Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After owning this TV for exactly a month I've finally decided to write a review, you know, after the excitement wears off and what not. Actually I'm still pretty excited about it. My previous set was also a Samsung 26" LCD and upgrading to this one was worthwhile. Since this is a television, I'll comment about the picture first. Out of the box it's very good, after adjusting the settings a bit - excellent. The colors are very vibrant and no problems with viewing angles. I actually like my images to have a bit of contrast to them; I prefer black to be black and not grey. At first I was having a hard time trying to get it right, since my initial reaction was to reduce backlight and gamma, but crank up contrast and brightness. After a while, I finally figured out 'brightness' had the biggest effect. Around 30% was where it really kicks in, but it didn't occur to me to drop it that low. It's all about preference though, and this TV should have enough settings for anybody. Aside from contrast though, I don't see an insane amount of difference between this and a non-LED set... Something I must mention about the settings though, depending on which of the 4 picture presets you're on, certain selections like advanced video settings become unselectable for reasons unknown. Though I pretty much left that setting untouched. Despite that, I really like the fact that settings are saved independently across the 4 presets for EACH input source. So, for example, if you have 4 connections coming in, you can have a total of 16 presets - good stuff. I also tried the PC input through vga and found the picture to be very sharp. Colors are accurate though a bit strong and text is easily readable from a few feet out and this is coming from a practically blind gamer. The audio, I found to be pretty good. The bass isn't going to blow your neighbors away, and it's not going to replace any home theater system, but there is a very capable, customizable equalizer on board which should help a bit. Loudness for this set wasn't a problem for me. Now I must talk about the 120Hz Auto Motion Plus(AMP) dealy as it seems to be the main feature that drives up the cost from lower models. What AMP does for you is, well, readable in the product description, so I'll describe it. AMP made every thing move faster while maintaining picture detail. (more frames in the same amount of time = faster) So, to me, everything looked like either home movies or daytime soaps which, if you can picture them, tend to move faster than most television programs and movies. Despite the bit about daytime soaps, I generally watch movies and sports, and after a few dozen years of watching them in ~24 frames per second (a bit higher for sports), I found the added (double?) frames to seem unnatural. After a few days found myself turning the feature off completely even for sports. Though there's nothing wrong with the quality of the image presented per se, I'd just prefer to see a blue flash go by as opposed to Ironman's actual chest piece go by, for example. And it only really kicks in at what seems like certain intervals, so the inconsistency in framerate got to me as well. I did find a use for AMP while gaming. Everything moves at what seems like 60 fps even when the game is not natively known to. Though, again, it's not 100 percent consistent in high frames (more like 60-80) and certain, very fast moving, games, like racing, cause what seems like screen tearing at the edges. You probably won't notice it (AMP) on games that already run at 60fps, and also it won't work miracles for games with already poor and inconsistent framerates. Overall, it looks fantastic for games, as I didn't give it a second thought about leaving it on, but for everything else I finally decided not to. The main selling point for me was the Connectshare. I was thinking of purchasing a digital media player a while back, but here it's already built-in and it's a very capable one indeed. Though, there's too many to list here, the TV's e-manual actually lists suppurt for a dozen file types spanning several dozen video and audio codecs with bitrates as high as 30 Mbps for certain file types. It's played pretty much every thing I've thrown at it and handled any 'usb device' I've used so far, which includes NTFS formatted sata hard drives with external enclosure, no worries. Though once in a while the audio cuts in and out on my .vob straight rips, and I've yet to test files with very high bitrates since I feel the tradeoff for file size isn't worth it past 7-8 Mbps. Something I must mention about the media player is it does an admirable job of reducing video artifacting from down-conversion, however you're not able to zoom past the actual video while maintaining aspect ratio. In other words it won't crop the black horizontal bars for you on a 4:3 ratio video. You have to do it in the conversion. I found it strange since the option to zoom in is there for all the other video inputs. As for the Smart TV/Samsung App hub, I tried it briefly using the Youtube app under a wired connection(which stalled on the initial install). Videos streamed very quickly and it looked like the the app always plays the highest video quality. Most of the other apps never appealed to me so I found myself quickly deleting them off the TV but this was never a selling point for me anyways, just something to mess around with. As others have mentioned, navigating without a keyboard quickly became a chore. So, hopefully, somewhere along the line, Samsung will separately sell their qwerty remote that's included with their 7000 and up series of TVs otherwise this feature could fade fast. After all that though, I would definitely purchase this TV again if I had to (which I did - the 40" UN40D6000 series) especially at the $700 price-tag offered at the time (thanks to the wacky commodities exchange-like fluctuating price system here). Even though the LED aspect seems to do more for your eco concerns than picture quality and I seldom use the 120Hz Auto motion, I'd rather have more functionality than less. Also, I can afford it. However, for the casual viewer, those on a budget, or old-school movie-goer, 120Hz is overkill. I could go with the UN32D5500 32-Inch and still be happy. As always, see it for yourself.