In TVs, Toshiba is really pushing big, wall-mounted LCD TVs as a lifestyle item. It is trying to get away from the image of TVs as big, bulky items, hiding away and outsourcing its old CRT offerings to promote the flatscreen LCDs relentlessly.
This is a good decision for Toshiba, as their CRT TVs were mediocre at best, while their LCDs are some of the best on the market today. While expensive, as ever, they are extremely lightweight and come with very good software and extra features to help you get the most out of your TV viewing, such as automatic tuning, picture-in-picture, very quick channel changes, and all the other little things that add up to make a good TV much better than a cheap one.
If you’re buying a Toshiba TV, you will find that it works much better if you actually mount it on the wall as intended. The best thing to do is to clear a space that you know works – perhaps take down a painting – and measure it, and then take the measurements with you when you go to the showroom. Hopefully the showroom will have the LCD TVs hanging on walls to allow you to see how they will look in that environment, and they should be able to provide the exact measurements for any given TV for you on request.
Even though Toshiba’s LCD TVs are selling well, they know that nothing is forever. However, they tend to be a company that leads rather than follows, and they’ve got an ace in the hole: they’re already working on SED, a possible successor to LCD. These screens will again be flatscreen and look much like existing LCD TVs, except that they will be capable of displaying much higher resolutions, such as those output by top-end HDTV – that’s high-density TV, the next-generation broadcast standard. However, there is as yet no known release date for SED TVs.
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