we rented an apartment four blocks from the ocean for four years), so it had been exposed to some harsh environments.  I figured my trusty stand-by had finally kicked the bucket.

When I finally got home about three days later, we headed out to a local electronics store and zeroed in on a Sharp Aquos 60-inch 1080p 240Hz LCD HDTV. This television had it all – a great picture, good sound quality (although, we would be hooking our surround sound system to it), and multiple different inputs.  Not to mention that the price was terrific!  We bought it, as well as a wall mount, that day.  The folks at the store were great – even going so far as to measure my car to see if it would fit (just barely) and taking it out of the box and firing it up to make sure I was not lugging a defective unit back to my house.

When we got home, I proceeded with the act of removing the old beast – it must have weighed about 300-400 pounds – and installing the new one.  It took me a little longer than I expected, but the new set looked great on the wall.  I hooked up all the electronics – DVD player, cable, video game systems, etc – and then I fired it up for its inaugural viewing.

EVERYTHING WAS PINK!

After about ten minutes of troubleshooting, it was determined that the only thing that was wrong was the cable box.  A quick call to our cable provided resulted in a crystal clear picture.  Unfortunately, it took a multi-thousand dollar investment to get to this point!  And the kicker was that, even if I wanted to pack it back up and bring it back, I wouldn’t have a TV.  Some copper scrapper strolled up about half an hour after we put the old television on the curb and snipped the power cord for its copper.  Long story short, we now had a great television, a perfectly functioning cable box and a whole lot more room in our den!

Overall, I highly recommend this product.  It has a lot of things going for it:

• The picture is insane – 1080p is an insane picture with the only problem being that not all high-definition (HD) channels broadcast in 1080p.  Most are at the 720p or 1080i level.
• There are a number of inputs – four HDMI, two HD Component, two composite video, four RCA audio inputs, one 9-pin RS-232C serial input and one 15-pin PC input.
• The overall usability of the television is simple.  The controls are very intuitive and the input selection can be easily customized so you know exactly what input you are selecting rather than just remembering that Input 1 is Cable, Input 2 is DVD, etc.
• The unit really is plug-and-play.  No real set-up is required – even the remote control is easy to get used to and can be customized to accommodate your cable box so that you are eliminating multiple remote controls.
• A nifty little feature I like is that, when you change channels, the television tells you what resolution the channel you are watching is being broadcast in.  There’s no real value to it – I mean, if you want to watch the football game, you’re going to watch it whether its 480p or 1080p – but it’s pretty neat nonetheless.

The only drawbacks I have found on this set is that I have yet to find side-by-side functionality on this television.  One thing I liked about my old set was that I could be playing a video game on one half of the screen while I had a ball game playing on the other half.  I lose that capability with this television.

Overall, I give this set two very big thumbs up.  I highly recommend it!