Toshiba Regza 40RL858 40in LED TV

Smart, but no mortarboard

Bottom out

One inevitable consequence of the Regza 40RL858’s thinness is that it sounds like an escapee from Alvin and the Chipmunks. There’s no weight or roundness to its sonic output, which makes enduring anything other than Deal or No Deal a bit of chore.

Toshiba Places portal

Hot IPTV buttons, YouTube and BBC iPlayer, are available direct from the Quick menu. For more net telly, you’ll need to head to the brand’s online portal, called Places. It’s here you’ll find VoD and free streaming services from Acetrax, Viewster, DailyMotion, Box Office 365, Woomi, Cartoon Network, HiT Entertainment, iConcerts and AUPEO!. There’re also a couple of social media apps, for Facebook and Flickr.

While the set is DLNA compliant and has the chops to stream content across a Lan, its network media performance is a tad flaky. Not only did my review sample crash several times when in Network Media Player mode, requiring it to be unplugged, it exhibited a devil may care attitude to file playback.

Ticks a lot of boxes but its performance with Nas boxes leaves room for improvement

Despite being offered a variety of Nas devices, it showed only passing interest in movies and music. Not only is video file support limited to MPEG derivations, the set seems to have a low tolerance of different media servers. Let’s hope Toshiba improves this with a firmware update sometime soon.

Things improve with local USB media. MP3 (sans album art), MP4, AVI, WMV, MKV and MOV content all plays, however navigation on a USB stick isn’t easy, as the reader uses a thumbnail display which refuses to reveal full file names.

Verdict


Undoubtedly, this 40-incher offers a lot of screen for the money. Image quality isn’t too shabby and it wins brownie points for its IPTV offerings. However an unconvincing multimedia performance across a network could prove a bit of a deal breaker for some. All things considered, I’d rate the Toshiba Regza 40RL858 as a nearly, but not quite, decent TV. ®

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