Samsung UN46B8500 46" LED TV

Incredible picture quality but with very clunky extra features., November 19, 2009

In terms of video quality, this TV is awesome. I can't imagine how the picture could be much better.

There are some picture quality issues with off-angle viewing (as the CNET review states), but I think CNET exaggerates the severity -- it's only noticeable to me if I'm far off center. Although CNET suggests setting "judder...read full review In terms of video quality, this TV is awesome. I can't imagine how the picture could be much better.

There are some picture quality issues with off-angle viewing (as the CNET review states), but I think CNET exaggerates the severity -- it's only noticeable to me if I'm far off center. Although CNET suggests setting "judder reduction" off, I like the effect. While setting this to 10 introduces some distortion at times, a setting of 6 smoothes out motion well without noticeable distortion. I haven't yet noticed any blooming effects. Setting energy saving mode to "auto" doesn't seem to hurt picture quality.

The remote is RF rather than the standard IR that most home theater equipment uses. While many people may consider this a plus, the downside for me is that I can't use my universal remote with the TV. For years I've only had one remote on my coffee table, now I have to have two.

Unfortunately, digital audio output does not pass through multi-channel audio from HDMI inputs. You need to run extra digital audio cables from your DVD player and other components to your AV receiver if you'd like Dolby Digital or DTS sound.

One small build quality issue that I encountered: the plastic at the base of my TV extended a bit too far, making it impossible to fit it into the stand. I had to carve away some of the plastic in the slots of the stand just to get it to fit, which made me very uneasy.

The TV has a variety of Internet and media features. But ironically, I think that I'd be happier with the TV if it didn't have any of these, as there are lots of quality issues such as:

1. When playing video files through USB, DLNA, or Internet features, most TV controls are disabled including aspect ratio control. While you can adjust basic picture settings, you can't choose 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. In playing NTSC video (i.e., any video that came from standard def TV or DVD) from USB or DLNA, the aspect ratio is *always wrong*: 16:9 video is always squeezed too thin and 4:3 video is always stretched too fat. To me, it's unwatchable.

2. The TV does not decode DTS audio for video files played through USB or DLNA. While I wouldn't necessarily expect this of a TV, I would have hoped that it would just pass through the audio stream to the digital audio output for an AV receiver to decode. It does pass through Dolby Digital from video files (but not from HDMI) to the digital audio output, but it does not pass DTS. Many HD video files on the Internet have DTS, and I can't play any of these on this TV.

3. There is no fast forward, rewind, or chapter advance when playing video clips or movies. This is true of playing YouTube videos as well. Although there is a "skip" feature where you can jump in increments (e.g., 10 seconds), this is only available for some video files (most don't support this, in my experience).

4. As the CNET review stated, the Yahoo widgets are extremely slow to start. Note that this has nothing to do with your Internet speed, since I have a 25 Mbit Internet service with wired Ethernet to the TV and it's still painfully slow. I have an HD TiVo with a lot of the same features as the Yahoo widgets, and that is far more enjoyable to use. But the one area where the Yahoo widgets outperformed TiVo was YouTube -- the Yahoo YouTube widget can play HD video clips as HD but TiVo plays them as SD.

5. For some reason, the DLNA file management user interface is a bit different from the USB file management UI. You can work with hierarchical folders with the USB capability, but not DLNA. All video files from your PC are presented as a flat (large) horizontal list, and it's awkward to navigate if you have more than a few files. Both the USB and DLNA UIs are kind of clunky, but DLNA is worse than the USB.

I assume that these problems exist with all Samsung TVs with the Media 2.0 feature. Perhaps these problems will be fixed in a future software update (I have the 11/09 version). If so, I'll post another review. But I would have preferred a (cheaper) TV that didn't have any of these features to a (more expensive) TV that provided these features poorly. I'll probably end up getting an MVIX or similar device for these features, rather than using the features built into the TV. minimize