40TL838: good video, terrible channel management.

Question

Hello from Italy,
I recently bought a Toshiba 40TL838.
While I'm satisfied of the video and the audio features, I think the channel management software is inadequate for a device of this level.
This is a list of the flaws I found, I hope you can give me some solutions or at least some info about updates.
1 - Once the automatic search is finished, all the radio channels get numbers already belonging to TV ones. All these "duplicates" generate confusion and make the direct selection of a radio channel impossible. Example: if I want to hear the radio channel numbered 851 I can't press 8 5 1 because the tv will switch to the DTV channel that holds that same number.
I rather have to select "List", scroll ALL the channel and select the radio I want to hear.
If there were separate lists for radio and TV the scrolling would be easier, but it's just one big list.
2 - There is no useful table of channels from which you can easily assign options to the channels (favourites, skipped etc etc). To assign those options you must tune in the channel, select "Quick", scroll the list, choose options, select the option you want and exit.
In all, 9 clicks that you have to repeat for EVERY single channel. With hundreds of them in memory it takes hours.
3 - The favourites menu, as it is, is totally useless. Once you've painfully chosen all your favourites with the above procedure, there is no way to make it your standard channels list. When you press P+ and P- you will still see all the non favourite channels. The only way to avoid them is going to "List", switch to favourites, scroll and select the channel. For the next choice, everything is back to the start because the favourite list is neither here the standard one. It's just quicker to just press P+ and P- thru all the channels, favourites or not.
4 - It is possible to skip the channels from the options menu, but once again the lack of a channels table makes this procedure very slow. Wouldn't it be better to just DELETE all the channels you don't want? Example: I would delete all those "Pay per view" encrypted channels that I didn't subscribe for, or the many duplicates… but it's not possible. Why?
It's the first time that I own a TV where you can't delete channels.
5 - Once you assigned all the options - channel by channel with the 9 clicks procedure - if you make another search, even if manual and related just to a specific frequency, you LOSE ALL your preferences: numbers, favourites, skipped...
This is crazy since it's normal to make a new search from time to time or just add a new channel that has been introduced.
After I lost all the options, I just gave up and left everything as it came with the auto search, since i don't want to start from the beginning again. It's really frustrating.
In all, a custom channel management is impossible.
If I knew it was so bad, I wouldn't have bought this TV, which looked so nice on the store shelf. I hope Toshiba will realize how its software is not on pair with the quality of the screen and will release updates to fix it.

Answer 1

You may want to contact Toshiba Europe. This site supports the US.
- Peter