Toshiba Regza 40SL753 Review

With Toshiba seemingly focussing more and more on becoming the leading budget TV brand, its once impressive reputation for innovation – at least where its UK operation is concerned – has been on the wane. And in one way the 40SL753 merely confirms this, for by being Toshiba’s very first edge LED TV, it immediately causes us to reflect on just how long it’s been since we saw the first edge LED TVs from the likes of Sony, Philips, Samsung, LG and, to a lesser extent, Panasonic.

Basically, the 40SL753’s arrival is long overdue. So it would be nice if it proves that Toshiba has been using its extra development time wisely in coming up with something a bit special.

Hopes that this may be so are reduced, however, by its lowly price of just £612.70 – something we noticed about the 40SL753 actually well before we figured out its edge LED lighting. This price would look reasonably affordable on a normal CCFL LCD TV, never mind an edge LED model, and it immediately raises worries over what sort of price-driven compromises we might come across.

On the other hand, of course, if the 40SL753D turns out to be much cop, it will be a major bargain. Fingers crossed.

The 40SL753’s design is notably slimmer than the distinctly chunky butt efforts of most of Toshiba’s current CCFL LCD TVs, as we would expect. Though at around 50mm, its depth still has a long way to reduce until it gets close to the ultra-slender edge LED efforts we’re seeing these days from LG, Philips and especially Samsung and JVC. So much as JVC still actually has a UK TV operation these days, at any rate…

Toshiba has also marked its edge LED debut by tweaking the 40SL753’s fascia design, equipping the dark bezel with a transparent outer trim that ends up making the TV pleasingly reminiscent of the look Samsung is using for the mainstream end of its current LCD range.

Turning the 40SL753 round uncovers a good collection of connections. Four HDMIs get the ball rolling, one of which is v1.4 to offer an audio return channel to compatible AV amps. But actually far more interesting are a pair of USB ports, an SD card slot, and an Ethernet port.

These provide, as you would expect, a selection of multimedia features. But sadly the support they offer is more restrictive than we would have hoped. For instance, the USBs and SD card slot can only play JPEG photos, not movie or music files. Worse, while the Ethernet port is capable of streaming in stuff from DLNA PCs, these PCs have to use Windows 7. And even then we found the number of file types the TV worked with extremely limiting.

Unless we were doing something wrong – and we’ll correct this in the Comments later if it transpires we were – it appears as if the TV doesn’t actually have any significant codec support of its own. Instead it just functions as a simple renderer of stuff streamed – at low quality only, so far as we can tell – from the Windows Media Player 12 system shipped with Windows 7. WMP 11 doesn’t offer the facility to stream out video to a TV, which is why the TV is only acknowledged to be compatible with Windows 7 PCs.

Toshiba is on its own with this frankly rather half-hearted approach to DLNA functionality, and it’s not a great move. We’ve asked Toshiba for clarification/confirmation of all this, and if a firmware update might be in the offing that could improve matters, but haven’t had a response as yet. (Though sadly, a workable firmware update seems unlikely.)

It’s also a tad disappointing – though more forgiveable given the 40SL753’s price – that Toshiba hasn’t stretched the Ethernet jack to any sort of online functionality beyond the potential occasional interactive feature that might come on line via the built-in Freeview HD tuner.

Duty compels us to report that Toshiba does offer an optional Wi-Fi USB dongle for the 40SL753, but it’s highly questionable whether this is worth spending good money on given how limited the TV’s multimedia features are.

Thankfully, the 40SL753’s features become much less controversial once you stop trying to get its multimedia stuff to work and focus instead on calibrating its pictures. For among a surprisingly flexible suite of adjustments are a genuine colour management system, multiple gamma settings, a basic but welcome tool for shifting the underlying black and white balance, and separate MPEG and standard noise reduction systems.

It’s a pity Toshiba’s dated looking onscreen menus don’t make using all these features more enjoyable, but really we’re just happy they’re there at all considering how affordable the set is. Especially since the tools on offer really can help the TV deliver some startlingly good pictures considering what an affordable edge LED model it is.

With bright, colour-rich footage, for instance, there’s a degree of luminousness and that eludes most CCFL TVs. This helps colours achieve that extra level of vibrancy and insight we’re starting to associate with edge LED sets too, yet for the most part the extreme saturations don’t become stressy or cartoonish (so long as you don’t make the mistake of sticking with the insane Dynamic factory picture preset).

HD pictures look reasonably crisp and detailed meanwhile, at least when the image content is relatively static. And standard definition pictures can be made to look unusually detailed and sharp, too, thanks to Toshiba’s impressive (so long as you use it with care) Resolution+ processing system.

The 40SL753’s black level response is emphatically superior to that of Toshiba’s CCFL LCD TVs, meanwhile. In fact, it’s very good compared with the majority of other LCD TVs of all types and brands at the 40SL753’s price level.

Having said all this, while the 40SL753’s pictures can look excellent under the right conditions, we haven’t set its picture rating at just 7 out of 10 just to be spiteful.

The main reason it doesn’t score higher is that while the screen’s black level response and contrast are innately good, they come with a big string attached: uneven backlighting. This is present to some degree on many LCD TVs, especially edge LED-lit ones. But it’s more severe here than usual, leaving very obvious patches of extra brightness visible during dark scenes in all of the screen’s corners. And every time you spot them, it jolts you right out of what you’re watching. Plus, of course, after you’ve seen them once, you start looking for them all the time.

You can reduce the impact of the problem by setting the backlight and brightness settings lower, but even after we’d made the picture darker than we were comfortable with, the problem still hadn’t totally gone away.

Also slightly distracting on occasion is motion blur. While not bad for a sub-£650 40in LCD TV, this can nonetheless take a little edge off fast-moving HD material, despite the fact that the 40SL753 carries Toshiba’s Active Vision M100 processing, complete with 100Hz.

One final concern for people with small living rooms and large families is that the 40SL753’s viewing angle seems even more limited than usual for LCD TVs. Even at 30 degrees off axis contrast and colour take a hit, with the colour and black level reduction increasing exponentially with every subsequent degree wider you go.

The 40SL753’s audio is pretty much as we’d expect from an affordable edge LED TV. Which is to say, decidedly average. The speakers are just about powerful enough to cope enjoyably with the relatively low-level demands of normal TV broadcasts, but they soon start sounding underpowered, thin and overwhelmed when James Cameron gets his action mojo on.

Verdict

While we applaud Toshiba for joining LG’s recent 37LE5900 in trying to make edge LED LCD TVs genuinely affordable, as with its Korean rival, the 40SL753 falls prey to one or two significant performance weaknesses.

It can produce some really good images if all the picture planets happen to line up in just the right way, and this could be enough to sway a purchase from a relatively casual TV user. But we suspect that anyone interested in AV enough to be reading this review will probably find the 40SL753’s backlight inconsistencies and inscrutable multimedia features a compromise too far.