He also disliked the set's handling of 480 content, reporting massive jaggies. But scaler aside for a moment, anyone can tell this set looks good, technical tests or not, by looking at it plain and simple. If you're considering this TV, he also drops in comparisons to plasmas and some other sets so reading his review is worth it. [HD Guru and Samsung's 81 Series on Giz]

I tested using an HDMI splitter from Gefen, Blu-ray and HD DVD titles like 300, Batman Beyond, and Xbox games like Halo 3, Halo 3, and Halo 3. I don't think that motion handling was improved over the last generation LCD, and plasma still has the advantage here. But the picture is as life-like as I've seen on a TV like this generation. It is a big jump. But not perfect. Although Sound and Vision and CNet liked this TV's predecessor a lot, and are bound to love this one, a quick standard def HQV test disc test showed that the TV is running the same level of upscaling performance as the 65f. PC mag didn't love that about this TV and to my eye, it was a middling performer at best. This is undoubtedly its weak point. Also, some other readers have complained about the brights being too bright, causing halos; I love bright screens that can replicate a day on the beach vividly, so I'm not as concerned. Color seemed even to me, uncalibrated, when viewing a simple color bar pattern. Like all the glossy screened Samsung TVs, it kicks up a lot of glare, and the case itself is a dust magnet. It has an 8ms response time, which is twice that of the 92u Sharp series, but that didn't bother me a bit; I've never been able to directly qualify 120hz or sub 8ms response times as something I could notice. (Unlike the contrast of this TV.)

The LED count behind the screen is in the hundreds, and there are dozens of sections that can be individually controlled. The dimming occurs in many degrees, and because LEDs can be turned down with a greater degree of control than CCFLs, its easy to get lighting to be pretty close to zero without dropping to complete black. That helps gray detail. The controls are pretty bad-ass, too: Full touch controls for everything, and the power switch is the round semi circle under the logo. Very slick.

The TV itself isn't cheap: For a 46-inch set, you'll pay $4000 at Crutchfield, but like anything, they'll drop in price soon enough.

So far, this is the best LCD I've seen yet. Highly recommended. I'll either match this up against a Pioneer Kuro or a Olevia LCD next. [Stats at Samsung]

According to Samsung, this is the world's first 1080p Wi-Fi plasma. That's a lot of qualifiers, but it is pretty tasty, and according to the company, the issue of getting Hollywood's permission to stream 1080p video from Blu-ray or HD DVD is being resolved, and the TVs will ship in early October. They will be at 50" and 58" sizes, and will cost $600 more than the equivalent plasmas without Wi-Fi. Note the USB jack next to the HDMI input.

LED backlighting is the wave of the future for LCDs, and not just because they are "greener" than the current CCFLs. Because they can alternately dim and brighten 60 or 70 separate clusters of LEDs underneath the LCD panel, you get deeper contrast, but without losing detail in dark scenes. The TV in the shot below is the previously announced but never-before-shown LN-T4681F, a 46" set that will list for around $3,500. (Though the screen shows that idiotic Robots movie, the best demo of the TV's shadow and explosion capability was Batman Begins.)

Finally, we turn to 120Hz. As many commenters have acknowledged, there are plenty of different types of 120Hz systems, and many different claims. I think the best ones are the ones that use image processing to interpolate new frames. (And yes, there are different types of interpolation, too, but let's skip that for now.) If you look at the photo I snapped of the TV here, Samsung's $3,000 46" LN-T4671F, you can actually see that for every two frames on the right, there's only one on the left. The camera don't lie, and believe me, it looked good in person too.

Samsung