Toshiba 32RL958 review

A 32in TV was once a living room monster, but such sizes are now used more commonly as second sets. Such TVs often miss out on convenient features such as DLNA media streaming or internet connectivity. That isn’t the case with Toshiba’s 32RL958, as it has a Full HD 1,920×1,080-resolution panel, a suite of online services and direct-to-USB recording, and costs just £330.

The glossy black plastic finish isn’t exactly stylish, but it’s fairly inoffensive, giving the 32RL958 an edge over the supermarket-brand TVs also available in this price range. The large stand is made of plastic too, but it’s firm and fairly sturdy; the panel only wobbles if you knock it with significant force. Sadly, it won’t let you pivot or tilt the screen, so it might look a little crooked on top of an angled cabinet or table.

Given its price, we were expecting the 32RL958 to have few connection ports, but we were pleasantly surprised to find three HDMI ports, component, SCART and VGA video, digital optical and 3.5mm headphone audio, a Common Interface slot, Ethernet and two USB ports. This is a fairly standard selection for a bigger TV, but it’s great to see such variety in a 32in model. It even has integrated Wi-Fi, which makes it easy to stream online services without running a network cable from your router. You’re prompted to connect the set when you first switch it on, and we were up and running in a matter of minutes.

Once connected, we dived straight into the Toshiba Spaces online portal. It has a good selection of catch-up and on-demand services, including BBC iPlayer, YouTube, Dailymotion, Blinkbox and AceTrax, along with Facebook, Skype and Twitter integration. It also has a web browser, but the remote control is totally unsuitable for quick browsing. Toshiba Spaces is also one of the only smart TV systems available with multiple user accounts. This is ideal if you have several family members with Facebook or Twitter, but it’s quicker to use your smartphone with Facebook and Twitter as it’s painfully slow to load at times and entering text with the remote can be difficult.

We also put the RL958’s DLNA player through its paces with our collection of test videos. Happily, it could play them all, including DivX, MKV and MOV files, so you should be able to play almost any video stored on your PC or NAS device, along with any music and photos. You can also play media stored on an attached USB drive.

The USB ports can also turn the TV into a rudimentary PVR if you have a spare USB stick or hard disk to hand. We connected a blank 2.5in hard disk that can run solely on USB power and had no trouble using the scheduled recording and time shift functions conveniently placed on the remote control. It isn’t going to replace a Sky+ or Virgin set-top box, but we didn’t have to format the USB drive before using it, which is handy if you only want to record programs occasionally and don’t want to tie up your hard disk.

Whether you’re playing it back or watching it live, standard definition TV looks surprisingly good at 1,920×1,080. You must sit much closer to the screen to see the digital noise artefacts that are typical of broadcast TV, as you don’t notice them when viewing more than a few feet away. High-definition broadcasts look much better, with sharper images that show plenty of detail. Colours look overly saturated at the default picture settings, but with a few quick changes we came away impressed.

It’s only when we switched to our dark Blu-ray footage that the RL958’s major weaknesses were revealed. There’s definite backlight clouding around the right side of the screen, which meant black images appeared milky grey. You can reduce the backlight to compensate, but it never truly goes away.

As you might expect from such a small TV, the internal speakers aren’t very loud and sound a little tinny.

With very few similarly priced TVs having quite such comprehensive feature lists, the 32RL958 is a bargain. Yes, you could buy a bigger screen for only slightly more, but it’s unlikely to have integrated Wi-Fi, Smart TV or DLNA media support. Its picture quality isn’t going to blow you away, but it’s a massive improvement over any own-brand/no brand sets from the supermarkets. If you’re after a second TV, this could be a great buy.