Toshiba U79 and U80 Owners Discussion And Review !!

[bipin1143]

Went to reliance digital to Demo some soundbar's, They confirmed that Toshiba U80 is launching on October, also Flipkart has already mentioned Big billion days sale in their page, so it would be launched in few weeks.

great news! so they are launching u80 afterall
the guys in RD near my place have no clue about toshiba when i asked them 3-4 visits since the launch of toshiba lineup

 

[neoonwheels]

Got the TV installation done. As always the installer had no clue as he is not a Toshiba guy. I have not used the TV much so all settings are still on factory mode. My HTPC and Fire TV fullHD are working as expected. The default FullHD quality to me looks good. The motion was too smooth and felt artificial in videos so I set it to off. I will now start using the settings given by @lightgamer.

Family is pretty impressed by the size of the TV and we feel we made a right decision of going with 65 inch instead of 55. Will post my review in couple of days with pics.

BTW, I am not able to send sound to my AVR using ARC and HDMI in on AVR. Will have to do some research. I selected Speaker set as ARC but still not working.

 

[josedandrew]

Brightness: This is not your real brightness but weird image enhancement stuff, don't touch this from 50.

Contrast: Another image enhancement. I set it to 45 for SDR, 50 for HDR and 50 for sports.

Sharpness: Again, another setting to generally not mess with. It provides edge enhancement at the cost of halos around bright object. Set to 0 for all 3 modes. You can set to a low value (10-20) for sports and SDR if you're watching a lot of SD content and want some edge enhancement.

Colour saturation: The most obvious setting. I set it to 50 for HDR, 47 for SDR and 55 for Sports. I need a bit more pop in sports, a bit less in regular SDR content and it's about right for HDR as making it higher will make things look wrong and oversaturated.

Adaptive contrast: Low makes everything look worse, medium and high cause too much black crush. This is a setting for low saturation 80s and 90s shows where the reference image itself is washed out and flat. Keep it off for all 3 modes, can turn on if the contrast is a bit low for a particular source.

Noise reduction/MPEG noise reduction: Keep it on low for both. You can also keep it off but low doesn't make a difference for me and it will likely help with low-resolution content.

White balance: The most important setting. Cool is bad and way too cool. Standard is a bit too cool and Warm is a bit too warm for my liking. So I set it to Standard(slightly blue, but added Red and Green till colours looked right)

SDR/sports- standard with red and green offset set to +1 in expert settings>white balance
HDR - standard with red offset set to +1 in expert settings>white balance. Setting green to +1 made it a bit too green since there's already a bit of green in HDR movies dark scenes.

Brightness is actually black level setting. I found the default setting perfect. But this may vary due to panel to panel variance. If you increase, it will raise the black level. If you reduce it, you will lose the shadow details. I used avs calibration slide for setting it.

Contrast setting is similar but adjusts the white level. The default was again correct setting here. Lowering it will reduce peak level and pop. Raising it will blow out highlights. Again used avs calibration slides.

Sharpness left at default zero. Will experiment with it later.

Color saturation again used the slides for calibrating. Ideally you want to set maximum saturation without clipping any of the primaries. I got 47 for cinema night and 48 for cinema day.

Adaptive contrast turned off. Won't touch it.

Noise reduction turned off for now. Will experiment later.

For white balance, Warm looked fine for me. Will experiment with your settings later.

I have set gamma to 2.4 for cinema night and default bt.1886 for cinema day.
2.2 looked flatter.

HDR left at default settings for now.

Location dimming set to high in all modes. Found it to be the best for watching movies and keeps the letter box bars inky black.

Still experimenting with motion settings. Will try your settings.

 

[lightgamer]

For white balance, Warm looked fine for me. Will experiment with your settings later.

Yeah, white balance depends a lot on the ambient light, panel to panel variance and personal preference. For my ambient light and panel, warm had too much red (also I prefer a bit cooler white). I've noticed it in the past too. My monitor panel got replaced (earlier one went bad) and the new panel had completely different white balance. The earlier one was perfect at Warm, this one at standard.

I have set gamma to 2.4 for cinema night and default bt.1886 for cinema day.
2.2 looked flatter.

