By Ty Pendlebury, CNET.com.au
23/10/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/tvs/0,39037585,43986287p,00.htm

Are you craving for deep luscious blacks that are on par or even better than the legendary Pioneer Kuro? If what we've witnessed during Samsung's recent product launch is a good yardstick for its Series 9 LCDs, these HDTVs may just be your gateway to home entertainment nirvana. Expect to cough out good money for these full-HD panels, but rest assured their impressive feature-set will keep your family "glued" onscreen for quite a long while.

Design

Television design has been getting a little silly of late, what with the LG Scarlet's "love hole" and the Sony ZX1's wall-mount bracket in a fetching, scratchy piano black that no one will ever see. So it's refreshing to find a TV as understated as Samsung's Series 9. After all, people visit the Louvre for the pictures, not the frames.

But that's not to say that design has come last in the construction of this TV--it's actually quite a stunner, with a faux carbon-fiber finish and a clear plastic trim. While it's not as slim as the Series 8, it's certainly sturdier with a solid, non-swiveling glass stand.

Our only gripe is with the onboard controls. They are impossible to see under most lighting conditions. Unless you have a light shining directly on them--which is a no-no for TV viewing--you won't be able to find them. They are of the capacitive type, but will light up when you touch the buttons.

The remote is quite chunky. With a decent smattering of friendly buttons. While controlling some of the network and streaming functions isn't always that obvious it's quite useful in most respects. We especially like the Previous Channel button for cycling easily between two channels.

Features

While this isn't the first LED-backlit TV, the Series 9 is one of the few of its kind in the market besides the latest Sony Bravia KLV-46X4500. But it's an exciting feature as it allows better colors as well as blacks at the same time.

The panel itself is a future-proofed 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution LCD, and the backlighting contributes to the hyperbolic 2,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. Suspicious numbers aside, the black levels on this TV are very fine, indeed.

Like the Series 8 before it, you get a generous four HDMI ports and an Ethernet networking port for streaming weather information and media content from a Digital Living Network Alliance-compatible server (a PC or network access storage).

If that's not enough you can also connect USB devices like MP3 players or thumbdrives and choose from a large selection of content onboard, which includes children's stories, illustrated recipes and even games. You don't even need to connect an antenna to get entertainment from this device, but if you must there's also a built-in EPG-compliant HD digital TV tuner as well.

Performance

We'll put this out there: If you're looking for a plasma-like picture without the associated burn-in problems, then the Series 9 Samsung is the king. In fact, because this TV doesn't have the light bleed or off-axis discoloration problems of other LCDs, we think you could fool most people--experts included--into believing this is a plasma TV.

Standard definition was a tale of two outcomes. While the TV failed our synthetic tests, it did well with our usual barrage of movie content. To elaborate further, the Samsung had real problems with "jaggies" when it came to DVD upscaling. This was verified using a Faroudja DCDi-enabled Marantz DV6001 player which cleaned up the image effortlessly.

However, watching King Kong was an engaging experience. Even without noise reduction turned on, the MPEG artifacts in this movie were much reduced. However, one thing did strike us during some of the darker scenes--the high-contrast coating is very reflective so you may like to watch this TV with the lights off. This is not exactly a familiar feature of LCDs which usually perform better in bright rooms.

While the screen boosts black levels, we found it also "flattened" them a little, meaning that some detail in dark areas can be lost. But the end result was impressive and certainly on par with typically softer plasma.

A lot of the panels we've seen recently tend to be oversharpened out of the factory, and what this does is create false levels of detail. This tactic is usually employed to make the set stand out when sitting on the shopfloor, but it can make the picture look garish and noisy in your living room.

As a result, we had to fiddle with the Sharpness controls to rein in the Mission: Impossible III Blu-ray's tendency for image graininess even in Movie mode. Once we did that, the picture was vibrant and three-dimensional.

The onboard tuner was quite capable and provided smear-free images. The Samsung's deep black levels brought out the best in free-to-air HD documentaries. The complementary EPG, on the other hand, was also easy to use, though this could be a little slow to update.

Our only disappointment with this TV was a relatively minor one when you consider how magnificent the picture can be: Media streaming still has a way to go. We had a lot of problems with Samsung's DLNA program, finding it hardly intuitive and laboriously slow.

It didn't even work at times, but eventually we had some success with streaming once we enabled sharing on Windows Media Player 11. Even then the TV's interface was slow and hard to navigate. If you have a PlayStation 3 or even a Media Center PC we'd suggest sticking with them.

Internet connectivity is still a bit of a gimmick, and we wouldn't buy this telly simply for that. Its LED backlighting is the star here, and it's what makes this TV worth every single cent. While you can get plasmas with an equivalent picture for cheaper, this is probably one of the best LCD HDTVs you can buy.