Toshiba Regza SV670

Display Size & Technology
The panel that the SV670 is built around is a 54.6 inch LCD panel, which uses LED backlights instead of the more common CCFL (Cold Cathode Florescent Light) backlights. LEDs use less electricity, but Toshiba did not release any details on the expected power draw of the system. The backlight is an array type, where the LEDs are behind the panel (other displays put the LEDs at the edge of the display). Having the LEDs behind the panel also allows for something called local dimming, where the display can turn down the brightness of LEDs that are behind darker parts of the display; Toshiba calls their version of this technology FocaLight. In theory, this makes for deeper blacks, as turning the backlight down means that less light will get through. One unanswered question is how these LEDs are controlled; it would be too complicated to control them all individually (there are usually at least hundreds of individual LEDs), so the display divides them up into zones, each one of which can be controlled. Toshiba did not release any information on how many zones there are on the SV670, claiming that they had not yet decided. Other displays that have local dimming usually have between 100 and 200 zones. 

A 55.6-inch LCD panel is at the heart of the SV670

Format & Resolution
The SV670 is a Full HD screen, so the panel has 1920 by 1080 pixels. This also means that it can display every pixel of a 1080p video signal without having to downscale or otherwise fiddle with the image. 

Brightness, Blacks & Contrast Ratio
Like most of the pre-production displays that we have looked at at the CES show, Toshiba has not revealed much in the way of details on the performance of the display. So, we have no figures for how bright and dark the screen can get beyond a few bits of marketing speak along the lines of 'significantly higher dynamic contrast'. But the local  dimming we described above should mean (if it works as described) that the display can achieve higher contrast ratios than other non-dimming screens.

Refresh Rate & Motion
Most of Toshiba's high end models have made the leap to offering 240Hz motion processing which they refer to as ClearScan 240. With this, the display tries to fill in the blanks between video frames (which are sent 60 times per second) by refreshing the screen 240 times a second. In theory, this should lead to smoother on-screen motion, and we've seen a considerable improvement in motion on the displays that we have tested that use 120Hz processing. We'll have to wait and see if Toshiba's ClearScan 240 is an improvement over this, though. 

Viewing Angle
It's hard to draw too many conclusions from our examination of this pre-production model, but we didn't see any big problems here: the contrast and color both remained strong up to a wide angle. 

Color
The SV670 does not support any of the extended color gamut settings that many other manufacturers are adding, but we did see strong, deep color from the model that we looked at.