Try the colour gamut setting too. If you have it at auto, my settings won't work. 2.2 Gamma looked good to me with Native colour gamut set.

 

[sijuvrm]

I also ended up doing the same, as 3 and 6 were just experimental starts and I didn't test them thoroughly. I'm fine with the smooth soap opera effect as long as there's no judder. However, even 1 introduces weird motion on complex movements and the motion looks uneven (albeit smooth). So it looks processed rather than from a native 60Hz source.

I ended up off for SDR and HDR mode, and 10 de-judder, 1 de-blur for sports. Will share the complete settings in some time as I ended up with the perfect ones finally (I think).



Even my panel is exceptionally clean. The only thing I see is the corners are a bit dark with slight vignetting, but that's common on H8F and other FALD panels. About the banding, that's due to local dimming on grey. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't allow setting a separate mode for the UI so you'll have to deal with it. It will go away if you set local dimming to low.

I thought Disney + hotstar just started supporting 4k HDR and DV is not yet out. That's what I see in the news. @sijuvrm might be lucky and part of an A/B test. So if you're not getting 4k Dolby Vision in Hotstar, don't worry. You should get DV in Netflix though.

The panel is 8-bit + FRC and even with test patterns, you won't be able to tell the difference between 8+ FRC and 10-bit because they're functionally the same. The only way to tell is through a high-speed camera. If dithering is done well 8+FRC is indistinguishable from native 10-bit.

Interestingly, I am not sure what is better at this point. I am getting Dolby vision in Disney+ but it's playing in max full HD only. I will try to add the pic of video details. HDR version maybe playing in 4k but can't confirm as no HDR or 4k for me.

 

[lightgamer]

Interestingly, I am not sure what is better at this point. I am getting Dolby vision in Disney+ but it's playing in max full HD only. I will try to add the pic of video details. HDR version maybe playing in 4k but can't confirm as no HDR or 4k for me.

LOL. It's a new feature. I'm sure they'll fix this stuff in a couple of months. But Hotstar is garbage anyway. Their top bitrate is like 4 Mbps. I have the subscription but pirated the high quality 4k HDR version anyway.

 

[neoonwheels]

One question guys, I used Netflix app on the TV (Its native app) but I dont see Dolby Vision ticker come when I watch the show even though NF in info says the title is DV. Is there any other setting which I am missing.

 

[lightgamer]

One question guys, I used Netflix app on the TV (Its native app) but I dont see Dolby Vision ticker come when I watch the show even though NF in info says the title is DV. Is there any other setting which I am missing.

Yeah, the ticker won't come up in that case. However, if you go to the menu you'll see that the TV indeed switches to DV bright mode.

The OS needs a lot of polish. I've seen a bunch more issues in the last couple days:

1. The DLNA player doesn't work with OPUS audio and PGS subtitles. Had to transcode some videos.

2. YouTube app doesn't show 18:9 videos properly. It stretches them to 16:9 and then crops to 18:9. Things look stretched out.

3. Netflix and prime UI are rendered at 1080p. Plex even lower at something like 720p.

Honestly, this OS seems unusable to me. It's undercooked and doesn't do justice to the panel. I'll be getting the new Google TV dongle as soon as it launches.

Then again, the H8F and H8G which use android TV with this chipset have major lag and freezing issues. Why do manufacturers go with such garbage tier chipsets with their TVs? Even a cheap Snapdragon 460 which is used in ₹10k phones will be a major upgrade from these.

 

[neoonwheels]

Yeah, the ticker won't come up in that case. However, if you go to the menu you'll see that the TV indeed switches to DV bright mode.

Then again, the H8F and H8G which use android TV with this chipset have major lag and freezing issues. Why do manufacturers go with such garbage tier chipsets with their TVs? Even a cheap Snapdragon 460 which is used in ₹10k phones will be a major upgrade from these.

Thanks for the confirmation.

I wish TV manf just focus on panels and give Android box type modules as add-ons. This would make the whole experience modular and you dont have to spend on Android licensing and all if you already have such player. I envy the good old days of TV = Panel, period.

