Toshiba Regza 37C3030D review

If you're just about to buy your first HD Ready screen you might not want to spend all your money on dipping your toe in the market. Screens that show 720p aren't cheap, but they do cost significantly less than their 1080p variants, so can make ideal first hi-def televisions.

The C-series TVs sit at the bottom end of the Toshiba Regza range. Things like matte plastic and no side HDMI input show that there has been some cost-cutting to keep the price of this screen low.

Design
One thing about the design of the C3030 series has given us a little chuckle. Unlike the X- and Z-series televisions, the C series has only a matte-black finish. This implies that piano black is only for premium products, but in our experience it's everywhere. For us, it's actually quite nice to see a TV finished in a pleasant non-reflective surface.

Although we like the matte black, the 37C3030 is actually pretty boring to look at. The traditional silver claw stand and a thin metallic surround are the only relief from some otherwise fairly stark blacks. At the bottom of the TV is a thin strip of shiny black plastic, which conceals the status light and some logos, claiming the TV is 'HD ready' and has 'integrated digital TV', meaning it can receive Freeview.

On the front there are no buttons at all. To the right of the screen, there are controls for adjusting volume, channel and entering the menus. There's also a composite video input for hooking up a camcorder, but no S-Video or third HDMI socket here, unlike on the X series.

To the rear there are the usual two HDMI inputs, as well as a pair of Scart sockets and component video in. There's also a VGA socket for connecting a Media Center PC or Xbox 360.

The remote control is the usual Toshiba affair. It's light, pleasant-looking and does everything you would expect. The major buttons are where you would expect them to be, and on the C series the remote controller seems to be a little more responsive than on older models.

Features
The menus on the Toshiba are nice and simple to use. We also found that the response time of the TV while configuring the menu options has been improved greatly from the WLT66 range. This makes adjusting the TV settings much easier and less irritating.

The TV features a built-in Freeview tuner with auto setup, which worked well. The electronic programme guide interface is pleasant to look at, using low-key colours and providing a decent amount of information. A nice addition is the counter, which tells you how much of a TV programme remains.

The 37C3030 also supports 24 frames per second processing, which exactly matches the frame rate of film. This means that movies should look natural and not suffer from any pitch change, which used to be a problem on film material converted to the PAL format. Obviously you'll need a high-definition player that supports this feature.

Performance
In our darkened testing room, we found we could easily turn the backlight down to minimum and still see plenty of detail in the picture. We also noticed that when the backlight setting was high we could see the backlight more at the corners of the screen -- this is irritating, because during dark scenes it's fairly obvious. We were pleased to see this problem was reduced by dimming the backlight, but this is far from ideal and is the worst we've seen for a while.