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Actually, while I might have sounded a bit blasé about Active Vision 2 back there, it's another quite surprising find given the 37AV635D's puny price tag.

So proud is Toshiba of the MetaBrain that it allows you to call up a couple of real-time graphs showing what the processing is doing at any given moment. Tucked away under a 'Control Visualization' menu option, one busy graph entitled 'distribution' shows via fast-changing peaks and troughs the 'number of pixels' on one axis against 'brightness' on the other, while a separate Control Curve graph shows Output along one axis and Input along the other.

To be honest, with the over-brief instruction manual giving no explanation at all of what these graphs are really showing, they're more an in-store marketing tool than anything a normal user will get much use from. But at least you can look at them and be reassured that the MetaBrain is always keeping busy on your behalf!

Turning to features you can adjust yourself, the 37AV635D helpfully allows you to turn on or off an automatic 3D colour management system, or adjust the hue, saturation and brightness levels of the red, green, blue, cyan, yellow and magenta colour elements. Such fine tuning is pretty remarkable on such a cheap TV.

Just as surprising is the 37AV635D's system for adjusting its backlight settings in response to the image content and amount of light in your room. For while these features are common to most TVs these days, the 37AV635D has an innovative AutoView image option that actually looks at ambient light levels and picture content in tandem. What's more, Toshiba even provides you with a graph-based tool for shifting the base point for the automatic backlight level adjustment to suit your own image tastes.

Yet more flexibility allows you to turn on or off the whole active backlight system, tweak the black/white level, adjust the static gamma level (which can affect the amount of shadow detail the picture shows), adjust the level of Resolution+ processing, and have the picture show just its blue, green or red colours to help you set colours with more precision.

With all this going on, we could easily be talking about a premium TV costing north of a grand rather than one costing well under £600. But the set does have a couple of specs that hint at its budget nature. One is a claimed dynamic contrast ratio of 'just' 23,000:1 that's slightly low compared with many rivals. The other - a real kicker for some people, I suspect - is that the screen's native resolution is an 'HD Ready' 1,366 x 768 pixels rather than the Full HD resolution found on most 37in TVs these days.

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