The Short Form

Price $2,800 / tacp.toshiba.com / 800-631-3811

Snapshot

Despite less than perfect color, this big Toshiba's deep, clean blacks and great detail make it a worthy 1080p competitor.

Plus

•Reproduces deep, clean blacks and shadows •Uniform picture across the screen •Resolves every detail of 1080i/p sources

Minus

•Overly blue out-of-box color temperature •Somewhat inaccurate color decoding •Cannot accept 1080p signals

Key Features

•62-inch 1,920 x 1,080-resolution DLP display •2 HDMI, 2 component-video inputs •CableCard slot with TV Guide EPG •Ethernet connection allows limited network functions

I did appreciate that the Toshiba's QAM digital cable tuner grabbed plenty of channels and that its over-the-air digital tuner snagged all the stations I expected, even from deep in an office building in midtown Manhattan. I grew to love Toshiba's channel-browser system, which let me select favorites and showed a thumbnail of each along the bottom of the screen. The favorites could include not only channels from the antenna and cable tuners, but also regular A/V inputs, so I could add HDMI1 as one of my favorites, for example, next to the high-def CBS channel. The browser thus made the usual tedious trip to the input selection screen largely unnecessary.

The rest of the menu system was designed well enough, with the exception of the custom picture memories. Although I liked that the "preference" picture mode could remember my settings individually, whenever I selected one of the other presets - Sports, Movie, or Standard - and adjusted contrast, brightness, or other parameters, my settings in "preference" would revert to the defaults. If you spend any time setting up the picture as you like it, be sure to write down the numbers.

There's an advanced picture menu with a few other options. The dynamic contrast mode is said to adjust the picture on the fly to maximize contrast, but in our testing I found contrast superb anyway and preferred to keep the settings stable, so I left it off. The noise reduction settings did clean up some moving motes in both standard-def and high-def content, although for the highest-quality material I preferred to leave it off. I also really liked the option to turn the lamp down; it visibly improved black levels and will also, in the long run, extend the lamp's life.

On the other hand, I had a lot of work to do getting this set's color temperature to track properly. Out of the box, the Warm color temperature mode came closest to the neutral-gray standard, though it was still unacceptably blue, tingeing the picture more than just about any other high-end HDTV I've seen recently. Consequently, skin tones looked pallid, and white fields looked a bit blue as well. Measurements revealed that the 62HM196 did indeed operate at a very high color temperature across the full range of brightness levels (see Test Bench). Fortunately, once I got the grayscale tracking back in line with service-menu adjustments, the set was excellent in this department. Still, serious viewers will definitely want professional calibration for this TV. At this point, there's no reason to expect such inaccurate color temperature out of the box, and I hope Toshiba can address that in future models.

PICTURE QUALITY To see how the 62HM196 would handle the highest-quality source I could throw at it, I watched The Italian Job on HD DVD. As soon as the white-on-black ratings screen came up, I noticed something good and something not so good: The black levels were nice and deep, but the Toshiba displayed the so-called "rainbow" effect, in which brief flashes or trails of color sometimes appear in high-contrast areas. Since rainbows are common to just about every DLP on the market, I won't dwell on them except to say that if you're sensitive to them (most people aren't), they're no more or less prevalent on this TV than on others I've seen.

I'll happily dwell on those inky blacks, however. The 62HM196 produced as deep a level of black across its screen as any rear-projection TV I've seen, from the letterbox bars to the shadows around the safe that Stella (Charlize Theron) cracks to the black of her leather jacket. In my darkened room that depth of black lent the picture impact and drama, even after I set maximum light output at a comfortable level of about half the default setting. I also appreciated the clarity of the shadows: Watching Stella sit in her dramatically lit apartment, I saw no noise in the dark area behind her chair, and I could see details in her hair and in the shadows near the bookshelves and lamp.