If you read Sound & Vision steadily, you know we've only recently embraced LCD flat-panels for serious home theater viewing, mainly because the newest models mitigate LCD's longstanding problems with poor reproduction of black and smearing on fast motion. Taking its proud place in this pack of breakout flat-panels is the Toshiba 47LZ196 Regza 47-inch LCD HDTV, the flagship in the company's new top-of-the-line Cinema Series Regza Pro family.
This 47-incher has a commanding presence out of the box with its smart, gloss-black bezel with beveled edges, "hidden" speakers, and matte-black swivel stand. But it's what you don't see that sets it apart: Along with competitive picture quality, the 47LZ196 has more bells and whistles than a busful of one-man bands.
The package starts with a high-rez 1080p screen and a jack pack with two 1080p-capable HDMI inputs, two RF antenna/cable inputs, and a CableCARD slot (for use with an embedded TV Guide On Screen program guide). An Ethernet connection to your home network allows streaming of MP3 and JPEG files to the TV (where you can make slide shows) and lets you receive and send emails (albeit clumsily, via an onscreen virtual keyboard). You can even email the TV to schedule a recording on your video recorder. The remote has buttons for freeze-frame as well as a double-window function that splits the screen between two inputs so you can keep an eye on two games simultaneously.
Speaking of the remote, its well thought-out layout is among the best I've seen. The button to activate the full backlight is smartly positioned at the upper left corner, where you can always find it in the dark. The good-size Input button is equally accessible, at the bottom right corner of the numeric keypad; hitting it brings up a menu showing all inputs, which you can then select directly by number, via the navigation keys, or by repeatedly pressing the Input button. About the only awkwardly placed control of any import was the Pic Size button for widescreen modes. Otherwise, this remote was pure joy — a rarity indeed.
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The Short Form
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| Price $3,900 (AS TESTED; $4,500 LIST) / tacp.toshiba.com / 800-631-3811 |
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Snapshot
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| Solid LCD picture quality combines with an incredible feature set in Toshiba's new flagship LCD. |
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Plus
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•Vibrant, natural color •Crisp 1080p detail •Innovative Color Palette control •Excellent, fully backlit remote |
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Minus
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•Poor handling of noisy cable programs •Uneven brightness on some scenes |
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Key Features
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•1,920 x 1,080-pixel LCD display •1080p-capable HDMI inputs •Color Management Pro palette control •Ethernet link for photos, music, email •Fully backlit 6-device remote •Video inputs: 2 HDMI, 2 component-video, 2 composite-/1 S-video, 2 RF, VGA |
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Test Bench
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The Toshiba's Pro2 and Movie modes measured closest to the grayscale standard, but were still unacceptably blue. Service menu adjustments in Pro2 brought it to within ±50K from 30 to 80 IRE. Brightness in this mode was 27.5 ftL before calibration and 31.0 ftL after. Color- decoding error measured +20% red and +7% green, but Color Palette tweaks zeroed these out. Red, green, and blue primaries were notably accurate. 1080i and 720p patterns were fully resolved via HDMI but slightly softer via component. Full-field gray patterns below 50 IRE were slightly darker in the middle than on the sides. Full Lab Results |
Most notable, however, is the Color Palette, a feature I've not seen on any other TV. It allows independent adjustment of the hue, saturation, and brightness of red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, and cyan, plus three arbitrary user colors you can pick up from anywhere on any video frame. All your changes are graphically tracked on a swatch that shows where you are in that part of the color space, and you get adjoining "before" and "after" bars that let you clearly see the differences your adjustments make. Awesome! This feature was fantastic for endlessly fine-tuning the picture to account for color variations in programming.
PICTURE QUALITY I started my viewing with a wildlife documentary on Discovery HD and was immediately taken with the sharp clarity of the Toshiba's image and its robust, striking color. Fine details were apparent in the undulations of fur on a polar bear basking in the Arctic dusk and in the coats of wolf pups in Yellowstone. In one shot, a park guide climbed a rocky hill against a rich blue sky with an almost three-dimensional wisp of white cloud. Small brown boulders were clearly tinged with rusty stains, and every blade of tall, yellow grass cropping up among the rocks and patches of crisp snow seemed set off in perfect relief. The scene looked almost photographic. Later, talking heads in an HD Net news report displayed similarly startling details, such as the subtle pinstripes in a man's black suit and the fine creases in an old woman's face. ESPN HD football highlights looked spectacular, with the blue and orange uniforms of the Denver Broncos and the silvery helmets of the Oakland Raiders vividly rendered and no distracting trails during fast action.
But in another scene of the wildlife show — a nearly still shot of the full moon against a dark sky — I noticed that the sky on either side of the screen seemed a little lighter than in the center. Earlier, I had observed that on dark gray test patterns, the Toshiba's image was slightly brighter in its far left and right zones than in the middle, and now here it was in program material. This kind of imperfection is not unknown in LCDs (JVC's 46-inch LT-46FN97, reviewed in December, suffered the same fault). It may have been endemic only to my sample, but in any case, it manifests infrequently in moving pictures and is difficult to spot unless you're really looking for it.
For movie content, I spun the HD DVD of Backdraft. In the opening shot, where two young brothers shine a flashlight on firefighters' helmets lined up in a dark locker room, I could make out fine details in the stitching of the hemets' colorful black leather shields. Later, the red of the fire engines in bright sun popped off the screen, and the lime-green robe worn by singer David Crosby in his cameo as a resident of a burning building looked natural and punchy. Fire, a challenge for any video display, came across with good richness, depth, and color.
In this film — and, frankly, all my viewing — I couldn't help but yearn for a little blacker blacks and a little more detail in the shadows, but the Toshiba did an admirable job that ranks it among the better LCD panels I've seen. Also, while the set did pretty well upconverting clean 480i DVDs to fit its 1080p screen, its two noise-reduction modes weren't much help with poor-quality 480i cable broadcasts, which generally looked soft and noisy.
BOTTOM LINE Though not flawless, Toshiba's 47LZ196 delivers an excellent picture that puts it in the top tier of late-generation LCDs. What's more, its innovative features, sophisticated adjustments, and thoughtful remote are in a class by themselves. Whether you just like to sit back and watch or prefer to play, play, play, you'll find plenty to pass the hours with this impressive HDTV.
Full Lab Results
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