Toshiba 46TL968 review

Unfortunately, the TL968 struggles with standard definition images, displaying a lot of noise and little detail, but it copes very well with high-definition content. It varies depending on the channel and content, but there’s significantly more detail and much less noise. Blu-ray films looked even better, although we had to adjust the picture quality settings before they looked their best. The Resolution+ feature, for instance, sharpens the picture and gives the appearance of more detail, but it also introduces an excessive amount of noise.

There are a number of presets from which you can choose, such as the backlight-controlling Dynamic, the overly saturated Hollywood Day and the dim Hollywood Night. The Game setting is a welcome inclusion, disabling all unwanted image processing for improved response times when you’re connected to a PC, Xbox or PS3, and is often missing from similarly priced TVs from more budget-oriented competitors.

With the right settings, based on the Hollywood Pro preset, we managed to get our reference footage looking sharp, bright and colourful. Skin tones were reasonably lifelike and colours weren’t overly vibrant, producing realistic images that had plenty of depth in HD. Annoyingly, there’s no way to save your calibrated settings for multiple sources, so you’ll have to write them down and set them again for each HDMI connection.

Even after calibration, things weren’t perfect. We noticed some backlight clouding around the top and bottom edges of the display when watching darker scenes, which is especially apparent if you haven’t reduced the aggressive backlight settings down from their default values. Black levels were reasonable for a sub-£600 LCD TV, but don’t expect plasma-like levels of clarity here.

The TL968 is an active 3D TV, but Toshiba doesn’t include 3D glasses with it, so you must spend £45 per pair on top of the price of the TV if you want to watch 3D films. The TV can upscale 2D images to 3D, but we weren’t particularly impressed by the simulated depth effects. Even native 3D content wasn’t particularly stunning, with noticeable crosstalk that isn’t present on rival active 3D TVs from the major manufacturers. There’s also much more judder than in 2D mode, as ClearScan processing is disabled.

No 3D glasses are bundled, as has become the norm, just this nicely-styled remote

The integrated speakers do a reasonable job, producing loud audio that can comfortably fill a medium-sized room, but don’t expect much presence; there’s barely any bass and the treble can get painfully sharp when you’ve got the volume turned up. It’s ideal for watching the news or catching up with EastEnders, but you’ll definitely want some external speakers to get the most out of games and films.

Toshiba has managed to squeeze a large amount of features into the TL968, and while many of them are appreciated, not all of them are up to the same standard as the competition. We appreciate the inclusion of Wi-Fi, extensive image quality controls and excellent file format support over DLNA, but the limited smart TV portal and merely average picture quality make it more of a jack-of-all-trades than budget bargain.