Toshiba TN55X81 55 in. TV

PLEASE READ THE UPDATE FOR BETTER INFORMATION!

I purchased mine at HH Gregg, open stock but never displayed. They got the new model after unpacking but before displaying, still had the tape on it. I got a tremendous deal, $1650 + 299 for 3 year extended warranty.
As stated in the title the picture quality with digital images is outstanding. 480P from our Pioneer DV-434 Digital progressive has friends thinking that 480P is HD. Then I switch to broadcast 1080i via RCA DTC-100 and their jaws drop. We also have Time Warner "Digital Cable", which is only digital for about 30 channels, the first 60 channels are analog. What a shock when I tuned into Babylon 5 on analog Sci-fi channel, everything was very grainy, and looked like watching it in a dense fog. I had TW come out and replace the cable in the house with RG6 which helped a bit, but I was very disappointed with picture quality. Broadcast analog is disappointing also. For analog my previous Hitachi Ultravision far outperformed the toshiba. This unit has I.D.S.C., Intelligent Digital Scan Conversion, and supposedly upconverts interlaced and NTSC signals to a native 480p scan rate. I think I will try a DVDO iscan plus on analog signals (broadcast, cable, and vhs)as I have seen very impressive results using this unit. Since I got such a good deal on the TV the $500 or so for the line doubler will still leave me below retail on the TV itself.
480i performance is excellent as well, although still scenes tend to undulate in brightness. I calibrated the set when I got it, but have had to realign the convergence a couple of times after the kids jump around the living room.
I honestly can't comment on the sound, all my sound sources are routed through my A/V system. I haven't signed up for DirecTV yet, but anticipate that it will be far superior to the two thirds of the channels in analog on Time Warner. The digital channels on Time Warner look very good, although artifacts are somewhat common which I attribute to bandwidth failures in the cable system. Overall I am pleased with the TN55X81, thrilled with digital sources and disappointed with analog handling.





UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, my initial enthusiasm has turned to pessimism. When I initially wrote this piece I was new to HDTV, but not anymore. I mentioned the convergence drifted, noticable by white lettering on scores or the program guide that had blue or red "shadows" and were blurry. In May I initiated comtact with Toshiba, but more on that later. HD images that are letterboxed (Grey panels on top and bottom to view 16x9 material)looked good except for the upper right corner where there were wavy blue and red areas around the letterboxing. A service tech came out and checked the service menu and convergence.

Service level convergence is simply a grid that should be in straight lines. The right side of the screen was very wavy but the tech straightened them out somewhat. a couple of months passed and the waviness got worse. They came back out and took it to the shop. They replaced the red CRT and yoke and brought it back out. (32 days later)
The tech entered the service mode while the TV was accepting signals from the "TV" input, or the coaxial cable input. He aligned convergence so that DirecTV 480i signals looked great, although with and orange hue. I expected the orange hue due to a new RED CRT being brighter since it was brand new, as compared to the blue and green.

After he left I tried to lessen the tint and BAM the picture went black when I started adjusting the hue. This happened three times before it worked without losing picture. When the picture returned it was in a brown fog. I set the user lever 9 point convergence and tried to calibrate the color with Avia to be somewhat more lifelike.
Still brown.

I checked the HD inputs and the convergence was way off! I corrected it as best as I could on the user level and called Toshiba. Toshiba said they had no record of me! This after 6 months of phone calls and service calls. I feel they just want to deny that either I have a lemon and/or their techs are sub-par. They want to pick it up again. Great, in 10 months it will be in the shop 20% of the time.

Back to the TV. The TN prefix indicates a 1999 model year set. Two things that are missing on this set that are important considerstions are a line doubler with "2:3" pulldown, and a 16x9 mode. I will try to convey why these are important below.

1.- Line doubler with 2:3 pulldown.
Standard cable/satellite/broadcast signals are in 480i. The "i" stands for interlaced, meaning the set scans lines 1 to 479 (odd numbers) and then 2 to 480. So each time the electron guns on the TV paint your screen they are only painting 240 lines. They just do it so fast that the picture looks complete except for scan lines. A line doubler does just that, it doubles the number of lines scanned in one pass from 240 to 480. Problems with this are when you have a bad signal, often analog, (Regular cable or regular broadcast) the image looks fuzzy. Digital signals in 480i, (regular DSS and digital cable) look much better, but when the lines are doubled, the TV's computer chips take the 240 lines and fill in the missing 240 with intermediate information. If a video source is film based, it gets worse. Film is printed at 24 frames per second, video at 30 frames per second. when a line doubler encounters a signal that moves at 24 frames per second, but has to display it at 30 frames per second, "artifacts" happen. Straight diaginal lines look like they are stepped, kind of like an old video game. There are other issues but the easiest example is the diaginal line problem.
A line doubler with 2:3: pull down processes the difference in a way that you do not see the artifacts. If you are shopping at Best Buy for a HDTV watch when they show text. Some letter O's will be rounded and others will have jagged edges.

It's not the most scientific explanation but I hope I conveyed the gist of the matter.

2. Lack of 16x9 mode.
Without getting into a debate on scan lines, HDTV is usually displayed as 1080i,interlaced being the same as above. HD images are also broadcast with a 16x9 widescreen format. The TN55x81 lacks a 16x9 mode. On TV's like this one, with a standard 4x3 aspect ratio, the HD image is not displayed at the full height of the screen. In order to see the entire image it is "letterboxed" with grey bars top and bottom. A 16x9 mode squeezes the electron gun scanning into the area where the picture is displayed and not wasting lines of resolution by painting the grey bars. The result is that a 1080i signal is only displayed as about 810i, losing about 20% of the resolution. It can still look great, but not as good as full HD.

The TV is also constructed mainly of pressboard! It's shocking if a tech ever disassembles your set!!



The TN55x81 is showing it's age in lack of very useful features. That said, a properly calibrated TN model, with the convergence finely tuned, is still capable of giving you close to eye-popping images with a variety of sources. If you are considering buying one remember that it is probably a refurbished model by now, (Dec 2001) and that I would be very wary of Toshiba's commitment to their customers.