Toshiba Regza RL858 (32RL858) LED LCD Television Review

Toshiba take another stab at the entry-level market but this time come armed with a host of features.

Introduction

The model under testing here is the Toshiba 32RL858 32 inch LED LCD TV with a Freeview HD tuner and full UK specifications. Also available is the Toshiba 40RL858 32 inch LED LCD TV, which has not been reviewed here but should offer the same features and a very similar viewing experience.

To give you an idea of how crowded a market the 32inch LED/LCD TV one is, Toshiba themselves have a further 3 models available in this size, in addition to the RL858 under testing here. We have a certain amount of sympathy for the manufacturers whom have the job of making their products stand out from the rest but, then, nobody’s putting a gun to their heads and perhaps it might be an idea to rationalise somewhat and concentrate on getting the basics right in addition to adding features the market wants at prices its willing to stand.

As it is, the Toshiba 32RL858 is the manufacturer’s most feature packed 32 inch TV and, as such, we’ve some fairly high hopes for it given the generally good performance recent Toshiba’s have exhibited recently. Will the RL858 live up to expectations or fall short? Let’s crack on and find out. The full in-depth review follows after the Summary and Scoring and the Test Results are under the tab at both the top and bottom of the page…

Summary

The Toshiba 32RL858 isn’t a remarkable performer but we feel it’s solid enough to warrant us recommending it to be put on your demo list. With its solid black levels and reasonable accuracy, out of the box, you certainly could do worse although the default gamma tracking doesn’t really lend itself to being placed in a bright viewing environment. With the RL858 being widely available for just over £350 its feature set, including a Freeview HD tuner and access to Toshiba Places, make it a good value proposition in this sector of the market, provided you can put up with its rather retro appearance.

Whilst the outward looks doing nothing for us, the nifty little remote control is a mini-design classic that makes you wonder why others need to be quite so large. Similarly, the menu structure is one of usable simplicity, although the EPG could do with toning down a shade, or two. The only disappointment in the menus was the lack of a multi-point white balance control but we were still able to effect a reasonably successful calibration and, what’s more, the colour management system worked as intended, much to our surprise. The RL858 also displayed some fairly good picture processing, with good scaling and deinterlacing performance accompanied by flawless handling of 1080p Blu-ray content. The Toshiba 32RL858B would be a good choice as a gaming display with its low input lag figures and energy consumption performance that would allow for long sessions without seriously adding to the electricity bills.

The Toshiba RL858 isn’t going to set your world on fire, but then we wouldn’t expect anything in this price range to do so. It’s solid and unspectacular but does get most of the basics right whilst offering features not usually found for such a modest entry fee.

Scores
Contrast ratio/dynamic range
Black level
Colour reproduction out of the box
Colour reproduction calibrated
Greyscale out of box
Greyscale calibrated
ISF or calibration controls available
Video processing SD/HD
Sound quality built in
Networking
Features
Ease of use/menus/remote/settings
Value for money
Overall

Styling, Connections, Menus and Setup

The best thing we can say of the RL858’s styling is that it’s distinctive and eschews the general trend of gloss black surrounds and instead has a bezel in a matte aluminium effect, with the emphasis on ‘effect’ as it feels very plasticy indeed. In fact, in our estimation, the entire look and feel of the RL858 is one of cheapness but we guess its retro looks might gain favour with some. The matching base stand continues both the retro and budget feel and disappointingly doesn’t swivel being as it’s supported by two metal feet. Design is, of course, a highly personal thing but we can’t imagine the Toshiba 32RL858 will have shoppers swooning in the aisles and, in terms of build quality, we’ve seen better in TVs costing less.

We can’t imagine the absence of a fourth HDMI port – the RL858 has 3 – will present much of a problem in a television of this size but if your HDMI sources mean you require more, you’re at least forewarned. Two of the HDMI inputs are outward facing from the rear and are accompanied by the antennae connection, a LAN port, a SCART socket, Component Video in - together with L/R audio jacks, a D-SUB VGA PC connection and an optical digital audio out. The side connections are completed by a headphone jack, a CAM slot and a single USB port. There’s also four buttons for on/off and selecting up and down for both volume and channel selection.

The supplied remote control might not look much but it was a joy to use being light in the hand and with well placed, slightly concave, soft rubberised buttons that have just about the right amount of give whilst being of ideal size. It’s an ironic contrast to the designer- fuelled madness of the drop flapped monstrosity that ships with some of the higher end sets and its compactness leaves you wondering why some remotes have to be so large.

Setting up the RL858 was the expected breeze and we were up and running within 5 minutes. Once operational we were presented with a, more or less, identical facsimile of the menus and GUI present in the recently reviewed >46TL868 with just a couple of minor differences. The 13 channel/2 hour view EPG is certainly identical and we’d perhaps suggest toning down the bright white background by a few notches as it can be a bit of a strain on the eyes.

As with the TL868, the overall menu structure consists of 5 sub menus - Picture, Sound, Applications, Preferences and Setup and it’s good to see all the Smart TV functions now grouped under Applications, rather than in 3 areas we’ve seen in other Toshiba’s. For a more comprehensive run down of the Menus, we’d ask readers to refer to the TL868 review and here we’ll largely concentrate on the Picture Menu.

