PERFORMANCE After adjustments with the set's Warm color-temperature preset selected, colors looked relatively natural. And the TV proved capable of a punchy picture with satisfying blacks without requiring me to turn on the dynamic contrast and backlight settings, so I left these off for most viewing. On the HD DVD of the British comedy Hot Fuzz, a scene where the evil-minded village elders meet in a churchyard showed off the Toshiba's handling of dark material: Background shadows displayed a bottomless sense of depth, while the black cloaks worn by the elders showed plenty of detail in the garments' folds and creases. And when supercop Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) shows up with a flashlight to break up the party, the TV maintained its solid black depth even with bright white beams cutting through the image.

The Toshiba's color rendition was also very good. In a scene where the cops do battle with supermarket employees, the officers' pasty skin tones looked natural and subdued, while the brightly colored boxes, jars, and bottles lining the aisles kept a punchy, vivid appearance. And the set's high-def picture detail was nothing short of excellent. Watching a scene at a church fair where a newspaper reporter gets offed by a falling cathedral spire, I could easily see the fine-pebbled texture of the limestone in a close-up shot of the spire before it gets pushed from its tower. And the intricate patterns of crumbly brick buildings in the background came through nicely.

Turning on the TV's ClearFrame 120-Hz display feature had only a subtle effect that was mostly visible with movies. Scenes with motion had a slightly "snappier" appearance with ClearFrame. And although I couldn't confirm an actual increase in picture sharpness and clarity with the feature enabled, I did find its effect appealing.

Curiously, ClearFrame also had the negative effect of introducing slight flickering noise in areas of fine detail during camera pans - such as the Vatican wall scene from Mission: Impossible III or a moving crane shot over trees in the church-fair sequence from Hot Fuzz. Toshiba confirmed that, with ClearFrame switched on, the TV performs frame interpolation even when fed a 1080p/24 signal. That's counter to displaying each frame multiple times - a simpler technique that some other TVs apply. So ClearFrame processing was the likely culprit here.

The set's upconversion of standard-def DVD and cable was passably good, if a notch below that of some other high-end LCDs. DVDs looked fairly soft overall compared with the same titles upconverted by my high-def disc players. The TV's CableClear digital noise-reduction and MPEG noise-reduction features proved effective in clearing up noisy images, although any MPEG noise-reduction setting beyond Low resulted in a visible loss of picture detail.

BOTTOM LINE The Toshiba Regza Cinema Series 52LX177 52-inch LCD HDTV looks impressive right out of the box, and its serious video-tweaking tools make it look even better. Although I'm not sold on the subtle effects (and occasional artifacts) of the set's ClearFrame processing, this feature is defeatable. And the set's $3,600 street price is competitive with prices for similar models. If Toshiba really is determined to become an all-LCD company, I'd say that this 52-incher is a very good start.

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