Technology is always advancing at a stunning pace. Here we have a new product, the Toshiba 32AV500U built from ground up as a modern 720p LCD panel. It includes all the goodies one needs today, like 2 HDMI inputs and a PC inputs. While it may not be your idea of top of the line, it makes a good choice for a second set, or a game set for the rec room.

The set won’t win any awards for thinness, with a thick and chunky backside, but its overall appearance is nice and clean with a glossy black strip all around the 32” panel. At the bottom you will find the speakers, which do a pretty good job as far as voice clarity goes, but even with the bass control cranked, it was still a little on the light side.

The connectors are located on the back bottom of the set and they point downwards. This is great for wall mounting since no cables need to be pressed against the wall, and there is a cut out in the casing to collect all your cables done the middle of the set. As for the connectors, you get 2 HDMI, 1 PC, 2 Component, 2 Video/S-video, Cable/Antenna, and there is the Variable Audio out and Optical Digital Audio Out.

Quality wise, I think this set looks great. It looks good on standard def cable TV, it looks great on up scaled DVD, and it looks great on off air HDTV. I love the way the colours look, something about them says ‘very nice’. It does a good job with contrast, and I found the onboard Dynamic Contrast and Dynalight are unobtrusive enough to leave active. Mind you, some of this ‘quality’ is do to the smoother look of 720p. Compared to the Sharp LC42D64U which is native 1080p, I can see how the Toshiba is smoothing things over, and missing detail. Even so, it has a very appealing picture with higher def material like off air HDTV and up scaled DVD.

Of course it’s not perfect and I had a few niggles. Some people may not like how thick this set is, meaning wall mounting might not look as clean as a thinner set. Then there is the DVI-to-HDMI connection from a laptop. It could have been my laptop, but I barely got it working. It did look great when it finally clicked in, but the Sharp never had a problem picking up the signal from the laptop, no matter what setting was used. My finally annoyance concerns the HD Antenna input. For some reason, I can not remove channels from the list and it did work for some channels, but not for others or it works sometimes and not other times.

Overall, the Toshiba 32AV500U would make a great second set, or if you are on a budget, it will treat you right with a nice widescreen image for watching your favorite DVD’s or just surfing the cable TV universe. Surprisingly good!