Verdict

The good old combi TV is making a comeback, it would seem. Sony has recently started building Blu-ray players into some of its big-screen TVs, while numerous brands have ramped up production of small-screen sets with built-in DVD and/or multimedia players.

It’s another example of this growing utilitarian trend we’ve got before us today, in the shape of Toshiba’s 22DV713B: a 22in LCD TV with an integrated DVD player tucked down its left rear side.

As with the similarly specified Sharp 22DV200E we reviewed recently, Toshiba’s set integrates its DVD player rather elegantly in that it’s really not much deeper around the back than your average standalone 22in TV. It doesn’t offer quite as many overt style flourishes with its bezel design as the rival Sharp model, but it’s by no means an ugly TV – not least because of the exceptionally high gloss finish that’s been applied to its black bezel.

It’s worth adding, too, that if black doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can also get the TV in high-gloss white under the model name 22DV714.

The 22DV713 jumps ahead of its Sharp rival with its connections. For instance, while the 22DV200 only manages one HDMI input, Toshiba’s TV gives you two. What’s more, while one is on the rear, as you’d expect, the other HDMI is down the TV’s side, providing an accessible connection for the current generation of HD consoles, or HD camcorders.

The other big advantage of the 22DV713B in connectivity terms is its USB input. For while the USBs on Sharp 22DV200Es are only for service use, the USB on the 22DV713B can play back photo and MP3 audio files. Excellent.

It’s pleasing given how cheap the 22DV713B is to find it also sporting a D-Sub PC input, with other key connections including a single RGB Scart, a headphone jack, an optical digital audio output, a component video input and, of course, a tuner input. This feeds analogue and Freeview (standard def) tuners.

The USB port mentioned earlier isn’t the 22DV713B’s only multimedia outlet, either. For the DV deck is also capable of playing JPEGs, MP3s and DivX video files from discs.

Given that the 22DV713B is really startlingly cheap for what’s on offer at £223, we were pleasantly surprised as we started using the TV by its remote control. For while it’s build is predictably plasticky, it’s also pleasingly large, helping it cope well with the extensive button count demanded by the TV’s combi status.

Buttons are well laid out too for the most part, with the DVD controls sensibly separated out from the TV controls. In an ideal world the disc navigation controls might have been set on a slightly raised section of the remote, and the AV input button would have been given more prominence. But overall the remote experience is better than expected.

The same can’t be said for the 22DV713B’s onscreen menu system, which is slightly disappointing by Toshiba standards in terms of both presentation and content. The main presentation issues are that the text is – unnecessarily – too small to be comfortably readable from a distance, and that there’s too much menu scrolling. We didn’t like the way the TV changed channel each time we shifted to a new programme on the EPG listings either – especially as this makes surfing the EPG feel unduly sluggish.

As for content, we’ve become spoiled by other TVs in Toshiba’s range into expecting startlingly expansive feature counts. But on the 22DV713B, the only processing tricks we could find, for instance, are a basic noise reduction tool, a mode for having the picture adjust itself to the monitored light levels in your room, and a ‘DynaLight’ function that automatically adjusts picture settings based on the picture content being shown. All features which are pretty much standard LCD TV issue these days.

There’s nothing like the same flexibility witnessed with many Toshiba TVs, either, when it comes to tweaking the look of the 22DV713B’s pictures. The only pleasing finding is an option to adjust the backlight output as well as the more standard contrast and brightness controls.

Kicking off our assessment of the 22DV713B’s performance with ”Pirates of the Caribbean” on DVD, it’s an immediate relief to find the disc slot much more willing to take in discs than Sharp’s scarily stubborn 22DV200E. This is even the case if you haven’t pre-selected the 22DV713B’s DVD ‘channel’; you just pop a disc in the slot, and the TV automatically switches into DVD playback mode.

Oddly the TV frequently refused to go into anamorphic widescreen mode with DVDs until the main film started to play (staying 4:3 for trailers and menus) – and also didn’t always auto-adjust to the right aspect ratio with some widescreen signals from an attached Sky HD box, come to that. But this is a relatively minor irritation in the great scheme of things.

In picture quality terms, the 22DV713B’s DVD playback is generally impressive for such a cheap TV – though there are certainly shortcomings.

The biggest strengths are the image’s brightness and surprisingly natural colour palette. Sub-26in LCD screens frequently come a cropper in both these departments, but the 22DV713B pumps out enough lumens to work within a kitchen or even conservatory environment without over-cooking colours.

This means that while the colour palette on show is certainly vibrant – with excellent rendering, for instance, of the rich red soldier coats in Pirates… – subtle fair like skin tones and vegetation are handled with unexpected authenticity.

Pictures look decently if not spectacularly sharp on the 1,366 x 768 screen too (with a rider we’ll come back to in a moment), and images look pleasingly stable thanks to a general absence of overt MPEG decoding noise or the slight twitching witnessed with low-quality DVD players.

The most surprising plus point, though, is that predominantly bright scenes enjoy a reasonable sense of contrast, as some passably deep black colours are able to co-exist in the same frame with the bright, well-saturated fare mentioned before.

The biggest flaw with the picture is the presence of some occasionally pretty noticeable motion blur. This undermines the otherwise strong sharpness performance during action sequences, especially if those sequences have lots of camera pans as well as motion within a frame.

To be fair, the level of motion blur is by no means bad by the standards of small TVs at the Toshiba’s price point. It’s just an issue to consider – especially if you’re driven more by picture quality than price. The motion blur is certainly more aggressive than it is on Panasonic’s 19in L19D28 or Sony’s 22in 22E5300, for instance – but both those TVs are considerably more expensive, and don’t offer integrated DVD playback.

The other rather predictable area of difficulty for the 22DV713B is black level response during predominantly dark scenes. For what seemed to be a decent black level response when viewing predominantly bright fare is rather caught out when night falls or the lights get turned off. The amount of greyness apparent over the darkest areas is sufficient to make pictures look less natural and vibrant, and also smothers background detail, leaving very dark scenes feeling short of depth.

Again, though, we need to keep this in perspective. For while the more expensive Panasonic and Sony rivals mentioned a moment ago certainly produce a deeper, richer black portrayal, the 22DV713B really isn’t bad at all within its price bracket. It’s certainly a match for the Sharp 22DV200E, at any rate.

The 22DV713B does fall prey to a couple more extremely common small LCD TV shortcomings, in that there’s a little strip of brightness inconsistency about a cm wide along the top and bottom edges of the picture, and its speakers sound thin, overworked and acutely underpowered when pushed at all hard by a film soundtrack. But overall…

Verdict

…we’re finding it really pretty hard to knock the 22DV713B. It’s cute enough to look at, it’s surprisingly well set up for multimedia use, and even its performance – while certainly not without flaws – is better than you’ve much right to expect for only a smidge over £220.

The occasionally irksome operating system – especially the EPG – is probably our biggest problem with the set, but bargain-hunting buyers might reasonably feel that a little teeth-grinding and impatience are small prices to pay for what is overall a really great value little combi TV.

Trusted Score