Cute, low-cost player offers value-for-money
performance
Toshiba’s Blu-ray biscuit tin may be small, but it leaves
nothing out. Aside from 4K upscaling, which as noted seems irrelevant at this
price anyway, all the boxes are ticked. There’s 3D, USB media-sucking and Wi-Fi
with DLNA, so you can access further video, photos and tunes from your
network’s devices.
Pleasingly
compact but doesn’t stint on features
The Cloud TV app portal doesn’t offer as much choice as
Samsung, Sony or Panasonic, but the core stuff is here from content providers,
such as Skype and Facebook. In fact, signing in with your Facebook ID saves a
lot of tedious typing with the remote and provides a handy social news feed;
just remember to politely decline to allow Toshiba to contact friends “on your
behalf”.
USB
goes solo but handily it reads almost any media you throw at it
Saving time is a key factor, because this deck is slow,
lagging behind rivals whether you’re loading a disc or opening an app. Throw too
many demands at the processor and the whole thing crashes – that’s what
happened to us anyway; maybe we’re just too demanding.
Playing a Blu-ray comes more naturally, though, with no
serious problems. However, if you look hard and you will notice some background
noise; colours are a little muted and it lacks the punchy whites and dynamic spectrum
of the more expensive machines on test.
Upscaling DVD is handled more clumsily, too, causing moving
objects such as cars to smudge around the edges.
Backlit
buttons: Invisible until the power is switched on, cunningly
As a CD player it performs a little better, with track names
pulled from an online database to remind you what’s on, and the quality in
stereo is fine. Multichannel soundtracks, however, sound slightly more brittle.
This definitely meets the requirements of the “smart”
category and is dirt cheap. Is the overall experience fantastic? Not on your
nelly. But the Blu-ray playback is acceptable and the connectivity good enough
for less demanding viewers or as a second-room telly solution.
Love: Conveniently compact. Facebook integration. Passable
visuals. A smattering of useful apps
Hate: Sluggish disc mechanism and even slower online access.
Messy DVD upscaling
T3 says A modest player offering crisp-enough Blu-ray
pictures. The slowness of it does grate at times but, come on, it’s only 100
notes
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Specifications
·
Smart TV Cloud TV apps ·
Video Up to 1080p 2D & 3D ·
Connectivity Wi-Fi, Ethernet, coaxial digital, HDMI, USB ·
Audio Decoding Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA ·
Media Streaming DLNA, Miracast ·
Height 36mm ·
Width 290mm ·
Depth 180mm ·
Weight 0.9kg
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