Toshiba 37XV505D Calibration

Greyscale

The television menus allow for one of three Colour Temperature presets – Cool, Neutral or Warm – to be used as a basis for Greyscale calibration. From there, the individual Red, Green and Blue components can be adjusted accordingly to achieve the closest match. I assumed that the "Warm" preset would bring me closest to the desired D65 standard, but found that it was much too, well – warm (just look at the sky-high reds). The CCT chart also showed that colours were some way off the desired 6500k.

Using these settings as a starting point, I began the greyscale calibration, and was eventually able to bring things much closer to spec:

Colour

The out-of-the-box Colour on the Toshiba 37XV505D LCD television was actually fairly close to the Rec 709 standard to start with, but using the Toshiba 37XV505D's "3D Colour Management" control, it was possible to fine-tune even further. The biggest improvements could be seen with yellows and reds, with green and cyan proving trickier. The end results, are excellent, and as such the Toshiba 37XV505D LCD HDTV's colour reproduction is far ahead of many other displays.

Before:

After:

Benchmark Tests At A Glance

Black Level

The black level produced by the Toshiba 37XV505D's panel was below average, meaning that its picture was inevitably robbed of some depth and didn't appear very satisfying during dark scenes. Fortunately, the Backlight can be dimmed through the Picture menu so you can at least turn down the light output to combat the problem. This will, of course, be at the expense of whites and give a dimmer overall image, so, as is common for LCD technology, viewers must pick their posion.

Toshiba's included "Active Backlight Control" can also be enabled to monitor incoming video and adjust the backlight accordingly (that is, to dim the dark scenes and brighten the light ones), for those who can tolerate the fluctuations in brightness.

Motion Resolution

The FPD Benchmark Software Blu-ray Disc allowed me to score the Toshiba 37XV505D HDTV as having a motion resolution of 300. This is standard for LCD televisions that don't employ any sort of motion processing technology.

Video Processing

For users who don't (yet) own an upscaling DVD player, or for heavy users of Digital TV, the quality of the television's internal Deinterlacing will be especially relevant. Running both the NTSC and PAL versions of the Silicon Optix HQV benchmark disc (from an Oppo 980H, sending Interlaced video over HDMI) revealed some strange results. For example, on the "jaggies" test, the Toshiba 37XV505D demonstrated a huge amount of combing, with the entire rotating white bar corrupted. However, raising the DVD player's own Brightness setting up a notch corrected the problem and changed the results considerably, presenting almost no jagginess at all - changing the results from terrible to excellent.

Similarly, on the "US flag" test, the actual smoothing was highly effective, but the entire background juddered - until the Brightness of the DVD player's output was lowered as far as -10, which provided excellent smoothing, but of course, with a picture that was far too dark. This is incredibly strange behaviour and I was honestly surprised that Brightness would affect deinterlacing this much.

Connecting a DVD player via the analogue RGB SCART interface instead improved the results considerably - combing was gone, except on rare occasions. Fortunately, actually watching real-life movies on the Toshiba 37XV505D didn't present any problems, but the test discs show that the potential is there.

Film mode detection was surprisingly excellent for a budget LCD TV, with both the 3:2 and, more importantly for us in Europe, 2:2 cadences being detected correctly, and even more surprisingly, quite quickly.

The quality of the scaling (Upconversion) was good. Any such resizing algorithm walks a fine line between creating upscaled pictures that are both detailed as well as without ringing. The "Sharpness" test card on the AVIA Guide to Home Theater disc revealed an acceptable amount of ringing, considerably more than other 1080p HDTVs such as the Sony KDL-40W2000, but still within acceptable limits.

That said, if you're using a DVD player which performs its own Upconversion alongside this 1080p LCD HDTV, you'll be relying on its scaling instead - so you're not necessarily constrained by the upconverting circuitry built into the Toshiba 37XV505D.