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Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Stunning picture

With both ActiveMotion and Resolution+ switched off, the screen’s performance is largely unremarkable, with average definition and motion resolution peaking at around 650 lines. However, power up picture processing and it becomes a very different story.

Toshiba Regza 32UL863 32in LED TV

Keep the edge backlight turned down

Place ActiveMotion on its Wide setting and motion picture detail is held at a crisp 1080 lines. This can then be furthered fine-tuned with Resolution+. Unlike vanilla edge enhancement, Resolution+ picks its targets carefully, avoiding the kind of uniform edge enhancement that often looks unnatural.

Test footage proves particularly revealing, with the process extracting extra detail in strands of hair and bring out highlights in a model’s hair, without affecting surrounding shadow areas or adding ringing.

Toshiba Regza 32UL863 32in LED TV

Slimline

Try to avoid ActiveMotion 100 on its Smooth setting, as this introduces predictive motion artefacts around moving objects. The Standard setting does not, yet retains full 1080 line clarity.

The panel itself is generically good. It’s a 1920 x 1080 LED edge-lit screen, with a dynamic contrast quoted at 4,000,000:1. Suffice it to say that the glaring edge backlight should be reduced for more comfortable viewing.

RH Recommended Medal

Where this set does fall over is in its audio performance. There seems to be a direct correlation between the extreme sharpness of its pictures and the thinness of its audio. Symmetry can be a double-edged sword.

Verdict

Overall, I rate this 32-incher rather highly. It’s decently priced, is capable of blisteringly sharp HD, is satellite dish friendly, has good USB media playback and comes with a net portal which might yet come good. Well worth a look. ®

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85%
Toshiba Regza 32UL863 32in LED TV

Toshiba Regza 32UL863

Feature-packed net-connected TV with classy image tech.
Price: £430 RRP

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.

6
0

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?

4
0

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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