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Take your Places

Connectivity is good. There are four HDMI inputs, phono AV, Scart, component, VGA, a CI slot, Ethernet, optical digital audio and a couple of USBs. The second of these can be designated to record from the tuner to an external hard drive –up to eight HDDs can be registered to the set. Wi-Fi is built-in, which is handy if you lack a local wired connection.

Toshiba Regza 32UL863 32in LED TV

Plenty of connection options

Media playback from USB proves useful, with my pool of carelessly wrapped MKV, AVI and MP4 files all playing, although there’s no support for SRT subtitles, foreign-language film buffs will be annoyed to note. Music is restricted to MP3 and AAC, without album art support.

Across a network, media support becomes rather more rubbish, with only MPEG derivations tolerated.

Toshiba is playing catch-up in the Smart TV stakes, but at least its cloud portal Places is nicely turned out, with individual silos for different types of content and services.

Toshiba Places UI

Places, Toshiba's late entry into the Smart TV stakes

Unfortunately, I found little of interest here beyond DailyMotion and a smattering of subscription video streaming services from Hit Entertainment, Woomi, Box Office 365 and Viewster.

As I’ve already revealed, image clarity is outstanding – provided you toggle the right buttons. The screen features Toshiba’s upgraded Resolution+ image upscaling technology, plus 100Hz frame interpolation, here branded ActiveMotion 100, which comes in two strengths: Smooth and Standard. Both prove key to the picture clarity this set can deliver.

Toshiba Regza 32UL863 32in LED TV specs

Next page: Stunning picture

LED TVs

Not necessarily a criticism of the review, but I'm fed up with LED edge-lit LCD displays being called "LED TVs". I was in the market for a new TV recently, and all the TVs in the local big box store were lablelled LED when they were clearly LCD panels.

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Is it just me?

or does anyone else think it would be better to reduce the number of channels being broadcast and up the quality/bandwidth of the broadcasts, rather than needing software gizmos to get a better picture?

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We're using Sony Bravia whatevers for our driving simulators, and yeah, lag is a big issue (particularly for racing!). We're using 720p60 on a 55" panel that's quite close; in 2D it looks pretty bad, but 3D seems to mitigate the resolution issues a lot.

At any rate, lag at 1080p60 (just on the desktop) is so bad that it's actually hard to use. This is witb zero image fuckery turned on. There's 'quality-vs-speed' thing that helps, but it's still awful. And turning on every bit of insanity available - and that's a ton - has no appreciable effect.

I'd say the 1080p60 lag is 500ms plus.

720p60, in the fast mode, is much better - maybe as good as run of the mill lcd projectors and monitors. (whatever you do, don't project a hot shit superfast lcd projector image onto your crt projector and copy the outputs... it'll be blazing bright but look like it's 20 miles behind).

720p60 is perfectly usable, anyway, but it'd be first against the wall when the revolution came for me.

1080p, due to the hdmi limitations (and utterly moronic refusal of the card/tv to allow 60p pageflipped at 30hz, despite their obviously being bandwidth) mean you get 24p or, bizarrely, 23p. Horrifying lag despite he atrocious framerate, and choppy likean angry sea no matter what I did. And I did a lot.

Looked great sitting still.

Oddly, Sony's motionflow and other temporal hijinks work really well. I know, I know, I was just as surprised. I sat there gaping for a while. The motionflow took 1080p24 from 'I will surely vomit!' to 'Oooh, smooth amd pretty but JERK why is itJERK still doing that eveJERKry so often?'... but unfortunately, between the time you turned he steering wheel and you saw the car move, entire Amazonian species evolved, thrived, and were rendered extinct by human encroachment and clearcutting. This would have been fine for NASCAR, where 'polar moment of inertia' means, "It's like the inertia of the earth between the poles", but we focus more on other areas.

At any rate, the motionflow didn't add to the lag (perhaps they throw in filler NOPs to keep timing stable regardless of settings?) but buttery smoothness couldn't make up for the epochal response times.

What I don't understand is the massive difference - nearly an order of magnitude - between 1808p24/60 and 720p.

And hey, kudos where due - the Sony temporal enhancements actually work. Not sure how they'd play out for non-computer sources, but they honestly do turn a scrolling treeline from swedish-chef-on-meth chopping to optical-table smoothness.

Can't say the same for their "Reality creation". You just have a setting for what is essentially contrast adjustment, between 'sane' and 'convert to b/w' and edge enhancement between 'too fucking much' and 'white noise'.

Which brings me back to the article... How is this the sharpest TV?! It's either filling its grid of pixels or not. Unless every other TV is throwing gobs of shit at the image, any TV doing 1:1 pixel pushing will be just as sharp as any other.

I suspect that you're mistaking contrast or EE or source quality for 'sharpness', or have a wacky definition of sharpness I haven't heard in years of home theater obsessiveness, as with a fixed pixel display, sharpness is just gonna be sharpness.

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"Hook the latter up to a spare Sky dish feed and you’ll get un-curated Freesat channels from Astra 19.2E."

You mean 28.2E.

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No alternatives

If there were true LED TVs on the market, then fair enough, but they haven't progressed past prototypes yet, with size being the limiting factor.

Generally when you see an "LED TV" in a store, it's just to differentiate against CCFL-lit LCDs, indicating it'll be thinner and more energy efficient.

But then, I'm just pissed off that I'll never see an SED flatscreen that I was promised many moons ago :-(

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