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There’s a decent amount of connection options on offer, although the C series entry level status is reflected by the lack of HDMI 1.3 support, with the two HDMI ports conforming to the older 1.2 standard. The result is that you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the Deep Colour feature that an HDMI 1.3 equipped TV could – assuming that you have a source device that’s also HDMI 1.3 capable and have compatible software of course. It’s fair to say that anyone who’s interested in Deep Colour and the other advantages that go along with HDMI 1.3 won’t be looking at a TV like the 42C3030D though.

As well as the aforementioned twin HDMI ports, you also get component video input, twin Scarts (one RGB), a D-SUB port for PC connection, S-Video, composite video and an RF aerial socket. There’s also a fair amount of outputs at the rear. There’s both analogue and optical digital audio out - the latter for streaming Dolby Digital from Freeview channels, if that service ever becomes available. There’s also a dedicated subwoofer output so that you can add a bit of low frequency oomph to your sound. The final connection at the rear is a CI slot for adding subscription TV packages to the integrated digital tuner. Unusually the 42C3030D has a captive power cable rather than a power socket, although previous Toshiba sets have employed the same system.

The 42C3030D has both analogue and digital tuners inside, although I’ve never really been sure why you’d choose to watch an analogue tuner when you have a digital one on hand. That said, the picture quality from the analogue tuner was surprisingly good on this TV, so if you were mad enough to want to make use of it, you won’t be disappointed. Auto tuning of both tuners was simple and painless, while the process of ordering your analogue channels is intuitive enough for even the most non-technical user to get to grips with.

Toshiba’s Active Vision LCD picture processing is present, although the impressive Active Vision M100 100Hz processing is reserved for the flagship Z series models. What you do get is dynamic backlight control, which will tailor the intensity of the backlight to the scene being viewed. This means that if you’re watching a dark scene, the backlight will be dialled back in an effort to improve black levels - this should hopefully eliminate the “grey” effect that has traditionally plagued LCD TVs. There’s also MPEG noise reduction and digital noise reduction on offer, which can be activated in varying degrees.

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