Toshiba 32TL838

Although news of TVs like the Toshiba ZL2 had led us to believe that the Japanese firm was concentrating on glasses-free passive technology 3D TVs, this new TL838 sees a return of active 3D technology.  It's a direct competitor of the Samsung D6200 series, and as well as having support for 3D, it adds connected services and a 100 Hz motion interpolation filter.

The TL838 series comes in three different sizes: this 32'' model, the 32TL838, the 40'' 40TL838 and the 46'' 46TL838.

Build Quality and Design

Like most of the current crop of TVs, the TL838 uses LEDs around the outside of the frame for backlighting.  This technology has grown popular in recent years, mostly because it allows manufacturers to produce thinner televisions with lower energy consumption.  Here, for example, the frame is a mere 3 cm thick across 80% of the surface of the screen, only expanding to 5.2 cm to make room for the speakers.

The TL838 is compatible with the DLNA 1.5 standard as well as HbbTv, and includes a media player that can access content either via a USB port or over a UPnP network.  Unfortunately, it didn't manage to work well with many of our files, and we were disappointed to only be able to play MTS video encoded as AVC.

Another feature conspicuous by its absence is Toshiba's new, redesigned interface.  The TL838 only has the older, less responsive onscreen menus.

To cap it all off, the remote is identical to the one found on SL series televisions, with cheap plastic and buttons that are squashed together.  It's hard to get the right button, even when you're using the four-way arrows.

Ghosting and Input Lag

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

Our technical tests didn't get off to a great start either.  With an average ghosting time of 15.5 ms, we have to describe the display as slow and unresponsive, and it falls below the 12 ms average that we've encountered so far.

Worse still, dedicated gamers will be disappointed to find out that even in Gaming mode, where the input lag should be as low as possible, there's still a 66 ms delay, or four whole frames.

Image Quality: 2D

As is all too often the case, the colours produced using the TL838's default settings are bright and garish.  Toshiba's engineers really haven't gone for half-measures: the whites are totally over-exposed and greys remain indistinguishable from black.  As for the other colours, we don't even know where to begin saying how bad they are.

Normally, switching to Cinema mode (or whichever settings are reserved for watching films) is a surefire way to get more natural results, but that didn't work here.  We tried everything we could, but none of them led to a real improvement.


In the end, we stuck with Cinema 1 mode, which left the colours with a notable discrepancy, represented by a deltaE of 6.4.


Things were better with the contrast, which we measured at a ratio of 3020:1, which gives nice, deep blacks.  While that's always welcome, it's no replacement for accurate colour reproduction.

If you can forget about those problems with colour reproduction, films look pretty good.  Standard definition content, like ordinary TV pictures or DVDs, has rather blurry upscaling, but that's normal and something Toshiba shares with other HD TV manufacturers.  For more successful upscaling, we suggest you try a recent games console, which will do a much better job and avoid pixellisation.  An alternative is to turn the sharpness up a little bit to help pick out the detail, but that also makes those pixels easier to spot, too.

There's no need to use a console if you've got native HD content: the picture is perfect as it is.  The only real disappointment is that the display isn't more responsive, which would have cut down on ghosting during long panning shots.

Clouding

Edge LED backlighting is often synonymous with clouding.  Although it isn't too bad here, the TL838 still isn't an exception to the rule.  Light leaking out of the LEDs is visible in the corners of the display, and is particularly noticeable when widescreen films are letterboxed with black bands above and below the display.

Image Quality: 3D

Before we go any further, we should point out that there's no automatic 2D-to-3D conversion on the TL838.  Then again, that isn't such a big problem given how bad these filters are on TVs that do include them.

With genuine 3D content, you can really enjoy perspective.  Unlike the Samsung 6000 series TVs, you also get a Full HD picture when you're watching in three dimensions.  On the other hand, there's more crosstalk, or interference between the signals destined for each eye, caused no doubt by the poor responsiveness of the display.  Seeing double is not uncommon, and others TVs--like plasmas from Panasonic and LCD TVs in Philips' 8000 and 9000 Series--do much better.

Audio Quality

Green area: good. Orange area: satisfactory. White area: unacceptable.
Voices should sound clear (in the range 300 Hz-3.5 kHz), but there is no sign of bass.

We weren't, unfortunately surprised to find mediocre speakers on the TL838.  Keeping the cost down inevitably means cutting corners, and TV manufacturers often see speakers as something they can skimp on.  As a result, the sound is far too metallic and very unpleasant to listen to.  Worse still, bass is totally absent.  Adding a Home Cinema kit will be a real benefit.

Energy Consumption

The TL838 ended its trip to our lab on a positive note.  Like most TVs with LED backlighting, it has very low energy consumption.  You can expect around 50 W while it's switched on and 1 W while on standby.