Toshiba 37AV502U

This TV goes in the bedroom. The picture is fabulous. The sound is fine. The remote is good and reasonably intuitive. Our configuration is just the TV, a network media playback device and a laptop, occasionally. No cable box, no DVD connected. The TV is directly connected to the household digital cable line.

I'm perplexed by the combination of audio and video inputs that don't work together. For example, a 2 month old laptop with HDMI out doesn't send audio over the HDMI cable, rather, a stereo jack must be used. Fine, until you attempt to have the TV play the sound. It won't. HDMI doesn't support any audio input that isn't included in the HDMI cable. Having HDMI video and listening to the audio on laptop speakers sucks. Booo.

Component video inputs will only support TOS-link (optical) audio input - no L/R stereo audio and no coax-digital audio. This means we're forced to use SVideo instead. Booo.

Then there's the hum. Whenever the TV is on, there's a high pitched hum. Constant - drive me crazy hum. Nobody else notices it in the house. It isn't anywhere as loud as an Xbox-360.

On our cable system, clean QAM channels get moved every few months. NBC-HD gets moved. According to the manual, rescanning all the channels will wipe the channel names we've entered. Booo. 96-804 is NBC-HD; next month, 98-807 is. Huh? The first evening we used the TV, we scanned all channels. Over time, some channels have simply disappeared from the TV list. We didn't remove them. Booo.

Rescanning shouldn't wipe existing channels. It would be really nice if we could say to scan between 90-001 and 98-890 QAM. Booo.

Just changing channels on normal cable channels is slow and there's no way to "fast change" except to enter the next desired channel or use the "favorites" to jump directly to the desired channel. Ch-Up twice only goes to the next channel until it tunes in. Then you must press it again, post-tune. 1.5 seconds to tune a standard def channel is slow.

Aspect ratio control is the normal Toshiba Theater-wide 1/2/3 plus "Natural" and "Full". I was able to set the input from our media player to be "Full" always even with just an SVideo input (due to component audio only supporting TOS-Link audio).

Let's be clear, the picture is fabulous, the sound is good, but I won't recommend anyone else to buy this TV. Many of my complaints are probably cable system and legacy hardware related - why are they allowed to move digital channels around so much? If I had HDMI everything to connect to this TV, I suppose life would be easier?

Four stars since our setup is a little different than most and normal DVD and digital cable box connections will probably be fine. 

Reviewed By : TunaMan "Engineer Nerd" : Dec 2, 2008

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