Toshiba 3D LED TV 46 Inch – The 46TL868B

What is it?
A surprisingly affordable 46in LED TV with a slimline design, online functionality and active 3D support.

What’s great
Its space-saving is a great find for the money, its price is very attractive, its picture performance is mostly strong.

What’s not
Dark scenes don’t look particularly brilliant, and Toshiba Places is currently short of content.

The bottom line
Although it’s not without its flaws, Toshiba’s 46TL868 still represents terrific value for money.

Toshiba TV Review

Usually when a 46in TV is as affordable as £650, you’re talking about a set that’s basic in the extreme, and probably rather flimsy in the picture quality department as well. Toshiba’s 46TL868, however, is definitely the exception that proves the rule.

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The 46TL868 immediately stands out from the budget crowd with its design, which features one of the slimmest bezels around. This allows the TV to fit into a smaller space than any other cheap 46in TV, and also means your attention is diverted less from the pictures the screen produces.

Connections, meanwhile, could easily have been transplanted onto the 46TL868 from a much more expensive TV, including as they do a quartet of v1.4 (3D-friendly) HDMI ports, a pair of USBs and a LAN port.

The USBs can play back a fair variety of music, photo and video file formats, including DivX HD, while the LAN delivers the ‘double whammy’ of DLNA network streaming and connection to Toshiba’s online platform.

Called Places, this platform impresses with its colourful, clear and mostly well-organised interface, and with its attempts to personalise the Places experience by supporting multiple user profiles. It’s also recently had its content level bolstered by the addition of the AceTrax movie service and a Facebook app. However, Places still lags some way behind all the other online platforms in content terms, with the BBC iPlayer, YouTube and a trio of subscription video servers (HiT Entertainment, Cartoon Network and Box Office 365) the only other services of note.

200 HZ Pictures For Amazing Clarity

Getting back into more positive territory, the 46TL868 delivers a Freeview HD tuner, 200Hz picture processing and a surprising amount of picture calibration – including a reasonable colour management system. Just be careful with the Active Vision system for improving the appearance of motion, though, as this can cause pictures to look over-processed if set any higher than its Standard mode.

Arguably the most surprising feature on the 46TL868 given is price is its 3D support. Especially as this is of the active shutter, full HD type. There is a key catch you need to be aware of, however, namely that the TV doesn’t come with even one pair of active shutter glasses included for free. So adding enough for, say, a family of four could add £250 or more to the overall price.

Normally we’d feel a bit annoyed by this, but the 46TL868 offers so much else for its price that actually providing the opportunity to ‘upgrade’ to 3D as and when you wish/can afford it seems a better option than making the TV more expensive just so 3D glasses can be included.

In most ways that matter, the 46TL868′s pictures are much better than they’ve any right to be. For instance, while many very affordable LCD TVs suffer with pretty heavy motion blur, the 46TL868 handles action-packed sequences with striking clarity and minimal judder.

This helps it look sharper with HD sources than most cheap sets too – a quality underlined by the impressive brightness level the screen pumps out.

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Perhaps the biggest surprise for the 46TL868′s price, though, is the way its high brightness output doesn’t come at the expense of a good contrast range. For the screen can produce more than respectable black colours alongside clean whites and vibrant colours, without either the black colours looking ‘misty’ or the colour range looking compressed.

The 46TL868′s 3D performance is also better than anticipated, comfortably justifying spending extra to secure some glasses. Pictures look punchy, sharp, full of depth, and only troubled by relatively minor amounts of crosstalk.

The strengths described thus far mean the 46TL868 already exceeds budget expectations by some margin. But it’s inevitably not perfect. Standard definition pictures, for instance, while reasonably sharp and free of noise, don’t enjoy the same colour richness as their HD counterparts. The 46TL868′s edge LED system could also be a little better, in that there are some gentle – but only gentle – signs of lighting inconsistency during dark scenes, especially in the top corners.

The tiny frame around the 46TL868, meanwhile, makes it difficult for the set to deliver a particularly powerful audio performance; the soundstage certainly seems a bit flat and constrained when pushed hard.

Balancing everything about the 46TL868 up, though, the unavoidable conclusion is that it’s a mid-level TV at a budget price. And that makes it very easy to recommend indeed.

Essential info
Screen size: 46in
Screen technology: edge LED
3D ready: Yes
Full HD resolution: Yes
Online services: Yes – Smart TV
Connections: Four v1.4 HDMIs, two USBs, component video, D-Sub PC input, composite video input, RF input, LAN, RGB Scart, PC audio input, digital audio output, stereo audio input, headphone output
Dimensions: 1056(w) x 57(d)mm
Weight: 13.25kg

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Topic:

Toshiba 3D LED TV 46

Article source: http://tech.uk.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=161236418