 

[saran]

Yes the OS is a crap totally unusable, I ordered MI TV box 4k.

 

[neoonwheels]

Yes the OS is a crap totally unusable, I ordered MI TV box 4k.

Let us know the experience, will order one too. Does it support audio passthrough?

 

[Srinivasa Rao]

Yes the OS is a crap totally unusable, I ordered MI TV box 4k.

You should have waited for Google TV Android box which is releasing next week. Should have compared specs and price and then decided.

 

[BLASTO]

I am getting Dolby Vision at both the places, at description and when playing. TV's Picture setting has Dolby Vision options too. I am adding pics of Dolby Vision for Mandalorian from Disney+ and Letter for the king from Netflix. Also my Firestick 4k display settings for reference.

Did you turn on local dimming or not?
Pics look awful like from normal VA.

 

[lightgamer]

One more update(did the local dimming test):

Interestingly, the TV has 7x8 local dimming zones (8 vertical, 7 horizontal) v/s 8x7 as I thought. The general expectation is that the horizontal side will have more zones(since it's bigger). Maybe they want to remove more vertical blooming (subtitles). This is also the reason the black bars at top and bottom are so deep on this TV.

 

[krypto]

Need some help with audio setup.

I use a external 2.1 speakers connected via the 3.5 jack, the tv recognises this as a headphone jack. The issue is the sound output is pretty low even at max volume on the external speakers and max volume on the headphones volume.

The tv has options to use both headphones and tv speakers, while watching I have to use that for decent sound during movies.

Anybody tried Messing around with sound?, Lemme know what can be done.

 

[neoonwheels]

Update:

So I got the ARC thing working now. It was the AVR setting which was off by default. Now the AVR HDMI out works as input for audio channel too. The TV gives option of: Bitstream (My fav), Auto, DD, DD+ and PCM.

Another good thing is, I have Fire TV stick (FullHD) connected to AVR which now I can control using the TV remote (And TV Remote APP on Android). Also enabled the Alexa voice commands.

 

[sijuvrm]

Did you turn on local dimming or not?
Pics look awful like from normal VA.

Its the Phone Camera, In real its different for sure. All the black parts are appearing bright. Those pics were just to show Dolby Vision working. My phone is not able to take proper Photo or Video of this TV. Maybe too much brightness. Need to change some camera settings and try.

 

[saran]

Need some help with audio setup.

I use a external 2.1 speakers connected via the 3.5 jack, the tv recognises this as a headphone jack. The issue is the sound output is pretty low even at max volume on the external speakers and max volume on the headphones volume.

The tv has options to use both headphones and tv speakers, while watching I have to use that for decent sound during movies.

Anybody tried Messing around with sound?, Lemme know what can be done.

The sound is really very bad, I have bought around 6 led tv's so far and this is the worst sound I have ever experienced,
Only the Panel is good rest all are half baked, People who want a complete tv and don't want to shell out on sound bar or android box should avoid this TV, U80 has a front facing sound bar type speakers better wait for that if you are planning for 65 incher.

 

[fragpic]

You should have waited for Google TV Android box which is releasing next week. Should have compared specs and price and then decided.

Is it confirmed to be coming to India?

 

[lightgamer]

The sound is really very bad, I have bought around 6 led tv's so far and this is the worst sound I have ever experienced,
Only the Panel is good rest all are half baked, People who want a complete tv and don't want to shell out on sound bar or android box should avoid this TV, U80 has a front facing sound bar type speakers better wait for that if you are planning for 65 incher.

If you're buying a high end TV and expecting to use the default speakers as a 'complete package', you're doing something very wrong. Even the so called high end speakers in LG C9 pale in comparison to the ₹12k studio monitors I have.

A TV is meant to be a panel with mediocre speakers. If manufacturers started adding premium speakers inside, it would add to the cost of the TV and you'll have to pay it again and again with every new TV purchase. I'd rather spend on a high-end audio gear once and use it till it dies with multiple TVs.

And the speakers are quite serviceable. I was thinking I won't be able to wait till Diwali, but they are decent enough to use for a month and get a good speaker in Diwali sale.