Toshiba Tv S
Toshiba will make the cheap! The Japanese manufacturer s We like the 46-inch toshiba tv s 46TL868B Toshiba has tried hard with the 55YL863B to produce a TV that can take on the high-end models from rival manufacturers. However, despite the promise of the powerful CEVO processing, this set is a mixed performer and its Internet features and 3D performance are in need of serious improvement. The 55YL863B is a high-end TV from Toshiba that comes with the company's powerful CEVO picture processing engine, active 3D support and built-in Smart TV features. The asking price is quite high at £1,500, but as a sweetener, Toshiba is currently running a promotion: if you buy this TV before Christmas from participating retailers, you'll get a free Blu-ray player and one year's subscription to the LoveFilm movie rental service. This model takes the same twin-circle approach to its menu system as the 55WL863 that we looked at recently. You select an option, such as set-up, from the semi-circle at the bottom of the screen and this then shunts you to an upper circle where you choose other entries like picture, sound and preferences. Due to its use of darker colours, the presentation looks a touch dull, especially next to the bright and cheerful menus found on LG and Samsung's latest models. The navigation is also fussy — especially as there's a jarring switch between this circular system and the flat menus that you eventually end up in. On the plus side, you do soon get used to it and it's arguably faster to use than Sony's Xross Media Bar system. Unfortunately, Toshiba has carried the dark and dingy colour schemes across to the Freeview electronic programme guide (EPG). The EPG also lacks the video thumbnail windows that most other manufacturers now use on their programming guides. Instead, it takes over the whole screen and displays 13 channels' worth of data. Of course, the plus side to this is that it lets you compare what's on and what's coming up across lots of channels. The downside is that it's overly busy to look at. Nevertheless, the EPG is quick to respond when you're jumping around the programming data using the remote. To add some wow-factor, this model has a camera and face recognition technology built in. This allows you to program it to recognise up to four people who use the set. Once their face is stored, it can automatically switch to their picture and audio presets when they sit down in front of it. It works reasonably well, although its accuracy does depend quite a lot on lighting conditions in the room. It does feel gimmicky and after a while we just turned it off as we didn't find it that useful. As with all of Toshiba's latest mid and high-end TV's, this one comes with the Places smart TV platform. Unfortunately, despite a recent minor update, it's still a disappointing offering. It's sluggish to load and navigating around the different sections isn't exactly speedy either. Places is split into various hubs for video, social networking, news, music and games. The video menu has been updated with the addition of the Acetrax movie rental service. This is a big plus — before, the only movie rental option was Viewster, which has an appallingly bad selection of movies. The rest of the video hub is reasonably well stocked, with entries for the likes of Dailymotion, Woomi, Box Office 365 and Cartoon Network. There are also links to YouTube and BBC iPlayer apps. However, if you select these you're simply told to exit the Places system and access them from the TV's main menu, which is pretty shoddy interface design. The other big problem is that the rest of the hubs are seriously under-populated. The music menu only has a single entry for Aupeo; the social hub merely has Flickr and Facebook apps; while the News menu only offers up a single weather forecasting service. It's a long way off the wealth of content offered on LG and Samsung's smart TV platforms. Along with the Internet features, this model naturally also supports digital media playback, either locally from its USB ports or remotely from DLNA devices connected to your home network. Playing back files via USB was trouble-free, as it worked with all the DivX, Xvid and MKV video files that we tried. However, it was more problematic when we tried to stream content over Ethernet or Wi-Fi. It refused to work with our Windows Vista PC and Iomega NAS drive and would only play Xivd and DivX files from our Windows 7 laptop. This has been a recurring problem on all of the Toshiba TVs that we've used this year and we really wish the company would update its DLNA streaming software to make it compatible with a broader range of devices. Like the 55WL863, Toshiba has turned to the Jacob Jensen design studio for some help with this model's styling. Jacob Jensen was the man behind many of the iconic designs found on B