FLATSCREEN 4K TV PERFORMANCE - TOSHIBA PROTHEATER L9450
Interestingly, only the 50 and 65-inch L9450 use a wide gamut panel (the latter is the one we tested), which Toshiba says sports 14% wider color gamut than its 2013 lineup. Also, these two smaller models’ panels go up to 75% brighter than last year’s model, thanks to the use of direct LED backlighting with local dimming areas. The ginormous 84-inch model on the other hand uses an LED edge-lit backlight unit instead. So, buyers beware.
We observed wide viewing angles and accurate colors on the L9450. Like the LG UB980T, colors were well saturated but not crazily vibrant out of the box. Contrast, while good, didn’t go as high as the Samsung HU8500. For an LED LCD TV, it exhibited high brightness (good news for those with bright rooms) and there wasn’t much of a dirty screen effect. We attribute these to the new backlighting system and the pixel structure tweaks that let more light comes through.
The L9450 also had a decent showing when it came to black level response. Sure, the Panasonic and Samsung sets still fared better, but the L9450 wasn’t far off. The difference was more apparent in a dark environment, as we saw more backlight transitions on the L9450. Reducing the backlight got rid of many of the distractions, but advanced users would not be pleased by the crushed shadows details.
Of course, with a 4K panel, the L9450 was capable of showing tons of details when fed with proper 4K signals. The Cevo 4K engine worked rather well, upscaling 1080p content to pseudo-4K convincingly enough. Motion resolution was noted to be very good, and credit for this has to go to the Active Motion & Resolution Plus tech. It’s hard to decipher what the AMR+ 3,100 spec really means, other than the fact that is plays around with the refresh rate (likely 100Hz natively) and the backlight system to produce smooth, high-res images during motion.