By Philip Wong, CNET Asia
13/02/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/tvs/0,39037585,43378909p,00.htm

The Samsung Series 7, 8 and 9 HDTVs are truly in a league of their own. Like most Korean consumer electronic products, they are absolutely stunning with eye-catching aesthetics. Their new connected TV functions also set them apart from the competition, enabling entertainment hub-like capabilities ranging from network multimedia streaming to downloading live RSS feeds.

As the most affordable lineup among the trio, the LA46A750 offers the best bang for your buck with a superb blend of fine design, features and performance. Here's why we think it deserves an Editors' Choice.

Design

If you have an appetite for exquisite design and are seeking a flashy display to impress your guests with, Samsung's crystal design with a touch of color styling is once such TV. Its sensuous combination of a thin glossy bezel and inconspicuous red-tinted borders make the LA46A750R1M a ravishing display. That is not all. For garnishing, there're touch-sensitive TV controls with red backlighting and a matching, albeit fixed, glass tabletop stand that can be substituted for a wall bracket. To maintain a clean picturesque front, the bezel features invisible bottom-firing speakers and dual subwoofers lined along the rear.

The placements of its auxiliary A/V jacks are well-conceived as well, within easy reach from the left yet concealed from praying eyes. The Samsung's built-in ports include an HDMI input for HD camcorders, USB to accept storage devices or the bundled Samsung Wi-Fi dongle, and a headphone jack. The chassis' all-rounded mirror finish and modest 98mm depth also mean it is attractive from the side and back but is twice as prone to dust and scratches too. Lastly, unsightly cords can be neatly bundled and routed using an adjustable tie for simple and effective cable management.

Samsung has brought the LA46A750R1M's remote one step closer to perfection with upgraded motion-sensing backlighting. This complements a dedicated backlit key and automatically turns on button illumination at a touch of the controller. Another addition is a scroll wheel for smoother navigation that also doubles as a five-way directional pad. While we've always favored an individual key for each input, Samsung is offering a TV and a smart video button that reprioritize connected jacks on the onscreen menu for easier selection. Furthermore, there's a suite of shortcuts to cover all the media solution functions.

Things were pretty much in order when we checked out its software menu. It's not as sleek as Sony's XrossMediaBar interface, but the tweaking options are aplenty to get the panel properly dialed in. You'll have access to all the basic video settings, including brightness and contrast, plus multilevel advanced variations covering backlight adjustment, white balance, 100Hz MotionPlus, etc. Nonetheless, our biggest gripe here is its limited picture modes (Dynamic, Movie and Standard), though there're three additional A/V entertainment modes preconfigured for sports, movies and games for hassle-free one-button tuning.

Features

Beyond its aesthetics, the LA46A750R1M is loaded with a full-HD LCD panel capable of delivering 70,000:1 dynamic contrast which is one of the highest in its class. To optimize picture quality, Samsung has brought back its 100Hz Motion Plus engine and the latest DNie Pro video processor. The former is an anti-judder system designed to boost the panel refresh rate to 100 frames per second (fps) with additional motion compensation. Unlike most LCDs, this model also has a reflective screen that enhances contrast at the expense of potential glare seen commonly in plasma TVs.

It is astonishing what an Ethernet port can bring to the table. With an Internet connection, its InfoLink system is able to download and display live Yahoo! news, stock indexes and weather forecasts onscreen. For users with a home network, its WiseLink Pro function can further stream music, photos and videos (MPEG-1/2/4, H.264 and Xvid) directly from DLNA-compatible devices. These can range from a PC running Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 to a network-attached storage and mobile phones. The playback user interface is pretty intuitive as well, with media files sorted in various categories such as album, artist, genre and folder.

With a built-in USB port that also replicates the above-mentioned multimedia playback and inbuilt memory, the LA46A750R1M is offering offline content through its Content Library function. The materials are grouped into five categories comprising a photo gallery, food recipes, mini games, fitness tips and children edutainment such as songs. Although Samsung does not allow you to refresh the pre-loaded programs in the TV's memory, users can download free as well as paid content from the Korean chaebol and third-party Web sites onto a USB thumbdrive, and play off that.

