This 1080p TV sold for around $450 in 2014. is hugely laggy outside of game mode and even pretty slow in game mode. The picture quality is good though.
Overview/Image quality
At native resolution (1080p) this TV is pixel perfect: no aliasing, no cropping (you must select "native" as the scaling option in the menus for this). This really should be the standard rather than the exception.
480i/p and 720p also show all pixels without cropping, but are distorted somewhat - there's noticeable reordering of the pixels in order to make them fit and a 45 degree line has uneven jagged edges.
It also supports 24hz mode, and it actually redraws at 24hz with no jitter in this mode, which should be great for watching movies.
It has all the standard inputs, including 2 HDMI, 1 VGA, and 1 yPbPr. VGA is pretty limited in the resolutions accepted, and notably does not support 720p or 1080p. The VGA port was no better than the HDMI port in terms of lag.
Input Lag
This display has a game mode. Outside of game mode the input lag was about 17ms slower, so for all testing below I had game mode enabled. No other settings impacted lag.
I used a piLagTesterPRO to measure input lag. This device sends a frame of video over HDMI and measures how long it takes to display it. Complicating things significantly, this TV is yet another display that does not actually sync to the input signal - instead it fills its own internal frame buffer from the video input and then draws that with a fixed additional delay of up to 16ms, randomly determined each time you turn on the set or switch inputs. At least it can actually sync to 60hz or 59.94hz so whatever lag you get when you turn on your console will be constant for that session, with no dropped frames.
Because lag varies each time it is turned on, I've elected to report the average lag values here, since that seems fairest, but there's no right answer; for more discussion of this issue see the above link.
Input Lag Test Results
I report two kinds of values.
1st response measures how long it takes for the TV to start responding (I use a 5% change in display brightness). This overly optimistic value doesn't tell how long it takes to see anything useful, but matches what other reviewers call
input lag.
full response is a more realistic measure of lag, and requires the display to reach 80% of full brightness. This combines both
input lag and
response time, and is closer to what you would actually experience in a game.
This TV does something really unusual: it draws from the bottom of the screen up. Thus the first pixels painted on each frame are the bottom row. This seems like a REALLY dumb choice; since the HDMI signal is sent from top to bottom this means the TV can't possibly start processing/drawing the frame until the entire thing is sent to the TV, implying an extra 16ms of lag. And indeed this TV has lots of lag.
| bottom (start) | top (end) |
| 1st (average) | full response | 1st response | full response |
| 48.0 | 58.0 | 64.0 | 74.0 |
| 30.0 | 40.0 | 46.0 | 56.0 |
| 30.0 | 40.0 | 46.0 | 56.0 |
| 30.0 | 40.0 | 46.0 | 56.0 |
Because this tv draws the bottom first I've placed the bottom first in the chart. There's not much variety here; the TV takes an average of 30ms to start responding (full range: 22ms to 38ms). It takes 16ms to paint the screen from bottom to top. And the response time is about 10ms. Deinterlacing takes about 18 extra milliseconds.
Results compared to other displays
To allow quick comparison between many displays I've summarized the results across all the displays I've personally tested with the piLagTester Pro. Min lag is the time to the first response, measured where the screen starts drawing; real lag is the time to the full response, measured where the screen finishes (on most TVs this is the top and bottom, respectively). Numbers in red denote average values that can vary by up to 8ms between power cycles.
This list is sorted by the 720p "real lag", since every display supports 720p. It's squarely in the middle of the TVs I've tested, but much worse than the average computer display. It's actually a bit better than the average TV if you only care about 480i.
It's interesting to note that the Toshiba 40L2200U is not the only Toshiba TV I've tested. The other model I measured (
Toshiba 46L5200U) was from the same timeframe but was a significantly higher-end model, featuring 120hz refresh rates. But between these two, this lower end model has much lower lag, by about 20ms. The TVs look similar and the on-screen menus are identical. But clearly the internal hardware is quite different. Probably designed by the same folks, however, as both have the bizarre choice of redrawing the screen from the bottom to the top. Take this as a word of warning that buying the more expensive model in no way guarantees better performance.
Conclusion
While this TV is only average in terms of lag, it does a good job of upscaling and is pixel perfect for 1080p content. It would be a good choice for non-action games. And to put things in perspective, while it's only average as a TV, most of the faster TVs are at best 10ms faster. So unless you are going to be very careful about choosing your TV you probably won't do a lot better than this. That said, there's nothing particularly good about this set other than it's upscaling, so I wouldn't seek it out either.
If you do decide to get this for some reason, make sure it has a remote. The buttons are hidden around the back of the set and are hard to reach and/or see.
Other models
I only tested input lag on the 40L2200U, but I would expect that the 32L2200U and 50L2200U would perform the same, based on similarity of the model numbers and specs, just with different sized pixels. They are all 60hz panels. Around the same time Toshiba also made the 46L5200U, 40L5200U, and 50L5200U, which were 120hz panels. I would not expect those to perform the same as the 60hz variety, and have personally tested the 46L5200U, which indeed was much slower.
Given the bizarre choice of scanning out the image from bottom to top instead of the industry standard of top to bottom, I'd personally lean toward avoiding Toshiba TVs from the early 2010s.
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