The Picture Menu houses the standard Picture Mode, Backlight, Contrast, Brightness, Colour, Tint and Sharpness sliders. The available Picture Modes are Dynamic, Standard, Game, Autoview and Toshiba’s attempt at providing accurate out of the box settings with the Hollywood 1 and Hollywood 2 modes. In addition to the standard controls we have the Advanced Picture Settings that contain the ‘ColourMaster’ Colour Management System(CMS) which we’ve had our fair share of well documented problems with, in the past. Further controls for the Auto Brightness Sensor, which alters luminance based on ambient lighting; Active Backlight Control; Black/White Level; Noise Reduction and Cinema Mode are also found in this area and we’ll cover some of those later in the review but we found no use for either the Noise Reduction nor Auto Brightness Sensor controls.

As with the TL868’s there’s only one-point White Balance controls for each of the channels under Colour Temperature, so fingers crossed for linear RGB errors. We also have a Cinema mode on/off option that we’ll check for efficacy in the video processing tests that. It’s nice to see the option available in the RL858 as it’s been a notable omission in the higher end TVs.

Features

The RL858 features a decent media player either via USB or by DLNA streaming. File support via USB is more extensive than that from the network and those particularly interested in MKV playback will need to utilise the portable storage option. Other extensions supported are too numerous to list in a review but, as is usual, the built in player is no match for a dedicated media player.

Toshiba Places, the manufacturers cloud based internet portal is still in development but content is certainly on the increase. Within this ‘hub’ there’s areas for Video, Music, Social Networking, News etc. Naturally the likes of BBC iPlayer and YouTube are supported but there’s some curios such as internet music service, Auepo, and Woomi, an internet video portal here too. By using the Quick button of the remote control both the iPlayer and YouTube apps are instantly accessible which saves the need to navigate through the menus to get to them, and the same goes for Toshiba Places.

All in all we’re not going to complain at the on-board features in the Toshiba RL858 and it’s good to see plenty of internet content in a sub £400 TV. If we were being cheeky we might have suggested built in wi-fi, rather than the dongle necessary, to really set it apart from the crowd but we understand how cut throat the industry is and manufacturers need to draw the line somewhere. The inclusion of a Freeview HD capable tuner is more than recompense for this, however.

Picture Quality

It looks as though Toshiba have been making deals with Samsung, of late, as like the TL868 the RL858 would seem to be fitted with one of their VA panel variants. This means the RL is capable of producing satisfying levels of black and decent contrast performance. Shadow detailing wasn’t the best and the RL858 was clipping detail just above black but that’s not untypical for LCD. Blacks were a little on the blue side too but, again, this is a fairly common modern phenomena and you could spend far more and still see the same.

Once calibrated, we were impressed by the pictures the RL858B was capable of producing, particularly with HD content and, thanks to the size, SD images were certainly watchable as well. The motion handling was certainly not of the highest standard and fast moving objects suffered the typical ‘motion blur’ issues and there’s no frame interpolation engine to help out. Viewer tolerance to this sort of thing is highly variable but we’d certainly recommend seeing one in action before you part with your money if you’re a fan of either/or sports and action movies.

There was nothing remarkable about the RL858, in all honesty, but sometimes that’s a good thing and it’s good to report that screen uniformity was a way above average for edge-lit LED, with just a little bit of bleed in the corners. Of course, we’d rather it weren’t there at all but we’re starting to accept it’s the norm and all we can hope is that it’s not too noticeable with regular viewing, which , in the case of the Toshiba 32RL858B, it wasn’t, but movie lovers who like to watch in the correct aspect ratio will notice it in the ‘black bars’. Viewing angles were fairly favourable and although there is a discernible loss of contrast, once viewed off-centre, colours remained fairly true.

Considering the prices the RL858 is widely available for, through internet channels, we really don’t have too many grumbles with its picture quality. You can certainly do worse in this section of the market and we’d imagine most would be happy with what’s on offer.

Gaming Performance

Once we’d got over the downgrade in size from our usual gaming display and engaged the Game Picture Mode we were impressed with the responsiveness of the RL858 and the measured input lag figures backed this up. We took a number of measurements and most were around the 17 millisecond mark, although one or two were at 33 milliseconds, which means the Toshiba is lagging between 1 and 2 frames for the average console game.

Energy Consumption

In the out of box Standard mode, the Toshiba 32RL858B drew an averaged 49.5w but once calibrated the number dropped to 30.5w, which is impressive.

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Key Features

Full HD 1080p

LED Backlighting

Smart TV

Freeview HD

DLNA

Wi-Fi Capable

Impressive Black levels and Contrast

Freeview HD Tuner

Plenty of Features

Excellent Little Remote Control

Colour Master Worked!

Decent Video Processing

Responsive for Gaming

Mostly Uniform Screen

Design may Put Off Some

Motion Blur with Fast Moving Action

One Point White Balance Controls

Stand Doesn't Swivel

Some Light Bleed in Corners

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