Why You Can Trust CNET Toshiba 58L9363 review: Toshiba 58L9363
Toshiba's 58L9363 is a pretty unconvincing 4K package even at this price, with backlight bleed, poor black levels, motion blur, a substandard smart TV system and sluggish menus.
If you want to upgrade to a 4K TV, but are put off by their hugely inflated prices, then Toshiba's 58L9363 looks like a more tempting proposition on paper. Available for around £2,300, it looks like a bargain next to the likes of Sony's 55X9005, which will set you back around £500 more, but has Toshiba compromised on performance to hit such a low price?
Toshiba 58L9363
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
TV guide
Despite the 4K screen resolution, Toshiba has used the same menu system that it used on its Full HD TVs from 2013. On the plus side, these have a more logical layout than the menus on the company's 2012 TVs, so stuff like colour and motion processing settings are easier to find. The big downer, however, is how sluggish the menus feel when you're using them. They're so slow to respond that at times I was worried the remote control had stopped working.
The set's standard guide is behind the curve too. It doesn’t have a video thumbnail view, so you can't keep an eye on the programme you were watching when you call up the programming guide. The layout also looks bland, but at least it displays a lot of programming on a single screen so you don’t have to do as much scrolling around as on some competitors models.
Toshiba also offers a secondary Internet-enabled guide, that pulls in pictures and extra metadata about shows. It's very sluggish to start up though, and I found myself making do with the standard programming guide instead.
Smart TV
This set relies on Toshiba's Cloud TV system for its smart TV features. I quite admire Toshiba's grand vision for Cloud TV. It tries to bring together smart apps with social media services, such as Twitter and TiVo style suggestions for stuff you might want to watch. The execution leaves a lot to be desired though. The whole system is slow and cumbersome to use. It's also severely lacking in movie on-demand and catch-up TV apps. It does have iPlayer, Netflix and Blinkbox, but lacks 4oD, Demand5, ITV Player and Lovefilm, for example.
As you'd expect the set also has a media player onboard that can be used either to stream files across a network from a PC or NAS drive or to play them back from a USB connected hard drive. This plays 1080p files, but didn't work with the Ultra HD files I tried in H.264 MP4 and MKV format.
Design and connections
The 58L9363 doesn't look much like a telly that costs over two grand. The chassis is plasticky and although elements of the styling are pleasant -- such as the narrow bezel and rounded corners on the bottom edge -- the overall look falls somewhere between low-end and mid-range telly level. The remote is a let down too. The buttons feel spongy, which combined with the TV's sluggish menu system, leads to a pretty unsatisfying user experience.
This model has four HDMI ports, but currently none of these conform to the HDMI 2.0 spec, so they're limited to delivering 4K resolutions at up to 30Hz. Toshiba says it will release a firmware upgrade in the future to allow these to accept feeds at up to 60Hz, but this will be similar to the upgrades for Sony's X9005 tellies in that it'll compress some of the colour signal slightly to achieve these higher frame-rates -- unlike Panasonic's WT600B, which has a proper HDMI 2.0 port. It's not a massive let down, as most people won't be able to tell the difference, but it's still annoying for purists.
The set also has three USB ports and an SD card slot. There's Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port onboard too. The Wi-Fi chip supports Wi-Di for screen mirroring from compatible laptops, but it doesn’t support Mirracast for mirroring from Android phones. Also, while there's a satellite port on the rear next to the RF input of the Freeview HD tuner, the satellite tuner isn’t Freesat compatible -- not hugely useful in the UK.
Picture quality
The Toshiba 58L9363 has quite a few strengths in the picture department. It does a sympathetic job of handling colours, especially in its Hollywood Day and Night presets. Landscapes look rich and lush, while blue skies look suitably light and airy. It also pumps out plenty of brightness, which will be important for those looking to use it in rooms that get a lot of sunlight.
Unfortunately this TV also has a number of weaknesses. I felt the biggest of these was backlight bleed. This was especially annoying at the bottom of the screen where in darker scenes under low lighting four spots of backlight clouding encroached substantially into the picture. Even cranking down the backlight setting by a significant amount never managed to reduce it to what I would consider acceptable levels.
The set's contrast performance is relatively poor. Its black levels aren’t particularly deep and it loses a lot of shadow detail in the darker parts of the image, so you see blobs of black where there should be subtle shades of grey.
Sadly it also struggles with motion. With the ClearScan processing turned off there's a fair amount of blur on camera pans and such like. Toshiba's motion processing isn’t great though, so when you turn it on you tend to get tearing around moving objects, which can be quite distracting.
3D picture quality
Although the larger 65-inch version of this screen uses passive 3D technology, this 58-inch model relies on active 3D instead. That's a shame as one of the big benefits for 4K screens with passive 3D is that they're able to deliver proper 1080p images to each eye without the associated bulky and flicker prone glasses used for active sets.
It turns out the 568L9363 isn’t particularly good at active 3D either. Even though the supplied glasses are reasonably light, they're not very comfortable to wear. The set also suffers from crosstalk, which I witnessed during key moments in Hugo on Blu-ray.
Audio quality
Given it's much lower price, it's no surprise that the 58L9363 lacks the type of motorised drop-down sound bar found on the recent 4K TV from LG. Instead it makes do with two 10W down-firing speakers.
Toshiba has added some Audyssey audio-processing features that you can turn on and off to try and improve the audio, including the ABX bass enhancer. While the bass boost helps add some low-end presence on the lower setting, however, it just sounds boomy on the higher one.
The overall sound of the set isn’t bad at lower volumes, but when you crank things up in an action movie for example, the speakers start to distort. Also, while watching Changeling on Blu-ray, the audio went out of sync with the pictures, so presumably there's a bug in the set's firmware that Toshiba needs to fix. I came across a few different bugs, in fact, including one where it left the 'going into standby' message on the screen even when I had changed sources and changed channels. This required me to pull the plug on the set to get rid of it.
Conclusion
While it's admirable that Toshiba driving down the price of 4K sets, the truth is, it doesn’t offer anywhere near the same experience as something like Sony's X9005. The 58L9363's issues with below par black levels, backlight bleed and motion blur outweigh the benefits of its 4K resolution in my book. Add in the sluggish menu system and sub-standard smart TV features, and it certainly doesn’t feel like the 4K bargain that I would have liked it to be.