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Toshiba Regza 32XV505DB 32in LCD TV

Author	John Archer
Published	16th Jun 2008
Manufacturer	Toshiba
Price	£469.69 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed	£551.88 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price	Click here

Design
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Sound Quality
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A little while back we looked at and were impressed by Toshiba's HD Ready 32CV505DB, finding it a mighty fine 32in budget TV. So now we're more than a little intrigued to find on our test benches the 32XV505DB: another Toshiba 32in LCD TV which brings a Full HD resolution to the table while adding less than £100 to the price.

Aesthetically the 32XV505DB - part of Toshiba's strangely-named Regza TV range - looks identical to the 32CV505DB, so far as I can tell. Which is no bad thing, as the combination of a slender gloss-black bezel, silver outer trim, and thin ‘speaker strip' jutting out along the bottom make it one of the better looking small LCD TVs in town.

Connectivity is good for the money, too, particularly thanks to the inclusion of three v1.3 HDMI inputs, a component video input, a D-Sub PC port, an optical audio output, and even a subwoofer line-out should you feel inclined to add a powered bass speaker to your setup.

As we made clear at the start of this review, the absolute key specification in the 32XV505DB's make-up is its 1,920 x 1,080 resolution - in fact, it's Toshiba's first ever Full HD 32in TV. This resolution is joined, as with any Full HD TV worthy of the name these days, by a pixel-by-pixel mode for showing the UK's 1080-line HD sources without any image scaling involved to mess things up.

Another very impressive number up the 32XV505DB's sleeve is its claimed contrast ratio of 30,000:1. Achieved with the help of a dynamic contrast arrangement, this figure is easily one of the highest we've yet seen attached to a 32in TV. Fingers crossed it turns out to be more than just Toshiba playing ‘the specification numbers game'.

As with the 32CV505DB, the 32XV505DB's pictures are driven by the latest generation of Toshiba's Active Vision LCD image processing. This is designed to improve detail, colour tones, and contrast while reducing noise levels, and has delivered some decent results in the past. Though in curiously inconsistent fashion, it's delivered some slightly disappointing results as well! Let's hope we don't find ourselves in the ‘disappointing' camp today.

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G1GAHURTZ said on 17th June 2008

Nice review, but I'd have thought that more people would have picked this out as a good desktop combo screen for PC/console.

I've been waiting for a good f... more

Mark said on 20th June 2008

Great reviews which are very helpful.

I'm also looking for a 32inch LCD to connect to a Vista Media Centre PC. Unfortunately a lot of PC's don't suppo... more

Zhiming Wang said on 30th June 2008

Re: Using it as a monitor for a computer.

I have bought this screen from pixmania for ~800 euro. Unfortunately my main PC broke down and I am driving it through VGA using my laptop at 1280x768. The resolutions it supports are kind of funny - standard VGA 4:3 resolutions are supported, so are some oddball wide resolutions, but zooming/letterboxing are kind of funny - they're not supported for modes higher than the 5:4 1280x1024 resolution.

The highest I can drive it using VGA is 1400x1050, but the funny thing is that I cannot output 1280x720 by VGA - so I have to make do with the 16:9.6 aspect ratio 1280x768 resolution, so things are a little skewed. The response time is fairly good - not much ghosting and blurring but you can see a little lag (I am VERY sensitive to this, so most people might not notice at all!) Not quite 2ms lcd with RTC fast, but definitely speedy.

I have hooked up an older pc, and have used a DVI-HDMI cable on a nVidia 8800GTX to output exact scan 1080p60 onto the screen and it does look glorious, no overscan or interference or blurring. It does look quite amazing. One thing I found was that the DVI-HDMI cable does not work on an ATi Radeon 2400 Pro, it gives me a black screen no-matter what I do, but I think that is to do with the card itself having a special method of re-arranging its pinouts to work with a specialised ATi DVI-HDMI dongle - and as I don't have this dongle (may have thrown it out) nor do I have a HDMI-HDMI cable, your luck might be different. The nVidia card itself needed a bit of playing around with using a VGA cable before working properly with the HDMI-DVI cable, but now is working 100% of the time - even at bootup and the bios, so it should be grand.

One thing for using this as a TV or PC monitor/speakers is that the review was spot on in saying how the midrange of the sound is kind of muffled. There doesn't seem to be enough sharpness in the higher frequencies of the sound output and playing around with the in-menu settings can help, but I haven't tried playing around with the audio equalizer settings on the PC itself yet - so it may help a lot!

Anyhow, sorry if this is long and rambling. I hope it helped.

Re: Using it as a monitor for a computer.

I have bought this screen from pixmania for ~800 euro. Unfortunately my main PC broke down and I am driving it through VGA ... more

Ash said on 19th October 2008

I just ordered on from Amazon for £404. I plan to use it as a replacement for my 19" lcd monitor on my PC. Shall let you know how it is once I get it :)

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