Toshiba 46TL963 review

The first thing to say here is that there are far more features in the Toshiba 46TL963 than you've any right to expect from a 46-inch TV with such a low price.

For starters, there's the fact that it doesn't actually look like a 46-inch TV. Rather, because of its exceptionally slim, barely-there 1cm bezel, it takes up barely as much precious living room space as a typical 40-inch set.

Its relatively light grey finish is likely to appeal to many people too. Partly just because it's different from the dark finishes so common in the TV world; partly because its matt rather than gloss finish soaks up reflections from your living room lights; and partly because it stops the TV dominating whatever part of your room it sits in.

The bezel's finish is a touch plasticky, perhaps. But for the price, most people will surely be more than happy with how the Toshiba 46TL963 looks.

Most people will also be fairly happy with the Toshiba 46TL963's connections. Its four HDMIs put the set on the same level as - or better than - almost all premium TVs this year.

And modern multimedia types will appreciate the provision of two USBs for both recording to USB HDD from the TV's Freeview HD tuner and playing back a solid selection of multimedia file types from USB storage devices.

Then there's the television's LAN socket, via which you can either stream in material from a connected DLNA PC or else take the TV online with Toshiba's Places system.

It's disappointing, however, to find that the Toshiba 46TL963 doesn't sport built-in Wi-Fi. This has become a standard feature on almost all other mid-range and higher TVs this year, so its absence on the Toshiba 46TL963 is keenly felt.

You can add Wi-Fi by stumping up extra cash for one of Toshiba's USB Wi-Fi dongles - an investment made more appealing by the fact that this dongle also enables the TV to support the Intel WiDi PC desktop sharing system. But it would of course still be much better if the Wi-Fi/WiDi was built-in.

The Toshiba 46TL963's DLNA situation is frustrating too. It's much harder to get working than most DLNA systems - unless you happen to have a PC running Windows 7, at any rate.

The run of niggles continues, moreover, when you delve into the 'Places' online service. This starts off very nicely, thanks to the bright, colourful, well-organised 'folders' the on-screen menus provide for sorting different types of content.

But as soon as you head into these folders, it quickly becomes apparent that there's very little in any of them.

Really the only services worth mentioning are Twitter, Facebook, BBC iPlayer, Cartoon Network, HiT Entertainment, Box Office 365, Acetrax, Viewser, YouTube and iConcerts.

Hardly an earth-shattering list in these days where rival online TV systems from the likes of Sony, Samsung and LG offer apps by the hundred.

At the very least, it would be good to see such online video 'big hitters' as Netflix and Lovefilm on Places. Fingers crossed Toshiba will considerably up its online offering sooner rather than later.

Getting back to the good news about the Toshiba 46TL963, it's truly startling to find such an affordable set boasting an active (as opposed to passive) full HD 3D system inside.

Admittedly Toshiba hasn't been able to include any active shutter 3D glasses for free with the TV while keeping to the low price, but unlike the Wi-Fi dongle, we can at least understand this decision.

Not least because 3D isn't everyone's cup of tea, so it arguably wouldn't make sense on such a price-conscious TV to have upped the price just so 3D glasses could have been included.

The Toshiba 46TL963 also carries more picture set up aids than you'd expect, given its price.

Particularly handy are a surprisingly fulsome colour management system, a simple black/white shift bar, adjustments for the TV's gamma setting, two types of noise reduction, and a selection of settings for the TV's dynamic backlight control system.

And then there's Toshiba's Active Vision 200 processing system. This combines a native 100Hz panel with a blinking backlight to deliver a 200Hz-like effect, in a bid to reduce the sort of resolution loss and blurring issues when showing motion that plague almost all LCD TVs to some extent.

The last feature worth pointing out before finding out how the Toshiba 46TL963 performs is its 2D-to-3D conversion system.

This isn't actually a feature most people will likely use more than a couple of times, since such converted 3D material never looks as convincing as the real 3D deal. But it's a notable feature here because it wasn't available on the Toshiba 46TL963's predecessor, the Toshiba 46TL868B.