good tv bad remote
Written: Feb 23 '04
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Pros: Attractive, decent picture, plenty of inputs, good geometry
Cons: remote, no user presets, inaccurate collors
The Bottom Line: decent tv for a bedroom. not the most accurate colors and really bad remote.
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| bobbyslav's Full Review: Toshiba 20AF41 20 inch TV |
Ok. I've had this tv for almost 3 years now. It's been a good tv and never really had any problems with it. For the longest time it was my main tv hooked up to my home theater receiver and dvd player, but finally I got enough courage to invest in a front projector so this tv finally went where it really belongs - in my bedroom. Not that it's not good or anything, but the screen size - 20" is just not enough for home theater.
Right now I have cable, vcr, and a dvd player hooked up to it, and also its audio output is connected to an external computer speaker system with a subwoofer for a little better sound.
The things I like about it:
The picture is overall desent. Picks up weak signals well and the comb filter cleans up snow and noise. There are plenty of inputs, and unlike the Philips 27" set I bought originally before this one, there are no color errors with any of the inputs. The geometry of the image is relatively good, but not perfect. It's relatively light and quite attractive.
Now for what I don't like.
First of all I cannot stress enough how much I hate the remote control. This has got to be the worst remote control ever designed. The buttons layout is totally random, the few buttons that do glow in the dark are stupidly enough the largest ones which you can find without any problem anyway. Worst of all is that god awful reset button conviniently placed on the farthest left on the remote. What it does is that it resets the factory settings for the picture controls to the default settings. And let me tell you the folks at toshiba must be blind because those factory settings are just ransid.
Out of the box the set is brighter than a light bulb. After turning down both brightness and contrast (both of which are set to the max by default) you do get a decent picture, but still you cannot achieve a good well balanced image. When you turn the brightness low enough for the whites to be nice withough "blooming" the picture gets really muddy. And the contrast feature makes very little difference from one end to the other. You can turn it all the way down and still end up with a really bright picture. I would say the color reproduction although not unpleasant is quite unaccurate. There is a strong blu/green bias, and unfortunately there are no color temeprature controls. There are also no user programable presets which is why i dread that reset button so much.
To sum it up - with a lot of reduction in the brightness, contrast, and color saturation you do end up with an ok picture, but far from true to life colors. The sharpness control has no effect at all.
The sound is ok but not enough. The volume bar goes to some random number like 68 i think or so but after 20 there is really no increase in the sound volume, instead only the background noise gets louder. This is why I connected the extra computer speaker system. Unfortunately the audio output is fixed so adjusting the tv volume does not affect the computer speakers so I don't have remote control over the sound.
Another minor problem is that you cannot switch the inputs with the channel control buttons, which means you cannot change them from the set itself, and you do have to use the input button on the remote. BTW the input button is only one and you cannot deactivate the inputs which are not in use. That means you have to constantly scroll through all 5 options to select the right one which is somewhat annoying. Also the fact that you have to use the input button was inconvinient for me because my universal remote from my home theater receiver didn't have a dedicated input select button and for that reason only I have to keep 2 remotes on the table instead of just the main one.
Last, the tv seems to polarize the screen more than other tvs I've used. This forms a strong static field which attracts a lot of dust. I have to dust it pretty much every day.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 300
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Epinions.com ID:
bobbyslav
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Bobby L
Location: Columbia, SC, USA
Reviews written: 132
Trusted by: 4 members
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