Toshiba 42HL196

Summary: Let me say first off this set might be good for most of you out there who can look past some it’s shortcomings but I expected more. I have learned that for the price, it is a good picture in most cases.

It does have a great picture with strong colors that can be configured to your liking. The brightness is the best I have seen and can tend to blow out some SD, this is also customizable though. The black level suffers a bit from this, turning down the backlight improved it but not enough. Black level in my opinion is average, depends on what your watching and the source.
Standard def looked decent at about 10ft away with the internal processing. I’m watching Jay Leno at 1080I at the time and it looks amazing. I am returning it for other reasons that I am going to go on about.

I almost was willing to keep it until I saw a show that was very dark and it became a blurry mess. The ghosting was in a 1080i broadcast over cable television. I noticed it first on a commercial where a guy was running and half his face was in shadow and half in light. His face in the shadow blurred around like a scene from The Grudge or the Ring. Good for a horror movie but not for a $2000 TV. Then I saw a very dark scene in a TV show that made me decide to return it. I know the specs say that the TV has a 8ms delay on the refresh and it shouldn’t have this problem. Might be that 1080 is to much for this set.

I had issues with connecting it to my PC also. The VGA input it unable to display at native resolution 1900 x 1080p or i. Nothing worked at 1080 but I was able to get it to display at 768.
At this res the picture was distorted and blurred but was readable from a distance.
I was willing to look past this PC distortion but I am buying for the future and 1080p hopefully on new sources (PS3, blueray or HD-DVD). Just hooked up the PC into the HDMI port via the DVI output of 1080p from my PC and it also did not work right. The TV accepted it as a 1080I signal, but looked worse than 768 through the VGA.

The remote also left me disappointed. Beyond it’s features working with the TV, the volume control doesn’t work on external volume connected to the TV. So the basic RCA red and white or optical is not connected to the TV’s internal speaker volume. This became a big issue with me when wanting to mute all sound or turn it up and down. I tried linking the remote with my receiver with bad results. This remote left me thinking I needed to purchase a expensive universal remote just to mute the volume?!

I am only writing this because I spent many hours and labor bringing this back and forth to make you more educated. This as advertised is a 1080 TV but it is one another that can’t move 1080p picture quality like expected. It is a good TV in some aspects but technical inept.