Home > Consumer Reviews > Toshiba 32C3035 - 32" Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV - With Freeview

The Toshiba 323035 - 32" is the best sub-£500 HD ready television that you can buy. Picture quality is amazing and the colours are rich and vibrant. The sound is suitable considering that it only has a 10Watt peak output. I also like the bass boost and SRS Wow sound features. Playing High Definiton games via the Xbox 360 is also great. The built in freeview is highly competent and reliable. The EPG is good and accurate with convenient timer controls. Picture quality from freeview channels is dependent on signal strength and broadcaster bandwidth. My own experiences are more than good. DVD playback is also fantastic and you can change the aspect ratios with ease. The only minor letdown is that this TV set uses 50~60 Hz instead of the 100Hz found on more expensive sets but it still performs admirably. The quality of true black is astounding for this price range. The set also has a sturdy stand that you have to assemble when unpacking - which took me about 8-10 minutes. The TV weighs less than 20kg (approx 17kg) and was easy to move about. All in all, you will not have any regrets when forking out less than £500 for this TV - fantastic.

I own this TV and yes, it has a fantastic picture in general. The sound is good enough, and colours are rich and vibrant. There is a comprehensive menu for tweaking all of the user settings (everything from gamma to backlight), and the interface is nice and clear with easy navigation. I have a Denon DVD player hooked into it via one of its two HDMI ports, and the upscaled picture quality is really superb.
What really lets this TV down is the contrast and detailing in dark scenes. There is very little definition in shadows, and if you're watching a night scene you basically have to forget about being able to see what's going on.
It's a real shame. This TV ticks every other box, and the overall quality is exceptional given the price. Just don't expect to watch a film like Alien with any real degree of satisfaction.

Great picture and great sound. Turned the lounge into a cinema!!! All delivered on time as promised. Great all round. Would recommend this LCD TV to all.

Shop around and you can pick up one of these for under £400. The look is simple and understated - it won't date like the ultra shiny ones, nor will it dominate the room. The picture quality is superb - very good definition, and viewable perfectly at all angles. The picture also seems barely affected by bright lighting conditions unlike some lower contrast ratios options available. The freeview is a bonus too, and will only pixelate if you have a very weak signal strength (or a lot of birds perching on your aerial!). Set up was simple, and the sound is superb whether through the built in speakers, or through a 7:1 surround set up.
The build quality is also excellent - the whole unit has a quality feel that some others did not, and the remote control has a robust weighty feel too.
A very good buy, for a very good price.

This is my first LCD TV, upgrading from an old Sony Trinitron CRT with a freeview box. I was very nervous about this purchase, but am delighted I took the plunge. I spent ages researching LCD's so here is some information I hope will be of use to others. Some of it is general and some specific to the Toshiba 32C3035.

My biggest concern was that I would be disappointed in the quality of Standard Definition (SD) television. I'm not about to spend a fortune on a HDMI DVD players so this was crucial. Well, the reality is that my 20 year old Sony does have better image quality, but this is only if you are four feet away. Anything further and this is absolutely fine. The fact that my screen is 50% larger, is now widescreen, has integrated digital, better sound quality, has multiple inputs, is future proof, yet can be a foot closer to the wall is worth far more than being able to watch from four feet away. I was worried that the size of the screen would make it too dominating but the fact that it is slim easily compensates. If anything I am wondering if I should have gone bigger.

Don't be misled by the awful image quality you see in Currys or Comet - it's just their lousy internal signal distribution. Go to John Lewis (or surprisingly to me, a large Sainsbury's) where they actually bother to set it up right and you will get a much better sense of how the picture will look; it's also a much better way to judge which picture you prefer from all the different models out there.

So why did I choose the Toshiba?

- It's remarkably cheap at the moment for a major brand
- The screen swivels on the stand, hardly any others do this
- It's NOT gloss piano-black, a nightmare-to-clean-fad I am sure will end soon
- While its native HD mode is 720p, it can accept 1080p signals
- It has a subwoofer output ie can go direct to a subwoofer

If you look for reviews of the more "basic" LCD's from the major brands, there are lots for this TV because it was seen as ground breaking and astounding for the price (at that time £700) when it was released last spring, winning lots of best-buy awards. Just enter 32C3030 in Google or indeed Toshiba's own website. That's the original model, this one the 32C3035 apparently just has cosmetic differences.

There are two consistent complaints about this set. First that the blacks are too dark and kill detail. All colours (including black) are indeed more vibrant on this set but you can soften this considerably using all the settings, and also by dropping the backlight to approx 50%. This takes you to the second complaint, that the set hums when backlight is below, bizarrely, 93%. I can confirm that it does, but if you are more than four feet away (see above) you need to be pretty anal to hear it. Other than this, I found it very easy to set up and to adjust the settings. I then watched a film off BBC2 freeview and was totally absorbed in a way my old CRT never achieved. This is a superb TV.

So in a nutshell, if you have a smaller old CRT, then a 32" LCD from a decent brand should not result in a big drop in quality. I don't know if this would be true of larger sizes. If you have a newer, large flat CRT, I would probably not make the switch unless you are desperate for a thin screen. And if you are going to choose a mid-range LCD, this one is the one to get.