interesting review, i bought the Toshiba TL868 LED Tv on the 17th Feb 2012, to replace my ageing Evesham 42", which was showing signs of 'clouding' after a faultless several years (bought it just before they went under). apparently signs the backlight illuminators were dying
1st impressions were although it is 46" it looks considerably smaller than my Evesham 42" (having side bar speakers and substantial bezels), so much so i had to measure both sets screen sizes several times to ensure i had not been 'conned'.
for example, when i bought the Evesham while upgrading from a 26" CRT, my wife complained it was far to big and we had a big arguent, when she walked in Friday - she complained the 46" was to small??? darn, had i known i could have gone with a 60" lol!
The sound quality i agree is not good, lacking base and stereo separation, but is i'd say usable and you can attach a sub.
tbf on this point, i think anyone paying the extra premium of owning a 3D Tv, buying the required active glasses @ about £50 a pop, is likely to be going to get it attached to a decent surround sound set up. lets face it, why would you stick with stereo? be like owning an F1 racing car and fitting 'town & country' tyres' on it. on that assumption i'd say Toshiba were prudent to spent that sum of the budget elsewhere.
My old set was 1080P, so i'm used to having a fairly sharp image, this set's clarity literally popped my eye's. before buying i asked for a 3D demo, i was shown on the smaller (40"?) set. salesman inserted Avatar, a 3D dvd and furnished me with toshiba's latest active glasses. initially i could not make any sense of the images, the salesman flapped about in a panic, but eventually i sussed it was the other Tv's. Once they were switched of WOW!
as my brain adjusted, images floated out if the screen onto the floor, having never taken stimulating drugs, i can only imagine this is what the LSD influence would be like. The spec says the viewing angle is 17o degs, not trysting claims in manuals i walked either side, back and close up, even crouched down to see the viewing angle's that are likely in real life, only were only slightly affected.
i have Sky+ HD, to get 3D you have to buy their '3D World', this includes sky sports, movies and most if their services. i recorded 'how to train your dragon' from Sky 3D as a 'test' which worked fine (though the film was not the best 3D test against Avatar).
having hooked in the network i tried video streaming from my 3tb NAS drive, to my surprise this was very easy, it streamed my home movies, even clips from my CCTv system - very impressive indeed.
instead of the dedicated BR player, i took an extra set if glasses. i bought a s/h PS3 with 360 gb hard drive. i know the true purist will be horrified, but it is more practical to be able to keep 'child safe' films on the PS3 to use as a media server, and of course there is the game side
. i as yet don't own any 3D blue ray disc's, so i inserted a normal dvd. to my eye the quality is superb.
the set has the usual terrestrial signal input, but also a satellite coax input. i've not seen any mention of an inbuilt 'free sat' tuner, just you have to select which you wan't on initial setup, so i wondered of what advantage/use is this - for hotels perhaps?
Early days yet, but thus far i have been very very happy, there is a couple of glitch's of note,
1) 3D, if you leave the 3D setting to change automatically, you will get image 'jumping' while in normal or HD mode, i found turning it off (so making 3D selection manual) stops this problem.
2) You can't 'save' your preference for when after selecting 3D, it shows two icons, and you have to select 3D (from 2D) then select side by side or above and below - WHY?
3) i went onto Toshiba World (lack of content should be renamed to Toshiba church table sale), clicked on the movie service to be told i had to update the firmware. so i tried to run the update via hard wired network, but this reports "no firmware upgrade is available at this time"???.
This us not the dearest 3D set in the market, from my usage so far it is well worth a look at - if you going to have an external sound system that is.
Regs
Alan