Toshiba 46TL963 review

The very definition of cheap and cheerful

Toshiba 46TL963 review
Great Value
The Toshiba 46TL963 boasts 3G and smart TV features for a good price

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Usability

Things start badly in this department, thanks to the Toshiba 46TL963's remote. For starters it's very uncomfortable to hold, thanks to a combination of its unusually large size, weird top-heaviness and slippery wedge shape.

But also unhelpful is its layout, because despite its extreme size, it still feels overcrowded, and doesn't always put the most important buttons in the most easy to access places.

Happily the Toshiba 46TL963's on-screen menus are much better. They employ an unusual concentric circle design where the bottom circle holds the main menu options and the upper circle shows the sub-menu options.

Toshiba 46TL963 review

This approach feels intuitive to navigate, and enables you to see a clearer path to most options than the usual simple list menu approach.

Also laudable in principle is the presentation of Toshiba's Places system, thanks to its colourful, friendly, customisable attempt to organise content into category folders.

Ironically, though, at present the sheer lack of content on the Places platform makes the use of so many themed content folders feel more like a barrier than a help.

Sound

Toshiba 46TL963 review

Unusually for a super-slim TV, the Toshiba 46TL963 sounds its best when running loud. At quiet volumes, the speakers just don't seem sensitive enough to deliver much detail or dynamism, yet driven harder the mid-range opens up nicely, good levels of treble detailing emerge, and there's even a bit of bass around.

Value

Given how often during this review we've stated how much better the Toshiba 46TL963 is than the majority of its budget TV rivals, you can probably guess that we rate it very highly for value.

In fact, all things considered it's quite possibly the best value 46-inch TV we've seen so far this year.

John Archer
AV Technology Contributor

John has been writing about home entertainment technology for more than two decades - an especially impressive feat considering he still claims to only be 35 years old (yeah, right). In that time he’s reviewed hundreds if not thousands of TVs, projectors and speakers, and spent frankly far too long sitting by himself in a dark room.