Verdict

Pros

• Attractively priced
• Bright HD scenes look pretty good
• Good connectivity

Cons

• Average black level response
• HD looks soft
• Colours look off with some picture presets

What is the Toshiba 50L7355D?

The 50L7355D is a mid-range 50-inch LCD TV equipped with Toshiba’s latest Cloud TV smart system, active 3D playback, multimedia playback, and built-in Wi-Fi. It’s quite aggressively priced for such a large and apparently well-featured TV too, setting you back a mere £770. Is it a bargain or a false economy?

Toshiba 50L7355D – Design & Connections

Aesthetically the Toshiba 50L7355D is nothing special by today’s
standards; its bezel is slightly wider than many of the latest
super-slim models, and its rear is slightly deeper than today’s norm
too. On the upside, the silver trim along the bottom edge contrasts
nicely with the black used elsewhere, and the rectangular stand is well
built and attractively connected using a very neat pole neck.

The 50L7355D’s connectivity is up to 2013 speed, thanks in particular to four HDMIs, two USBs, and LAN/built-in Wi-Fi network connectivity. The USBs and network options both support playback of video, photo and music multimedia files (though your PC needs to be DLNA compatible and ideally Windows 7 or later for that option to work), and the network connections additionally allow you to take your TV online with Toshiba’s new Cloud TV platform.

Toshiba 50L7355D – Smart TV

As with all the latest major smart TV platforms, read our Toshiba Cloud TV review for an in-depth look at Toshiba’s system. But to briefly sum up what we found, Cloud TV is a brave attempt to introduce to the Smart TV universe useful personalisation tools, a genuinely helpful TV recommendations system, and some helpful ways of searching for and organising your various video sources – including effective browsing of the TV’s electronic programme guide on your Android or iOS tablet or phone.

However, the system is not done any favours by its very sluggish operating system (even simply switching the TV on and off causes a delay of more than a second!), its instability (we experienced numerous crashes) and the fact that its current important video streaming services are limited to the BBC iPlayer, Netflix, BBC Sport, BBC News, Viewster and Blinkbox. There’s no LoveFilm, 4OD, ITV Player or Demand Five.

Toshiba 50L7355D – Set-Up

Toshiba has a proud record of going out of its way to offer extensive
picture calibration tools, even on its relatively affordable TVs. And
this tradition continues with knobs on in the Toshiba 50L7355D.

Among the highlights are a well thought out test pattern (pictured below) to help you make your adjustments; an RGB filter that lets you turn on or off the red, green or blue colour components individually when fine tuning colours; colour and tint adjustments; a white balance management system complete with 2p or 10p setting types and offset and gain adjustments for the red, green and blue colour elements; and separate hue, saturation and brightness adjustments for the red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and cyan colour elements.

You can even auto-calibrate the TV’s gamma if you invest in one of Toshiba’s optional external USB light meter kits. Though at the time of writing, we were unable to track these kits down anywhere in the UK. Despite the missing calibration kits, though, it’s hard to see how much more flexibility Toshiba could have given you.

If all this calibration talk has scared up your inner technophobe, mind you, it’s worth stressing that the Toshiba 50L7355D also offers a long selection of picture presets, including three ‘Hollywood’ modes designed to offer pre-calibrated day, night and ‘pro’ colour and contrast settings that get close to the values required by the key established video standards.

It means you should be able to get the best for the set no matter how willing you are to tweak and fix things.