The 84L9363DB is an 84-inch 4K TV selling for half the price of its nearest rival.
For
Incredible price
4K looks crisp
Decent upscaling
Great size for 4K
Against
Some lip-synch concerns
Iffy contrast Judder with 3D
Lacks video streaming support
Sometimes I have to search quite hard for reasons why a TV I'm
testing might be particularly interesting. With the 84L9363, though, its
USP hits you right between the eyes.
Basically, it's an 84-inch
TV with a native 4K resolution that you can buy at the time of writing
for just £7,500. Incredibly that's barely half the price of the next
cheapest 84-inch 4K TV, the LG 84LM960V.
Ratings in depth
Obviously
I'll have to be on the look out in the course of this review for the
inevitable compromises that must have been made somewhere to deliver
such a low price. But on paper at least the 84L9363 has
the potential to be the UK's first genuine 4K bargain. Slightly absurd
though that sounds when we're talking about a TV that costs a hardly
mainstream £7.5k!
Toshiba has two other 4K TVs in its current range: the £4,500 65-inch 65L9363 and the startlingly cheap £2500 58-inch 58L9363.
Rival
brands of 84-inch 4K TVs aside from the aforementioned LG model include
the Sony 84X9005A at a whopping £25000 (!) and the Samsung UE85S9000.
The latter uses premium direct LED lighting with local dimming and costs
– wait for it… £35000.
Fair to say, then, that for most people
the only realistic competition from a cost point of view for the 84L9363
will be a 65-inch 4K model like the Sony 65X9005 or
Samsung UE65F9000. But of course, 65 inches is no 84 inches. At 65
inches you're talking about a TV. At 84 inches you're talking about a
home cinema display. And let's not forget, of course, that in the 4K/UHD
world the bigger a screen you can lay your hands on, the more impact
you're likely to get from native UHD resolution playback.
Design
The
84L9363 doesn't make a big deal out of its screen size in design terms.
Its black frame is fairly slim, focussing you on the acres of screen
rather than unnecessarily exaggerating the set's already considerable
physical presence. The contrast of the black bezel with a silvery
bottom-edge trim adds a nice little touch of pizzazz, too. Huge screen, slim frame
Features
Connectivity
is strong, keeping pace with the majority of other 4K TVs we've seen to
date. Four HDMIs get the ball rolling, all built to the v1.4 standard
to support the TV's passive 3D playback capabilities, while the sort of
multimedia features we now expect from a high-end TV are serviced by a
pair of USB sockets (for playing multimedia from USB drives or recording
from the built-in Freeview HD tuner to USB HDD), an SD card slot (these
remain annoyingly rare in the TV world), plus both integrated Wi-Fi and
LAN network connections.
These network jacks can either stream multimedia from DLNA PCs or take the TV to Toshiba's Cloud TV online content platform.
One
key limitation of the 84L9363's connectivity is its lack of support for
the HDMI 2.0 standard. This means it can't handle native 4K sources at
higher frame rates than 30Hz without compromising on the colour
resolution of the source. But it's hardly alone in this regard; so far
only Panasonic has produced a 4K TV with a true HDMI 2.0 socket able to
deliver 60Hz 4K images with full 4:4:4 colour sampling.
Cloud TV
Toshiba's
Cloud TV platform shows signs of promise – especially as the 84L9363's
configuration avoids the extreme sluggishness witnessed with the system
on cheaper Toshiba TVs.
We quite like the way a series of avatars
are used to recommend different types of themed content from the
upcoming TV listings, for instance. And the provision of an electronic
programme guide app for your phone or tablet that lets you surf TV
listings on that rather than on your TV is very welcome.
However,
the 84L9363 comes a cropper with its online video platform support. You
get the BBC iPlayer, Deezer, BBC Sport, BBC News, Blinkbox, YouTube,
Viewster, KnowHow Movies and Netflix along with a few more niche
offerings, but at the time of writing there's no Lovefilm, no ITV
Player, no 4OD, and no Demand 5 – all of which are available on
Samsung's current Smart TVs. The apps screen is well-populatedAlso
a misstep is Toshiba's decision to slap a big Twitter window right at
the heart of its main smart TV screen, despite the fact that – as
Twitter is wont to do – the feeds that appear there tend to be rife with
unfilterable profanities any kids in your household will doubtless lap
up.
Shifting focus to the 84L9363's 4K resolution, it has the
predicted 3840x2160 pixel count, while the heavy-duty processing
required to upscale HD and even standard definition sources comes
courtesy of Toshiba's CEVO technology. This should provide enough power
to enable the TV to create all the necessary extra pixels to upscale in
real time without generating many unwanted artefacts.
Toshiba
thoughtfully provides a couple of options for fine-tuning the 4K
processing system, one focussed on reintroducing fine textures to 4K
sources and one devoted to reintroducing the brightness that tends to
get removed from sources during the video compression process.
Also
interesting is a Resolution+ feature that claims to be able to boost
the sharpness of native 4K content as well as upscaled HD! We'll look at
this more closely later.
The 84L9363 carries an extremely
comprehensive suite of picture adjustment tools, including enough
colour, gamma and white balance management facilities to secure the set
the backing of the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF). In other words, you
can pay an ISF engineer to come round your gaffe and calibrate pictures
so that they're optimised for your specific environment. Comprehensive picture adjustmentsWrapping
up the 84L9363's features are an AMR800 800Hz-like processing engine
devoted to reducing/removing motion judder, and the passive 3D system I
alluded to in the connectivity section of the review.
Taking the
passive approach means you won't get to see 3D in full – albeit
upscaled - 4K resolution like you can on the Samsung F9000, Panasonic
65WT600 and, oddly, Toshiba's own 58L9363. However, on the upside
passive 3D on a 4K TV does mean you get to see genuine full HD
resolution 3D (rather than the resolution-compromised passive 3D
pictures you get on normal HD TVs) without having to worry about the
crosstalk ghosting noise or flickering issues still fairly commonly
witnessed with active 3D TVs.
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