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Change can be a scary thing. Crave still remembers its first day at gadget school. It was scary and we missed our mum. Changing televisions is just as daunting: your trusty old screen discarded like yesterday’s paper and a new upstart put in its place. The good news is Toshiba doesn’t want to scare you, it wants to help — and that’s what the Regza 37X3030 is all about.
Toshiba’s X-series televisions are 1080p ready, which is great, especially if you have the equipment needed to make the most of it. The 37X3030 is, as you may have guessed, a 37-inch TV. See, no unpleasant surprises trying to ruin your day. It even comes with Freeview, so there won’t be any problems when the government turns off analogue in a few years.
The design has been tweaked from previous models, but the 37X3030 isn’t going to frighten anyone off. The finish is an appealing piano black, which has become all the rage after the 90s fad of painting everything silver died a quiet death. That’s not to say the Tosh has entirely forgotten about the last decade: its trademark silver claw stand is still in place.
Round the back, things stay fairly safe too. There are two HDMI sockets and one component input for plugging high-definition stuff in. You’ll also find two Scart sockets — one of which is RGB-enabled — and a composite video input. If that’s not enough for you greedy connection lovers, you’ll also find a PC input for hooking up your media centre, and on the right side of the screen there’s a handy S-Video input and a second set of composite and audio connections.
The X-series televisions do miss a couple of features that we would like to see. The first is Active Vision M100, the 100Hz technology that makes movement smoother, which is now only available on the top of the range Z series. The other is three HDMI sockets. Come on Toshiba, with the Xbox 360 Elite on the way, and Sky HD, the PS3 and HD DVD players all vying for a place in our AV cabinet, we really need more HDMI. -Ian Morris
