Toshiba Regza 26WLT66 review

Toshiba Regza 26WLT66 Review

Reviewed by: Ian Morris

Reviewed on: 5 February 2007

The menus are easy to navigate, and for the most part, quite attractive. The seven-day programme guide is simple enough to use. It's possible to scroll through all channels and set reminders to watch certain programmes.

Unfortunately, the guide can be slow to respond, and flicking through the inputs seems to take an age.  

The TV has a further interesting feature: if you press the 'info' button, the TV scans through all programmes that are just about to start, or recently began. It then presents this as 'Also showing', allowing you to see what you might be missing on another channel. We discovered this feature during the number round in Countdown, saving us from boring maths and reminding us that Pingu was about to start.

Performance
Where high-definition content is concerned, the Toshiba Regza 26WLT66 is very capable. Despite its small screen size, the differences in quality between a DVD and an HD DVD were quite clear. High-definition video from the Toshiba HD-E1 was crisp, clear and colourful.

There was a little motion blur in The Bourne Supremacy's action scenes, but apart from that the picture was as good as you would expect. Our test favourite Serenity proved that the set can do justice to the inky blackness of space. We were also impressed by the detail we saw in people's faces. We did notice that skin tones seemed a little unrealistic, but it isn't a major problem and spending some time adjusting the settings improved this.

Watching DVDs proved to be a slightly less impressive experience via the component output from our Denon DVD-1930. The image was quite grainy, particularly during the darker scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Freeview picture quality was passable, although it was quite soft and at times it was possible to see jagged lines on moving objects. We've seen better quality from other sets.

Sound quality from the small speakers at the front of the television was reasonable. We found that sometimes it was hard to hear speech, and bass was somewhat lacking, but for small inbuilt speakers we wouldn't expect much more.

With some adjustment of the brightness and backlight controls, it was possible to achieve good black levels and more natural skin tones, but this was at the expense of the overall brightness. In a dark room this wouldn't be a problem, but in a well-lit area, this might not be the best solution.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide