Samsung 26" LCD iDTV. Price: £674 from
247AV.
I’ve had a couple of days to play with it, so here are my initial thoughts. Please bear in mind that I’m comparing this LCD TV with my 3-year old Sony KD-28DX50 CRT iDTV, and my extensive experience with LCD PC monitors.
The first thing that hits you is the size: the 28” CRT and the 26” LCD have the same screen size, but the Samsung ‘hides’ in my lounge whereas the Sony dominated it! The casing is a gloss black with a subtle silver V-shaped port for the speakers at the bottom. Personally I prefer this to the very distinctive triangular speakers of the previous Samsung range. The remote control is long, thin and black, with a thick rear end. All the useful buttons seem to be right at the bottom (EPG, picture and sound modes), so it’s a bit hard to hold the remote and press them.
OK, plug it in. The Samsung does a ‘plug and play’ install and sets all the analogue and digital channels. The picture: amazingly bright, high contrast and vivid (almost day-glo) colours. I’m planning to watch Freeview a lot of the time, and the SD digital quality is as least as good as my old Sony, which was very good. The four pre-defined picture modes: Dynamic, Standard, Movie and Custom make a noticeable difference. Dynamic is very bright, super high contrast and highly coloured, so it shows off what the LCD is capable of. I quickly started fiddling with the other modes to try to ‘tone it down’ a bit, back to my old CRT levels.
So, the big question: is
LCD better or worse than CRT? I’d have to answer: it’s “different”. Colours look different, in the same way that pictures from a mid-range digital camera look different to those taken by a film camera. The way contrast is handled is different. I can see why people who move from CRTs might find this a shock and say their old CRTs are “better”. It’s just different, and no-one likes sudden changes – we all like to stick to our old ways. Maybe because I’ve spent a lot of time watching videos and DVDs on my PC’s LCD monitor it’s not an issue with me.
What about the other contentious issues with LCD:
blacks and motion blur. To test black levels I sat and watched a few episodes of ‘Lost’, which must be the greatest challenge as most of it happens in the dark! Blacks looked… well, black! Yes, there is some residual light from the backlight but nothing bad. My Sony CRT (which may not be typical) had faint purple banding on dark pictures anyway, so this is no worse. I’m pleasantly surprised by the ‘black’ performance.
Motion blur? I watched a bit of football last night and it didn’t seem a problem to me. I sometimes wonder if what people are seeing is in fact a result of the digital encoding of the signal: particularly with Freeview, which is a lower bandwidth than Sky digital. The effect is best seen on the lower bandwidth Freeview channels like E4 (which is worse than E4+1). Their purple backgrounds can look terrible as the encoder/decoder tries to make sense of all the subtle colour shades. Anyway, to summarise, the LCD didn’t seem much different to CRT.
Sound: The sound is thinner than my CRT with much less bass. I’m sure this has something to do with the CRT being a solid frame weighing 50kg and the LCD being a thin plastic frame weighing 10kg! The physics does not allow the LCD to move as much air. The speakers in the Samsung 26” are rated at 2x5W whereas the 32” and larger are 2x10W. Having said that the virtual Dolby works much better than my old Sony, and the Samsung has four sound modes to distinguish between music, voice and movies as well and ‘standard’ and ‘custom’.
Picture in Picture (PIP) fans who want to watch Freeview will be disappointed: there is no PIP option when watching DTV. It works with analogue and any other external source (including PC), but no way will it work in any combination with the digital tuner. In general, you get the feeling that the software was not designed with DVB in mind, as it leans toward the analogue functions first. However as said above DVB looks great.
What I really wanted this LCD for was as a screen for my Media PC, which is going to be acting as a PVR and playing DVDs. The first shock was that I had to connect the PC using VGA D-sub and not DVI. The manual says you cannot use DVI for a PC source unless it specifically uses an HD mode such as 720p, 1080i etc. I guess some new PCs (such as the latest Sony VGX series) can do this, but most can’t. Anyway I connected the PC via VGA and I was greeted by a great picture. The LCD reports a 1360 x 768 resolution through the graphics cards, and I can live with just losing 3 pixels each side of the screen (and I know you can tweak this in software). Having a 26” monitor is great, and it played some HD avi’s really well, but I want to download some more HD stuff when I get the time.
So a summary (for now):
Good points: Great sharp and colourful picture. Nice quality Freeview tuner. PC connectivity works OK, albeit via VGA. Looks great in your room!
Bad points: Sound a bit thin. Unfriendly remote. Limits on PIP use with Freeview.
I’ll post some photos of the screen when I can find somewhere to host them and link to them.
Any regrets? I only wish I had bought a 32” instead to get the same positive experience – only bigger!