Used to determine a user's inclusion in an experiment and the expiry of experiments a user has been included in. While Toshiba has spent money on this TV’s features, it feels like the core investments have gone missing. We’d guess that this is a cheap panel with a cheap processor and the result is a picture that struggles to keep up with the source material at full resolution.

The TV measures at 732 x 78 x 439mm without the stand, or 732 x 189 x 472mm with it, weighing 7kg to make it slim and lightweight. Thanks for your question. We view the TVs from all sorts of angles and distances when we test them out. Like you say, we don't expect anyone to sit super close to a 55in TV although, of course, some people do enjoy something close to a front row of the cinema feel. The sentence about the distance was a reference to the viewing angles. The off-axis viewing on this TV was poor at all distances. Up very close, though, it was so bad that even a central, on-axis positioned showed up the poor panel tech.Going the whole Dolby hog by also bringing Atmos sound on board merely underlines the feeling that Toshiba is willing to go the extra mile even with a TV as affordable as the 50UK3163DB to give customers an experience it likely couldn’t muster without ‘third party’ help. For audio devices you should use the Audio Link option via the following menu options on the TV: System > Sound Menu. For remote controllers, use the following: System > Options > More > Smart Remote. Select the menu option on your remote, and press ‘OK’ to open the related menu.

Hi guys , just as a point of interest , Who sits 5' away from a tv ??? Mines about 10' and it's not a massive room . Is that supposed to be a recommended viewing position for students in a bedsit or suchlike . What's the need , thanks Paul . The 50UK3163DB’s taste for spectacle is let down somewhat by its colour handling. The screen just doesn’t seem able to support a wide enough colour gamut to ‘keep up’ with its intense brightness, leading to some bright tones looking a bit thin and washed out versus some rivals. Similarly, the picture can clip subtle shading out of bright HDR and even SDR highlights quite noticeably thanks, presumably, to its preference for presenting HDR as brightly as possible rather than tempering it to the screen’s specific brightness capabilities with serious HDR tone mapping.While you won’t be blown away by the audio that the UK31 can produce, the sound quality of its 20W speaker system is more than enough to get the job done for those on a tight budget. This TV’s 4K image is crisp and clear, and thanks to this set’s Dolby Vision and HDR10 codecs the colors are bright and vivid. The middling brightness means the UK31 can't compete with higher-end sets, but you're getting a solid picture output for the price. While the Toshiba UK31 doesn’t have a flotilla of apps, it is not without smarts. Alexa is built-in – although annoyingly, a notification pops up asking if you want to activate it every time the TV is powered on and can’t be turned off unless you log in to Alexa. Toshiba’s reasoning being that you’ve bought an Alexa compatible TV… because you wanted Alexa. I’m not necessarily sure that will be the case for everyone that eyes this set. The user interface is occasionally a little slow to load, particularly when using the EPG, and stutters a fair bit when browsing the menus. Toshiba’s choice of the dual-core processor at the heart of this set may not have been the best option. If wall-mounting is not a consideration (or feasible) there’s the stand to deal, which while easy to screw in, is surprisingly heavy and brings the TV’s profile down low. It has the effect of making soundbar placement rather troublesome as there’s little clearance between the TV and the surface it’s on, allowing the IR receiver to be obscured. There have been many times where I’ve had to angle the remote down to function, and that gets irritating after a while.

The TV tab contains Freeview Play as well as the Guide and Channels. Lastly, Settings lets you manage image, sound and network settings. The 50UK3163DB’s sound, like its pictures, is pretty good for such an affordable TV. Its speakers are powerful and dynamic enough, for instance, to deliver an expansive sound capable of shifting up and down a few gears quite convincingly during the ebb and flow of a powerful action scene. While the 50UK3163DB isn’t anything special when it comes to handling dark images, it sure stands out with the intensity it brings to both bright parts of dark scenes, and full-screen bright HDR content. In fact, when it comes to the bright end of the light spectrum, it delivers arguably the most aggressive HDR performance in its class.

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The remote has IR learning for control over other devices. To disable this, hold down the “O” button for a few seconds. Controlling other devices isn’t the smoothest; pressing Home on the Sony UBP-X700 kept bringing up a side menu instead of returning to the UBP-X700’s start menu. Pressing Home when in-app also brings up picture settings instead of the Home tile section on the bottom of the screen. Toshiba 55UL5A63DB features– Dolby Vision HDR and Alexa are welcome features Between them, the intense sharpness and surprisingly potent handling of HDR leave almost all of the 50UK3163DB’s similarly priced rivals looking staid and dull by comparison. If you really want to get an impression of HDR’s strengths without having to spend big on a much higher end TV, the 50UK3163DB won’t let you down. But, if you can afford to splash out on a soundbar then you’ll be treated to a major boost in performance. The panel is also a VA type rather than an IPS type, which again usually results in better contrast (albeit at the expense of comparatively limited viewing angles).

If the TV is missing some channels, we would recommend carrying out an automatic channel scan to tune in these channels, and if necessary trying a First Time Installation or Factory Reset through the menu. There are two matching brushed chrome-look remote controls – one is fuller, with a number pad and compatible player controls, and the other is two-thirds of the size. Both are fitted with shortcuts to Netflix and the Freeview Play smart platform and, like the TV itself, they look and feel rather good.

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We test every televisions we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product. The former enables the TV to take advantage of extra scene-by-scene data delivered by Dolby Vision sources, while the latter sees the TV taking on the challenge of creating a soundstage capable of delivering at least a sense of Dolby Atmos’s object-based approach to sound.