Toshiba 46TL968 review

Toshiba’s previous TL-model TVs have often had many high-end features and a slim chassis that looks great. The 46TL968 is no different. It’s a 46in, active 3D set with smart TV, integrated Wi-Fi and plenty of advanced calibration settings to help you get the best picture.

The brushed metal effect bezel might be made of plastic, but it’s reasonably thin and looks good from a distance, giving no indication that the TL968 is a budget model. The glass stand is a simpler affair, but it’s very sturdy and looks quite stylish. You can pivot the screen, although it does wobble slightly when you do so.

The TL968 has a reasonable array of inputs on its back panel, including four HDMI ports, component, SCART and VGA video, digital optical audio and a 3.5mm headphone jack, Ethernet, two USB ports and a Common Interface slot. It also has integrated Wi-Fi and Intel’s WiDi technology, which lets you connect a compatible laptop to the TV and use that instead of the laptop’s display.

Once connected to your local network, you can stream music, photos and video to the TV using DLNA. We played all our video test files successfully, including MKV, MP4, MOV, WMV HD, H.264, XviD and DivX HD clips, so you won’t have a problem playing videos stored on your PC or NAS.

All the ports you would expect are provided, with 4 HDMI and support for recordings over USB

You can use either of the USB ports to attach a flash drive or external hard disk for one-touch recording and time-shift playback. We connected a 2.5in disk that takes power solely from the USB port and could instantly pause live TV and schedule recordings.

Toshiba has also added its Toshiba Places online portal, which has many good online services such as BBC iPlayer and YouTube. You can also create separate family accounts for Facebook, Skype and Twitter, and a web browser.

Video-on-demand apps include AceTrax, Blinkbox, YouTube and Dailymotion, as well as catch-up TV from BBC iPlayer. Sadly, there’s no app market for adding new content, so what you see is all you get. It’s a shame the system is so slow and often leaves you waiting while it loads an app or service, as we’ve seen more responsive smart TV systems from other manufacturers at a similar price.

The rest of the TV’s interface is incredibly basic. Apart from a few colourful icons in the main menu, all the settings pages are text-only, with low-resolution icons representing files in the media player. Thankfully, all the settings menus minimise to the bottom of the screen when you’re adjusting the picture, so it’s easy to judge whether you’re making things better or worse.

Unfortunately, the TL968 struggles with standard definition images, displaying a lot of noise and little detail, but it copes very well with high-definition content. It varies depending on the channel and content, but there’s significantly more detail and much less noise. Blu-ray films looked even better, although we had to adjust the picture quality settings before they looked their best. The Resolution+ feature, for instance, sharpens the picture and gives the appearance of more detail, but it also introduces an excessive amount of noise.

There are a number of presets from which you can choose, such as the backlight-controlling Dynamic, the overly saturated Hollywood Day and the dim Hollywood Night. The Game setting is a welcome inclusion, disabling all unwanted image processing for improved response times when you’re connected to a PC, Xbox or PS3, and is often missing from similarly priced TVs from more budget-oriented competitors.

With the right settings, based on the Hollywood Pro preset, we managed to get our reference footage looking sharp, bright and colourful. Skin tones were reasonably lifelike and colours weren’t overly vibrant, producing realistic images that had plenty of depth in HD. Annoyingly, there’s no way to save your calibrated settings for multiple sources, so you’ll have to write them down and set them again for each HDMI connection.

Even after calibration, things weren’t perfect. We noticed some backlight clouding around the top and bottom edges of the display when watching darker scenes, which is especially apparent if you haven’t reduced the aggressive backlight settings down from their default values. Black levels were reasonable for a sub-£600 LCD TV, but don’t expect plasma-like levels of clarity here.

The TL968 is an active 3D TV, but Toshiba doesn’t include 3D glasses with it, so you must spend £45 per pair on top of the price of the TV if you want to watch 3D films. The TV can upscale 2D images to 3D, but we weren’t particularly impressed by the simulated depth effects. Even native 3D content wasn’t particularly stunning, with noticeable crosstalk that isn’t present on rival active 3D TVs from the major manufacturers. There’s also much more judder than in 2D mode, as ClearScan processing is disabled.

No 3D glasses are bundled, as has become the norm, just this nicely-styled remote

The integrated speakers do a reasonable job, producing loud audio that can comfortably fill a medium-sized room, but don’t expect much presence; there’s barely any bass and the treble can get painfully sharp when you’ve got the volume turned up. It’s ideal for watching the news or catching up with EastEnders, but you’ll definitely want some external speakers to get the most out of games and films.

Toshiba has managed to squeeze a large amount of features into the TL968, and while many of them are appreciated, not all of them are up to the same standard as the competition. We appreciate the inclusion of Wi-Fi, extensive image quality controls and excellent file format support over DLNA, but the limited smart TV portal and merely average picture quality make it more of a jack-of-all-trades than budget bargain.