Recently, Samsung showed off several of its upcoming HDTVs in New York City. I took some time out of my incredibly busy schedule to check out what the company plans to offers consumers in the coming months. To read all the Dionysian details of what I saw, make the jump.
Yes, Samsung makes some mighty fine looking TVs. In fact, I bought one just last month so I could watch this year’s World Cup (tomorrow!) in full high definition glory as well as make my friends jealous. Now if only I could buy courage.
Samsung’s got all types of HDTV covered, with plasma, LCD, DLP and CRT-based systems falling out of its board members’ pockets.
While consumers’ love affair with plasma HDTVs may have waned a little bit in recent years, Samsung will still be pumping them out. The biggest HDTV I saw there was the 63″ HP-R6372. (Side note: Why can’t consumer electronics manufacturers give their products catchier names, like car companies do? How about the Samsung OmegaView?) Since most people who will be buying this $10,000 $9,999 HDTV more than likely have their own fancy Dolby Digital audio setups, Samsung made the clever move of designing the TV in such a way that there’s almost no bezel, that is, the set is pretty much all screen, for lack of a better term; there are no pesky speakers on the side of the TV, but rather on the underneath of the frame. It looks very clean, as any TV that costs that amount of money ought to.
Samsung also has two smaller plasma-based HDTVs in two different series. The 50″ (HP-S5073) and 42″ (HP-S4273) (both available in July and part of the 73 Series) are priced at $4,299 and $3,299. Meanwhile, the 53 Series’ 50″ (HP-R5053) and 42″ (HP-R4253) MSRP for $3,999 and $2,999, respectively. As you might imagine, the 73 Series HDTVs have more goodies, such as a 9-in-2 digital media card slot that’s compatible with SD cards, Memory Stick and the like for direct viewing of digital photos and other media.
All of their plasma models feature something they call FilterBright technology, which is a screen coating that basically improves picture quality by absorbing all that nasty external light while simultaneously boosting internal lighting. Useful if you plan on using the HDTV in a brightly lit room or near the surface of the sun.
On the LCD front, Samsung really has quite a range of sizes, for all shapes and sizes of consumers. Spanning from 23″ all the way up to 57″ across five different model lines, Samsung is throwing considerable weight behind the LCD HDTV experience.
If you’re looking for a 1080p LCD HDTV, Samsung’s got a 40″ and a 46″ with your name on it. The 96 Series, which includes the 32″ LN-S3296D (available in July for $2,299), 40″ LN-S4096D and 46″ LN-S4696D ($4,099 and $4,799 and available in August) are a pretty good deal. Part of what differentiates this year’s LCDs from last is the piano black of the exterior. If you’ve seen an Xbox 360 in the stores, odds are that it was connected to a now-obsolete 23″ Samsung LCD from the last model year. Remember how the bottom gray portion of the TV kind of gave it an odd, ho-hum look? Thankfully, the all-black (or all white, “pearl white,” if you prefer) better suits today’s home theater environments; the pearl white was demoed in a bathroom that would have made Louis XIV jealous. Imagine the horror of seeing tech journalists posing in such a bathroom next to the TV. Yes, that actually happened. Again, the speakers are hidden on the underside in case you want to stealthily integrate the LCD into a multi-channel audio system.
All of the LCDs coming out this year from the 26″ and up feature something called Game Mode, which helps to reduce to response time of all those little pixels, improving your gaming experience.
People preferring DLP HDTVs will be pleased to know that Samsung’s got those bases covered as well. This year’s models come in at 42″, 46″, 50″, 56″ and 61″; nearly half of them are 1080p, making them future-proof for the next few years, while the more consumer friendly models are 720p. I was assured by the Samsung suits that the color wheel “rainbow” problem that has come to be associated with DLP HDTVs has been greatly reduced with the introduction of an LED-based light source, removing the need for the color wheel altogether. All of them feature Game Mode as well as a new speaker system dubbed DACS.
The company is touting its Dedicated Acoustic Chamber Speakers (or DACS in more manageable parlance), which basically handle the low-range and mid-high-range frequencies separately. Why you’d use that instead of a dedicated sound setup is beyond me, but the gesture is appreciated nonetheless. The built-in HDTV-ATSC lets you receive over-the-air digital broadcasts, provided you live in an area where such broadcasts are present.
Another earth-shattering innovation that Samsung is pushing for its DLP HDTVs is the Cinema Smooth light engine. Aside from the marketing buzzwords, this helps eliminate the squarish pixel structure from the picture that sometimes plagues lesser HDTVs.
Finally, Samsung is still showing some love toward the aging cathode ray tube. Normally, when you think of CRT TVs, you think of huge cabinets and back-throwing-out weight. The company claims that their CRT-based sets are 30 percent slimmer than standard CRTs thanks to SlimFit, a point I would at least nominally agree with, as the CRT HDTVs on display were noticeably slimmer. The suits did admit, however, that they’re not quite LCD or plasma thin quite yet, but that progress is being made. These CRT-based HDTVs, which are mainly aimed at Joe Public who still owns a 27″ standard definition TV in his bedroom, are the cheapest of the bunch, with the most expensive (the 30″ TX-S3082WH) carrying an MSRP of $899.
For the rest of Samsung’s revamped lineup, including the seemingly endless number of LCD options, head on over to the Web site and just try not to be overwhelmed the the alphabet soup of product names and features.
Samsung TVs [Samsung]
