Toshiba Regza 40XV645U

Audio Quality (4.0)

The Toshiba REGZA 40XV645U doesn't have the best set of built-in speakers we've heard. Voices were very flat, even when the voice boost feature was enabled. The TV had very weak bass with the StableSound feature on and sounded very tinny. When we switched it off it gave the bass a bit more presence, but not much, and the lower bassy sounds made something in the TV vibrate. Interestingly, there is a bass boost feature, but we didn't notice a significant difference between low, high, and off. Regardless of the various advanced audio settings, the audio quality sounded pretty flat.

The TV doesn't have a proper surround sound option, but you can enable the stereo extension feature. This helps localize sound slightly better, but made sounds happening off to the left or right sound like they were happening to the extreme left or right with no real differentiation inbetween. It seemed like something was either playing loudly from one channel and not the other, or equally through both, with very little difference between these three points.

Overall, the speakers won't make you cringe and rush out to buy new ones, but they're not great.

Menu Interface (7.5)

The 40XV645U's menu system is very basic. It features a tabbed interface: icons run across the top, and the highlighted item's menu extends underneath. The top-level menu items are pictures, sound, applications, preferences, and setup.

The main menu uses tabs on top.

There isn't anything flashy about the menu system. Submenus open up over their parent menu and you'll have to use the return button to exit out.

The advanced picture settings offer a nice selection of options.

The one gripe we have about the menu is that none of the menu items are explained. This is obviously less of an issue for something like the sleep timer, but some proprietary features in the advanced picture menu or audio menu aren't particularly obvious.

Manual (6.0)

The 40XV645U's manual is packed with information, but isn't very user friendly. For starters, the font is rather small. The manual has a table of contents, but it's very dense. The different chapters are split into headers and subsections. The headers and subsections don't have any differences in the text style or font, but the latter is indented slightly. The manual also doesn't have tabbed pages and its index is pretty sparse, especially compared to the table of contents. The manual does feature pictures and charts, but they, like the text, are a bit too small.