tcbutler.co.uk

My last TV (32″ HD-ready and made by Hannspree) made me realise what a step up from CRT to LCD meant. For around £300 (AUD$600) it didn’t fill half the living room, had good sound, a pretty good picture, viewing angle, a few latency issues and problems with dynamic range (dark colours dropped off to black too quickly, meaning moody films featured actors with black empty eye sockets) but nothing compared to the muddy, blurry mess we’d had with our old similarly-priced CRT.

Moving to Australia was my chance (read: excuse) to make another step up, this time in price range and feature set. This gorgeous Samsung was retailing for up to AUD$2,200 when I bought it, and I negotiated down quite a bit from that in Bing Lee, an Aussie store whose differentiator is that “everything’s negotiable” – it is until you reach their “floor price” of course, which is quite easy to work out.  Some of their stores even mark price tags to show if they’re already at their floor price… but I digress.  I’d venture that it’s worth every single penny.

It arrived in a fairly large box (large enough for me to climb inside and briefly recreate the excitement large boxes held for me as a child) which was exceptionally well designed. No cutting of tape or inversion of the box required – squeeze and pull out the heavy-duty plastic carrying handles, slide the top of the box off and reveal the TV. 20 minutes of peeling off blue protective film from every surface and you’re faced with a stunning polished black TV. The base was a bit of a bugger to attach, but aside from that, setup was very straightforward. The fact that the base allows you to smoothly rotate the TV to get the perfect viewing angle (e.g. I can turn it so I can watch TV while tending the BBQ outside – perfect) makes it worth the fiddling around.  Can I include a rating for the box?  I guess I can, it’s my review: Rating:

It tuned itself in to the bizarre selection of free-to-air channels Australia has to offer, which includes a number of HD stations. While much of the content is still dross, you can wile away a few hours marvelling at how you can see the hairs on people’s faces and how much motoGP looks like a computer game when broadcast in HD. Even the TV’s menu and interface is pretty exciting in HD – sharp, detailed icons, large smooth fonts and good use of colours make it fun to use. Rating:

Actually, HD is a bit unflattering – suddenly you can see the newsreaders’ spots under the makeup, you can see the actor’s wrinkles or the wobble in the scenery which gives away that they’re in a studio… it’s actually quite unnerving, and made me pleased I’m not a media celebrity.  The picture is frankly amazing – much greater dynamic range than I expected, managing enough brightness while maintaining good, deep blacks. Rating:

I’ve tried most of the inputs (3x HDMI, 2x Component, RCA, VHF) and they all work fine – the response time is clearly better than my old unit (despite being the same on paper) without the blurring or artifacting we had gotten used to – and it drives home how much of an LCD’s performance is down to the hardware and software behind the screen which processes and scales the various inputs.  I remember that even the different HDMIs offered different qualities on my old unit, while this one is completely consistent, and upscaling from 720p to 1080p is better through the TV’s circuitry than through my expensive fancy-ass upscaling DVD player which blew me away when I first used it. Rating:

One unknown quantity prior to purchase (I’ve read conflicting opinions on forums recently) was whether the optical out connection always outputs the sound from whatever input’s being used, regardless of whether the input is digital or analogue, stero or surround etc.  This is relevant because if you want a low-budget home theatre, the perfect situation is to find yourself a non-HDMI, audio-only amp with digital in, use the TV as your HDMI switcher and the amp to just decode and amplify the sound.  Having now connected a surround amp, I’m pleased to say all audio is neatly routed through optical, which makes everything a lot neater.

Built-in sound is also fairly outstanding versus expectations – the speakers appear to be mounted on the underside and hence are invisible, but they are plenty loud enough for our sizeable living room – they just lack the definition and spacing of a home theatre setup. [rating 3.5/5]

The only real bugbear (and this has been tested on two different buildings’ aerials) is the built-in digital TV user interface. OK, it scanned well enough, and it manages to display an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) but for some reason the EPG interface is UNBEARABLY SLOW, almost to the point of being useless.  Thankfully many people have FoxTel here, so they can disregard the built-in software, but as we only use free-to-air we’ve had to establish a few workarounds in order to browse channels. Rating:

Basically, well done me – this is a freaking great TV.  But before I end on a rating, I forgot one very important test of any new hardware…

The emptiness test. I believe that any gadget worth its salt should feel full.  Full of circuits and batteries and capacitors and ingenious voluptuous gadgetry.  It should feel like a team of skilled and highly-paid professionals worked day and night to pack it end to end with STUFF, and put it all in a good solid box which was just the right size to keep it safe.  This TV does fall down slightly here.  It’s about a third of the weight you expect it to be, which makes you wonder why they didn’t make it even thinner (I guess the designers knew they were going to bring out the new LED ranges when they spec’d it out) and it did make me a bit sad.  However, the advantages are: 1. you’re less likely to drop it while rearranging furniture, 2: it’s easier to rotate without having to heft it around.  So I’ll give it a non-commital Rating: because heavy is not always equal to awesome.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

See related posts...

• No related posts found.