Toshiba Cell TV

Display Size & Technology

The Toshiba Cell TV has a number of impressive display technologies. First of all, like every other HDTV at CES, the Cell TV supports 3D. The television uses an active shutter system, which is what Panasonic, Samsung, and other manufacturers are also using. You do need glasses, and you should not expect them to come cheaply. At least in the show floor demos, the quality of the 3D looks pretty much the same as everyone else's: mediocre. These first-generation 3D HDTVs still feel like a novelty, and the only people buying into the gimmick are the manufacturers themselves.

The Cell TV, like Samsung and others, is also offering realtime 2D-to-3D upconversion. The process, as it was explained to us, is actually pretty simple: the image is simply doubled and offset; the glasses do most of the work in creating a mildly convincing illusion. We thought the results of this processing are less impressive than native 3D content: they lack the depth, or 'immersiveness' of Blu-Ray 3D.

Toshiba had this very cool cut-away display that showed the LEDs located behind the screen.

Net Resolution + is a technology that reduces compression artifacting from online video (think of the blocky video quality in a YouTube video and you have the right idea). The demonstrations that Toshiba was running on the show floor were really not much of an improvement. One of compression artifacting's biggest issues is disjointed color transitions. While the Net Resolution + appeared to smooth edges of the blocks, the color transitions still looked pretty bad. Also, the technology does nothing to increase resolution (which is not really possible anyway). This means your YouTube videos will still look pretty bad on a giant TV.

KIRA2 is Toshiba's trade name for the LED backlighting technology. In an interesting cutaway model on the show floor, you could actually see what 512 LED zones looks like. This is a big improvement over last year's Toshiba models, which had just 96 zones. More zones means finer contrast between bright areas and dark areas on the screen that appear side-by-side. The TV will be able to produce a blindingly bright 1000 cd/m2, which seems unnecessarily high. Whether this spec actually comes true in our lab testing is a different story. We can tell you that one of the floor models was bright enough to make us wince. Great feature, huh?

Formats & Resolution

The Toshiba Cell TV goes a bit beyond your ordinary HDTV. The resolution isn't 1280 x 820 or 1920 x 1080. It's actually a 4K display, meaning the resolution is 3840 x 2160. That 5,443,200 more pixels on the screen than a 1080p TV.

Do you need all those pixels? Right now, no. The Blu-Ray standard is limited to 1080p, as is HDMI 1.3, so there's no consumer-friendly container and no means of transferring the data from point A to Point B. Anything you watch on the Cell TV will simply be upconverted. At least you can be sure of a good upconversion process, though, because the processor is a monster compared to most TVs. All the demo units on the CES show floor looked good.

Brightness, Blacks and Contrast Ratio

The new KIRA2 LED backlighting system debuting on the new 2010 Toshiba TVs looks impressive, at least on paper. There are now 512 individually controllable LED zones—an increase from 96 zones on last year's models. The increase in zones should make for better tunnel contrast, meaning the blacks stay dark no matter how much white is surrounding them.

For whatever reason, Toshiba is also pushing the maximum brightness on their new Cell TV, supposedly up to 1000 cd/m2 (incredibly bright). As far as we can tell, few people in the modern day ever ask for a brighter TV. It's a technological breakthrough no one asked for.

Color

No details were mentioned about color performance. However, there is a new feature, called AutoView RGB, which reads the room's ambient light. It then adjusts color, brightness, gamma, sharpness, saturation, and color temperature to be the ideal setting for your specific viewing environment. The technology itself is not new at all, but previous versions we've seen only adjust the backlight according to your room's brightness.

Motion & Refresh Rate

The Toshiba Cell TV has a refresh rate of 480Hz. Yes, you read that right: 480Hz. Does it seem like overkill? It is. There's really no benefit that we've found to anything over 120Hz, which is the minimum needed for 3D displays. It's a numbers war between manufacturers, and Toshiba clearly wanted to come out on top (they didn't, though, since every major manufacturer except Sony seems to have a 480Hz feature).

The 480Hz refresh rate occurs when you're watching 2D TV. If you switch to 3D, you'll actually get a refresh rate of 240Hz in each eye.

Viewing Angle

No details were given about viewing angle.