For couch potatoes, the Series 7 is HD broadcast-enabled out-of-the-box, equipped with a DVB-T digital TV tuner and an MPEG-4 video decoder. For Dolby Digital-encoded programs, this panel will output the surround soundtrack via its optical audio jack for external decoding. There's one major problem though. You will have to share its sole TV aerial input between an analog and digital antenna. Otherwise, the LA46A750R1M has superb connectivity options comprising dual component-video, a PC and four 24fps-enabled HDMI terminals. That's a total of seven 1080p-ready jacks at your disposal!

Performance

The LA46A750R1M's analog TV broadcast quality is good but not exceptional when compared with the recently reviewed Sony Bravia X4. To be fair, most of Singapore's MediaCorp channels were reproduced in good clarity with a relatively clean background, though the images were slightly over-stretched at the TV's 16:9 aspect ratio mode. Switching to digital stations, the panel was able to maintain an overall stable reception on any antenna placement. Besides an instant boost in sharpness and depth for native HD programs such as Hereos on HD5, we also observed a visible drop in noise level for standard-definition digital TV channels.

It was a walk in the park for our SpyderTV Pro-calibrated 46-incher in Avia test patterns. Both the grayscale tracking and color decoding results were accurate after extensive white balance tweaking to rectify its overly bluish tones. We were also impressed by its solid blacks that were surprisingly close to our reference Pioneer LX Kuro panel without compromising shadow details as evident in the dark scenes in Blade 2. Based on HQV benchmarks, the LA46A750R1M's jaggie suppression and noise reduction were fairly effective. Additionally, its DVD upscaling and edge enhancement were brilliant in sharpening the visuals.

Taking the picture quality to another level were the detailed and crisp images from Blu-ray discs. We had little problem reading the fine print and racing decals adorning the vehicles in Cars, rendered in pristine and rich shades. Film-based movies such as Iron Man, on the other hand, exhibited a warm presentation and relatively accurate skin tones. Setting MotionPlus at low also delivered nicely balanced natural motion and minimal judder as well as video-processing artifacts. That said, it was still not good enough to pass our HD-HQV's film resolution loss test, though the other benchmarks were expertly tackled by the Samsung.

Gaming was another area which the LA46A750R1M truly excelled in. There was negligible image degradation running Xbox 360's Need for Speed: ProStreet on component-video over HDMI. In both instances, the gameplay was equally immersive, thanks to the faithfully reproduced eye candy, razor-sharp graphics and saturated hues. The same strong showing was replicated using a 1080p video feed from an HP laptop, formatted in edge-to-edge perfection. In addition, fine text was flicker-free and clearly legible, making this panel an ideal monitor for Web browsing, while the colors were silky smooth on our banding test chart.

As far as multimedia playback was concerned, the WiseLink Pro function was brilliant. We were very impressed by the stutter-free video clips up to 1080i played back through our office network that indistinguishable from standalone players. It could have been perfect if not for the extra side black bars from the upscaled widescreen videos. The LA46A750R1M was also a speed demon in JPEG loading, clocking an average 4 to 7 seconds to display our 8-megapixel test shots in near print quality. As for MP3s, it handled jazz, vocal and instrumental tracks effortlessly, losing pace only for the more dynamic rock music.

This dual-woofer Samsung is a songstress, piping out plenty of mid-bass matched by extended highs and distinct dialogs. The bottom-firing speakers' stereo imaging is actually quite good even with SRS TruSurround engaged. If you've a huge room, this TV could go pretty loud sans any strong audible distortions. To a certain extent, the Samsung LA46A750R1M has almost everything you'll need to set up a competent home cinema. At S$5,899, it's stacking up pretty well in terms of pricing, too. We're looking at just a few hundred dollars over non-connected TVs such as the Philips 47PFL9703.