Cloud based data management

Delayed gratification

The 40LE381E also has an Ethernet port, but at least Sharp is decent enough to include a USB adaptor for wireless connectivity. Alas, what's given with one hand, is taken with the other – you have to pay £69 extra for the 3D glasses, as these aren’t included as standard.

The EPG is bit lacklustre...

The 40LE831E isn’t the cheapest 40in HD TV currently available by any means, but that extra yellow pixel does produce very attractive results with HD content, producing very rich and vibrant colours. The default settings seemed to produce slightly pale skin tones initially, but there are a number of preset viewing modes as well as manual controls for adjusting the colour settings, and I had no trouble locating a preset that I liked better.

...although the menus are tidily organised

However, the appearance of SD channels from our Freeview HD box was merely average, with a touch of fuzziness around the edges of objects that could have used a little sharpening. If you’re mostly still watching SD channels on Freeview then there are cheaper alternatives available that will do just as good a job with SD content.

USB Timeshift in action

Sharp has brought in the handy ‘USB Timeshift’ option that it introduced in some of its Aquos models last year, which allows you to use a USB memory stick as a memory buffer so that you can timeshift the live TV broadcast (although you can’t record onto a memory stick).

Media player content sources

The 40LE831E also works quite well as a media player. It supports DLNA/UPnP networking, and has a clean, efficient interface for playing music, photos or videos stored on a memory stick. There is one annoying limitation here, though. The 40LE831E played all the video files I tested on it, including MP4, DiVX and MKV, but it completely ignored my AAC music from iTunes as it only supports MP3 audio.

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