Why You Can Trust CNET Toshiba 47WL66 review: Toshiba 47WL66
Huge screen with a stylish design but lacking in picture quality.
Design
The huge 47-inch (119cm) screen sits atop a thin black base strip with the Toshiba logo sitting centre. The usual functions, such as the power button and volume controls are located at the top of the screen, so note, these may be difficult to reach if you plan to wall mount the screen. Fortunately, the rather largish remote control sits quite comfortably in the hand.
Toshiba 47WL66
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The screen did not look out of place amongst the décor in our test room, nor did it dominate the room like some other large screens. Connections are located at the rear behind a removable panel.
The square grey stand, which is removable for wall mounting, offered excellent support and even allowed the TV to be angled in different directions to the base. The speakers are discretely packed at the base of the screen and are hardly visible. Total thickness is just under 11cm and overall weight, including the stand is 45.6 kg, which is excellent for a screen this size.
A strange design feature is the placement of a second power button blended into the side-frame, which can be difficult to see as it's painted the same grey colour as the rest of the frame.
Features
For years television companies have been claiming their products as HD ready or HD capable. With a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080, this is one of the few LCD TVs on the market to support the full standard. Panel Response Speed is 8 ms, which is good, but is slower than many competitor products to be released in the next one to two months.
The screen features Meta Brain Pro Technology and 3D colour management functionality which allows you to adjust colour brightness and saturation. Also, the Toshiba 47WL66 supports a large 178 degree viewing angle.
Sporting SRS WOW surround sound provides theatre-style sound effects, even with the standard built in speakers. Total audio output was 10W x 2. The Toshiba 47WL66 had a host of audio connections, but disappointingly the screen was limited by having only a single HDMI port, strange, because most competitors have a least two.
Sadly, the screen was lacking a built-in HD tuner. This same panel sold in overseas markets has this feature as standard. It's a shame Toshiba has elected to leave this feature out for the Australian market. Other features included Picture-In-Picture and Teletext.
Performance
Overall, picture quality was reasonable at best. When tested viewing standard definition TV, the huge 1920 x 1080 resolution made images slightly pixelated. Even when we applied the noise reduction and sharpness features, image quality was lacking. High definition TV was better, though images were still off because of the large screen size.
Setting the colours, contrast, brightness and sharpness using the 3D colour management feature did not help; dark images, especially when displaying the colour black, appeared washed out. This is one area where Plasma screens have the lead over the LCD range.
Watching a DVD was a love-hate affair. We found that viewing could be improved slightly by increasing brightness levels, but once again this had adverse effects on displaying dark images.
The viewing angle was excellent, with almost a full 180 degree spectrum. There weren't any complaints from any seat in the house, but this was expected from such a large screen.
Sound quality was a bit disappointing, that is until you turn on the SRS WOW audio enhancement feature. This worked remarkably well, providing very real surround sound effects. There was limited distortion even at loud volumes and overall, we were impressed by the standard speakers, however we doubt most people buying this television will rely on the built-in speakers.
Toshiba, in conjunction with its Australian distributor Castel Electronics, provides a very respectable, five year warranty on parts and labour for its LCD televisions.