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Toshiba 46SL417U LED HDTV

26.07.2011
With a decent 46-inch 120Hz LED-backlit display, a pretty good media player, and support for Yahoo Widgets, Netflix, Vudu, and a few other top-tier commercial on-demand Web services, the Toshiba 46SL417U enters the midsize fray in style. But the field is tough these days, and with a street price of just under $1100 (as of June 9, 2011), the 46SL417U faces stiff competition from highly rated models (some with 3D support, which this set lacks) at a similar or somewhat lower price.

It's not so much that this set has any major problems. It's just that the 46SL417U has a slew of design annoyances, and while nothing in our juried image-quality tests raised a huge red flag, nothing in the results made this HDTV particularly compelling, either. It scored pretty much straight down the middle, earning average ratings of Good for contrast, color tones, and and detail. Judges generally liked the way it handled our recorded high-def video clips, but a few found its DVD and Blu-ray videos a tad oversaturated, and they remarked on the loss of detail in a test clip from the Blu-ray version of The Dark Knight. And while it aced our motion benchmarks, we saw considerable stuttering in our diagonal-panning test.

The 46SL417U is very energy efficient: In our tests it consumed 63.6 watts per hour when turned on, and registered no noticeable consumption when powered down, earning a green score of 87 percent, which we rate as Very Good.

With a shiny black bezel and pedestal, the set's design is fairly typical, although the top edge of the bezel is significantly wider than that of most current sets. For some reason Toshiba placed a turquoise blue Energy Star sticker on the lower-left corner of the bezel, and it's a bit distracting there.

Ports sit along two sides of a recessed area in the back, facing either down or sideways, a design intended to facilitate cable management for wall-mounted panels. However, the arrangement can also make it difficult to line up and insert a thick cable, especially with the downward-facing ports, which include coax (for cable or antenna), ethernet, digital audio out, PC (RGB) video and audio inputs (the latter can double as a component-video or DVI-audio input), and an HDMI port.

The side-facing lineup, from the top, includes two USB ports; one component-video input (requiring use of an included adapter cable); two shared audio/composite-video inputs, which also use provided adapter cables (you choose the appropriate AV source--component audio, composite AV, or DVI audio via one of the HDMI ports--in the set's software menu); an analog stereo-audio output; and three HDMI ports.