Toshiba 32LF2F53DB review: an ultra-cheap 32-inch TV that falls short of greatness

The Toshiba 32LF2F53DB is a super-cheap small TV with a flawed, yet competent full HD display. Although the Toshiba 32LF2F53DB has an RRP of £199.99 (not available outside the UK) it’s often available for under £150 – meaning it’s an attractive budget option.

But how good is it really? Well, let’s start where it matters most – picture quality. And I’ll make something clear from the offset – I wasn’t expecting anything incredible from the Toshiba 32LF2F53DB, given it has a 32-inch, LED display. But even still, out of the box, I felt the picture was a touch disappointing, despite HDR support. For example, I tuned into Top Gun Maverick on Netflix and during an outdoor scene set at night, Jennifer Connelly’s hair colour looked slightly inaccurate and features of both her and Tom Cruise – such as lines on their hands and faces – lacked definition and sharpness. Having said that, the general picture quality was still adequate – I wasn’t finding the display to be blurry and even if hair wasn’t replicated impeccably in terms of colour, textures weren’t overly blocky or anything.

Perhaps the most grating part of the viewing experience for me, though, was that the picture could often be pretty dark. For example, I tuned into The Boy and the Heron on Netflix and found that large portions of the movie appeared almost dismal – a shame given it has a lot of bright, colour-popping scenes. Near the beginning of the film, a woman named Natsuko is wearing orange and yellow clothing, which is meant to be vibrant and eye-catching. Instead, though, it had a dullness to it – as did the whole picture. Natsuko’s rich, dark green eyes, Mahito’s clothing and background elements like trees – looked fairly muddied – whether in Movie or Standard picture mode and with dynamic backlight either on or off.

Despite that, when measuring peak brightness on a 10% window test pattern, the result was 228 nits and 207 nits in Standard and Movie mode respectively (in HDR). That’s honestly not awful and pretty similar to other 32-inch TVs we’ve tested, like the TCL 32S5400. While I’m at it, it’s also worth mentioning the results of colour gamut testing. For DCI-P3 (the colour space used to master 4K movies and digital cinema releases), accuracy was 79.9%, whereas BT.2020 was 61.1% – that’s actually a fair step up on the TCL, though these aren’t exactly game-changing results in their own right.