Sharp has announced that it will unveil its first-ever Mini-LED LCD TV for the global market at the Consumer Electronics Show next month. The new TV will be a premium model branded as "XLED", and will be showcased alongside a prototype of what Sharp insists will be the world’s largest Mini-LED model.
Older TV enthusiasts may remember a time when Sharp was considered to be one of the world’s top brands, regularly announcing competitive, high-end models with premium features. However, in recent years the company has been surpassed by the likes of Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Sony and Panasonic, and is better known as a seller of more affordable, mid-range TVs.
Now though, Sharp is apparently planning a comeback with its XLED model promising premium features that can compete with the best its rivals have to offer.
Sharp said its new flagship AQUOS XLED TV will be announced at CES 2023. “Visitors can experience a new generation of images with outstanding brightness and colour expression created by mini-LED backlighting and quantum-dot technology,” the company announced.
Interestingly, Sharp isn’t the first company to use the XLED branding. Vizio announced an XLED TV back in 2017, although that model did not feature Mini-LED backlight technology. Rather, the branding was more of an equivalent to Samsung’s QLED or Hisense’s ULED, which refers to quantum dot LCD TVs. Vizio ultimately dropped the XLED branding in 2019, though it continues to use the same technology.
Sharp currently sells a 65-inch XLED TV (pictured) that features IPS LCD, 4K resolution and sports 2,160 local dimming zones, though that model is only available in China. It’s not clear if the new global model will be similar or have any new features.
In addition, the company said it will launch a new prototype at CES of the “world’s largest 120-inch model”. Once again, Vizio has Sharp beat in this regard, as it launched its own 120-inch LCD TV way back in 2015. That model was notably the first in the world to support the Dolby Vision HDR standard. However, Sharp says that its 120-inch model will be the world’s first Mini-LED LCD TV of that size, though given that it’s just a prototype, we’ll have to wait and see if it ever becomes commercially available.
Currently, the largest Mini-LED LCD TVs on the market are 98-inch models sold by Samsung and TCL.
