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As you’d expect of an affordable LCD TV with an HD Ready badge, the 37WL66 boasts an HD-friendly native pixel resolution of 1,366 x 768, with other key specifications including very credible measurements of 500cd/m2 for brightness and 1000:1 for contrast ratio. Let’s just hope these measurements are less ‘fanciful’ than those of one or two rival brands we can think of…

A quest for features beyond the HD Ready status starts off with a disappointment: there’s no digital tuner. This initially seems odd on what otherwise appears to be a cutting edge TV until you realise that: a) if you want a digital tuner Toshiba has a version of the set, the 37WLT66, with one in; and b) not having a digital tuner lets Toshiba sell the 37WL66 for the best part of £300 less than its digital counterpart. In other words, the 37WL66 is there as a great money-saving option for people who already have a Sky or Freeview receiver box.

There’s some decent compensation for the lack of digital tuner, in any case, in the 37WL66’s provision of Toshiba’s Active Vision LCD picture processing system. As with rival systems found on the majority of other LCD TVs these days, Active Vision works across a range of picture elements, improving such things as motion, contrast, the amount of picture detail, and colours. Based on past experience, the only key thing that separates Active Vision LCD from many of its rivals is simply how good it is, so we’re hoping that trend will continue today.

Features you can play with yourself from the onscreen menus are reasonably numerous. People wanting to double up the TV as a computer screen, for instance, will appreciate a 3D Colour Management tool that’s intended to readjust the core white balance and colour settings so that they’re more in tune with PC demands. And closet tinkerers might find themselves spending hours altering the hue, saturation and brightness levels of the red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta colour elements via a Base Colour Adjustment system.

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