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Toshiba 42XV560A

Only a lick of paint separates the Toshiba 42XV550A and the 42XV560A, but do they have the goods to cut it in the wild?

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
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Ty Pendlebury
2 min read

Here's something we don't see very often: Toshiba's new XV550 and XV560 would appear to the untrained eye to be identical. Even skimming down the specs list doesn't give us any clues. The answer? Toshiba is giving televisions with different paint jobs different model numbers. While many companies will give a TV a different name under different regions, outside of the car world a slim, silver trim doesn't justify a new name.

Upside
The impetus behind the new series, it seems, are the addition of a "Gaming" mode and the next iteration of the company's processing engine: "Power Meta Brain". The company's 100Hz Clear Frame technology remains.

On the specs front it's a little light-on with a relatively low panel contrast ratio of 1100:1 and an 8ms pixel response time. Of course, the resolution is 1920x1080p, and there is the generous provision of four HDMI ports. Meanwhile, the 52-inch is a little higher specced with a 3000:1 contrast ratio.

There is one point of difference between the XV550 and XV560 that we need to elaborate on, the XV560 includes a 52-inch model whereas the XV550 only carries a 42- and 46-inch.

Downside
Apart from a couple of small tweaks, we're a little mystified by the need for these new ranges. Spec-wise the older, cheaper XV500 outperforms it — in pure contrast levels alone — by a factor of two. It even looks better cosmetically.

Outlook
Flat panel manufacturers are struggling at the moment — especially companies like Toshiba based in Japan. The Koreans seem to be mopping up at the moment in Australia with favourable exchange rates and up-to-date feature sets. While the XV550 and XV560 look like two perfectly serviceable television sets, the cynics in us think they could be there to artificially inflate the size of the company's range. To "look busy" in other words. Without testing them we can't say for sure, but the XV500 might be a better deal.