46LX177 Menu System

I found the menu system for the Toshiba 46LX177 to be very easy to use. It was well organized for the major functions and had direct access via the remote for commonly used features like the THINC system and Picture-in-Picture functions. There was a bit of drill-down to get to the more advanced features, but no more than you would expect to keep the upper levels from being too cluttered. I'll move through each of the major menu functions here:

Applications
This menu connects you to the Picture Viewer, Audio Player and Email systems. It also allows access to the incredibly cool Channel Browser which is sophisticated enough to allow for some very cool ways to browse though and select channels on your television. I'll go into more detail on this system later in the review. The Applications menu also allows you to start up the Demo mode as well as access the integrated Help system. The Help system is a very slick-looking subsystem that would benefit from additional time and development. For the most part the Help topics ranged from 'mildly useful' to 'go fix it yourself'. Here is one of my favorite screens when selecting help with setting up your PC for filesharing:

Help says: “Go figure it out on your own!”

They made up for it with such helpful screen as this one located under a connections section:

Now that is pretty helpful!

I'd love to see more development in this area as I feel it is a trend-setting feature. An integrated Help system only makes sense with the ever-increasing complexity of our AV devices. Future versions of the Help system should not be afraid to venture into multi-page solutions. Also, running the text by someone who has English as a first language would likely help in smoothing over some of the wording to more consumer-friendly jargon (friends don't let friends use overseas engineers to write their help manuals).

Video
The Video menu provides most of the settings and configuration you'll need to get the basic tweaking done for your display. The [Picture] Mode is located here as are the Picture Settings, Noise Reduction modes, Game Mode, xvYCC (Deep Color), Theater Settings and aspect ratio settings. ColorMaster Pro is a neat gimmicky color adjustment control that is fun to play with but doesn't do anything practical towards garnering more accurate color. The Game Mode turns off some of the internal video processing and in exchange speeds up the display's response time (reduces frame delays) in order to avoid lag time from the gaming console. Gaming Mode disables ClearFrame, Cinema Mode (2-3 pull-down) and Film Stabilization.

The Theater Settings sub-menu allows you to select the Picture Size (Natural, Theater Wide 1/2/3, Full, 4:3, and Native. This affects the way the picture is stretched (or not) to occupy the screen. Toshiba provides some of the more extensive scaling options I've seen to date and they add a feature I'd not seen until now, Picture Scroll, which allows you to take TheaterWide 2/3 modes and scroll the picture up and down vertically. This means you can really take advantage of the flexibility to get a truly custom position on the screen when dealing with letterboxes, closed captioning, etc.

Audio
What at first appears to be a very small menu does expand somewhat when you go into Audio Setup (there is both an Audio Settings and Audio Setup sub-menu as well as an Advanced Audio setting believe it or not). Audio Setup allows configuration of whether the PC (HD15) input will receive audio from the analogue audio inputs which are shared with HDMI input #1. It also sets the MTS mode, Language and whether or not the speakers are engaged (a nice feature if you utilize an external set of speakers.) You can also configure Dolby Digital Dynamic Compression and change the optical audio output from Dolby Digital (default) to PCM audio.

Preferences
In Preferences you find your catch-all settings for Closed Captioning, Menu Language and auto-input switching, but you also have access to custom Input Labeling which is cool (though limited) and the Channel Browser setup which lets you determine how channels and inputs will be selected in that menu.

Input Labels are cool, but they could use a few more - like Game Console 2, 3, 4... And while Toshiba included HD DVD in the available selections, Blu-ray was conspicuously absent.

Locks
This is the menu everyone often skips over, but it's actually very useful. Most programming these days, as you may have noticed, carries ratings in the form of TVY, TVY7, TVPG, MA, etc... The Toshiba's V-chip, like most other televisions can filter out what is allowable. The 46LX177 implements these filters fully, allowing you to not only select which rating you will allow, but also for what reason. Don't mind TVMA as long as the content isn't sexual in nature? No problem, you can enable a block just for that aspect. Now, I can't vouch for how accurate these blocks work or what shows are marked correctly, however it seems to be a very nice feature for parents to use and the Toshiba implementation is very well thought out.

Don't mind the violence, but don't want the sex-shows... not a problem.

Setup
Whether it's your cable/antenna system, THINC network settings or just whether or not you intend to use the CE-Link system, the Setup menu is where it's at. I liked the optional Power-Saving mode – it lets people who care about saving power feel good about being inconvenienced while allowing more performance-based people like me to have a quick turn-on mode and retain my Channel Browser settings. It's also in this menu where you can configure the Slide Show Interval for photos and also enable automatic Demo mode which is nice for retailers.

If you're in possession of a new HD-DVD player (of either flavor) you can enable both Deep Color and xvYCC support to benefit from these new color-enhancing technologies.

Technical Note: What's the difference between Deep Color and xvYCC?
This is a good question and the two terms are often, incorrectly, used interchangably. Deep Color refers to the increasing of the bit depth per channel of RGB from 8-bits to 12-bits. This means that Deep color allows for more color resolution within the RGB or YCbCr color range. xvYCC actually expands the color range to what is essentially 1.8x the sRGB color space. Deep Color gives us more resolution (all but eliminates banding), and xvYCC gives us more colors.