Toshiba 40G300U

Motion Performance

Motion Smoothness (7.0)

The Toshiba 40G300U was pretty good about showing a smooth motion. It exhibited the same stuttering and loss of fine detail that we see on nearly every LCD television. From a normal sitting distance, if you’re watching TV you probably won’t notice a problem. For sports viewing, you may see some loss of detail in the faces and uniforms of running players, but no major problems.

The TV offers a feature called ClearFrame that’s meant to improve these problems that, it seems, are inherent to LCD displays. While it does a very good job of correcting the problems stated above, it creates its own problems. When ClearFrame (or any motion smoothing feature, for that matter) is activated, the video takes on a very strange look. Film-based content looks like cheap video, everything is too sharp, and people appear to move unnaturally.

Motion Artifacting (5.0)

The Toshiba 40G300U displayed a fair number of motion artifacts. While we’ve seen similar problems in similar types of televisions, there seemed to be no way to correct them. In fact, when we activated the ClearFrame feature, the artifacts only got worse. Normally, motion smoothing features remove some problems, but add others. In this instance, it simply added to the problems.

In rare instances, we also noticed something that almost looked like the artifacting from a TV that offers local dimming, which the Toshiba 40G300U does not. When high contrast image were moving across a black background, we noticed some very faint ghosting around the object (on all sides), as if the backlights were reacting to the bright object on an otherwise dark screen. We double-checked all the settings to be sure we’d deactivated all the processing features. We can only guess that the TV is doing some behind the scenes tinkering that we have no control over. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps (7.00)

The Toshiba 40G300U is fully capable of displaying native 24fps content (like most Blu-Ray movies). We noticed some minor problems with stuttering in camera pans, as well as some jitters in high frequency patterns. Overall, though, the TV did just fine. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.

Resolution Scaling (9.83)

The Toshiba 40G300U does a very good job of scaling images to fit its screen. The TV has a native 1080p (1920 × 1080) resolution, but most of the video you watch will be of a lower resolution. It’s up to the TV’s processing to scale that image. It’s been quite some time since we saw a TV perform these tasks so adeptly. More on how we test resolution scaling.

480p

When we looked at 480p content, the Toshiba 40G300U was perfect, more or less.

720p

With 720p content, we saw the slightest problem with very high frequency patterns that created a faint Moire.

1080i

The 1080i content was perfect. No problems.

Other Models in the G300 Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
Toshiba 46G300U 46 in.	Toshiba 55G300U 55 in.