Samsung LCD TVs

For the past few years I have been on the plasma tv band wagon.Why?Well for a long time it has been carved in A/V stone that tvs over 40" were just better as plasmas for a number of reasons.Black Levels were better,color saturation and contrast levels were just way better.This year for the first time I am breaking the rule.Recently while perusing the tvs at my local distributor a group of Samsung tvs caught my eye,I asked my rep for more details and a demonstration.We hooked up a Blu Ray player and put on the Planet Earth discs.If you have not seen it I can only say its a must watch.The reason why this is a good demo disk is that some of the scenes have millions of objects (birds) moving across the screen and then there are just vivid slow motion moments that really show contrast ratios. On the Samsung LN55A950  the scene with the birds was processed so well that I only saw a few digital artifacts.which is on par with any of the top Plasmas from the last year (Kuros).

The Colors were so vivid and at this point I was 80% sold ,but the real test for me is how it does with black levels.This is normally the Achilles heel for LC tvs.We put on Iron Man and moved to the scenes featuring Tony Starks time in Afghanistan.Dark caves and some bright light sources.Again I was just blown away,there was hardly any blooming and the black is really black. 

Now these were just taken out of the box and thrown on the wall,no calibration of any kind.I cant imagine the images I can get with a little time and a few tweaks.So for me this is the product I will be putting on my customers walls.The 5gs for a 55" price tag is appropriate for a tv of this caliber. If you want to spend less and get 90% of the performance they do have the a cheaper model.The nice thing is that the LN52A860  is ultra thin and almost as good for $3400. 

The only down side to these tvs is that the glass is pretty reflective. Some other brands put tints or less shine on the glass,but you miss out on the brilliance that ultra good glass gets you.So for a lot of daytime tv watching this is something to keep in mind,but is not a deal killer.