Toshiba 40H80 Review

Overall Rating

Relatively attractive case.

Terrible build quality. Unreliable. Customer support is attrocious.

I placed an order for a Toshiba 40H80 on July 8th and my television arrived just a few days later on July 12th. There was no physical damage to the box, but after opening it and plugging it in the TV would not turn on. Although the television never worked Toshiba said they do not have a policy of replacing products. They will only repair a defective item. I called every authorized service center in my area (one was on vacation) and the other two were both working on another Toshiba widescreen HDTV doing the same thing as mine (power light comes on solid for a few seconds and then blinks - no sound, no picture)and could not figure out what the problem was. My television could not be picked up by a service center until July 23rd at which point the technician told me that based on his experiences dealing with Toshiba it would be optimistic of me to hope my TV would be back in my home, working, in two weeks. Still, regardless of the fact that my TV never worked and should not be expected to work a month after it was delivered, Toshiba refuses to send a replacement. Eventually the TV will be repaired and brought back to my house. I will have a broken machine that has been hauled out of my apartment, down a flight of stairs, strapped to a trailer with no packing materials, driven across town, REFURBISHED, and then made the same trip back into my apartment. I paid for a new machine and will have a beat-up, refurbished machine. Toshiba is not interested. I would like to include impressions on picture and sound quality, etc....maybe in a couple of months, eh?

Members' Comments onJake Moses.'s Review

• jewells. on 9th May 2002

  My husband and I are currently shopping for a widescreen HDTV and were going to get the Toshiba 50HX81, but decided that for our space and seating arangements we needed the 43H81. We have found that good reviews outnumber bad ones, but it's so hard to judge without more info. For instance, there is no mention in either of these bad reviews of where they bought the troublesome tvs, and whether they followed the instructions in the manual for setup. I know that with our old tv, which was a 40" Mitsubishi rear projection tv, we would have been lost without the manual. And the same with our DVD player...we thought it was defective until we read the manual and discovered that we needed to change some settings. So I would be interested to know whether these guys just plugged it in and expected it to work perfect or actually read the manual as they were installing it.

• Jake Moses. on 12th May 2002

  No, in fact, in spite of my considerable experience with audio/video equipment I had the same initial feelings. I figured, "This is brand new...I must be doing something wrong." I spent the next few hours reading the instruction manual over and over again (which confirmed, over and over again, that I had set up the TV correctly) and tried all different configurations. The repair shop took my TV and found the problem (the main circuit board had been cracked while a machine added a secondary board to a slot on the main one). The TV repair shop could not get through to a supervisor at Toshiba to have the part authorized to ship for two weeks so I began hounding them. After they promised it would ship three separate times and never shipped it (over the course of two more weeks) I put a reverse payment on my credit card. The next day a supervisor called me and said, "I just overnighted that part to the service center. If we will send you a new progressive scan DVD player for free will you remove the stop payment on you credit card and keep the TV?" So in the end I got a free DVD player and the place that I bought it refunded me the cost of the extended warranty so I guess it was worth it. But it was a stressfull ordeal to say the least. Since then, by the way, it has developed a tendency to shut off and lose all of the settings in its memory. I have read about this problem a lot as a lot of people with this TV have had the same thing happen, so it's back to the service center.

• maugusty on 13th Feb 2005

  I am an owner of a Toshiba 42H82 projection TV. When it was first delivered it worked about three hours, then a crack noise came from the TV and it went dead. Called the store that sold it and they brought a new one the following day. Great service, this was 11/4/2002. Today is 2/13/2005 and my TV has the power indicator light on then goes to flashing, no picture, no sound. Monday I will call my local repair shop and report my experiences. I see this seems like an inherent problem, so I will do my best to report part numbers and repair procedures to help all interested.