Toshiba 40RL858B

Toshiba 40RL858B manages to really stand out thanks to its stylish new design, which is surprising for a TV in this price range. Boasting a silver, metallic finish combined with a thin bezel, and even a stand that looks great, not to mention that thanks to the use of LED backlighting, the TV is noticeably thin as well, being only a slim 39mm thick.

The remote control isn’t as stylish as the TV itself, but it’s fairly user friendly with relatively small buttons and a proper layout. It’s also pretty comfortable to hold thanks to its angular shape.

The TV’s connections are positioned on both a panel on the left side as well as a panel on the back. On the latter, you’ll find a full sized Scart Socket, a VGA port,  optical digital audio output, full sized component inputs, a couple of HDMI ports as well as an Ethernet port. On the TV’s side panel you’ll notice yet another HDMI port, a CI slot, a headphone socket and a USB port.

It’s a nice selection of connections, even though most 40 inch models on the market offer 4 HDMI ports as well as another USB port that enables you to use a Wi-Fi dongle, while keeping the other USB port free for hooking up flash drives.

Performance

Toshiba 40RL858B makes use of LED edge backlighting as well as offering 100MHz processing for smoother motion. This model also has excellent viewing angles, so you won’t have issues with colors and contrast changing should your viewing angle be off.

Some of the primary qualities this TV boasts is its great levels of sharpness, and we’re not talking only about HD here, but even standard definition channels on Freeview.

Up-scaling fares well, adding extra sharpness to the picture while avoiding image noise, performing surprisingly better than even Toshiba’s more expensive models in this regard.

Pictures have a considerably high level of brightness, making colors look truly vibrant and intense.  Black levels are very deep as well.

Colors look natural and rich, especially on HD video, and even better should you use of the 2Hollywoodpicture presets that manage to offer a great balance of contrast and color performance.

As for standard definition material, performance isn’t as good with color tones seeming a bit off, as well as contrast and motion isn’t as smooth as it’s supposed to be.

Pros

The 40RL858B offers good standard definition up-scaling, sharp HD image as well as great deep black tones. We also liked its stylish design.

Cons

We did notice a few things we weren’t all that excited about such as the internet and media streaming features tend to be a bit sluggish when compared to other competing models, standard definition material color performance definitely has room for improvement and the speakers proved to be less than impressive.

Conclusion

The 40RL858B boasts a nice looking, stylish design and it does great in terms of HD performance, as for standard definition material however, it offers subpar performance, but what’s really disappointing is its internet features, as well as low audio quality.