The 40A650
After weeks of contemplation I finally gave in and purchased the Samsung 40A650 full HD T.V, this was influenced by the very good performance of the cheaper 32A550 and I needed to have a higher end Full Hd panel - that's an LCD, to compliment my Panasonic 42PY800, another very good 1080p performer but on plasma's side.
I won't go through with the specs on paper but rather on how the unit performs in "real life"
Blu-Ray/DVD
Using a Pioneer DV610v we watched the Lord of the Rings "Return of the King" dvd set at 1080p, the cavalry charge towards the end of the movie was presented in a very panoramic manner with no hints of slow-down or pixelation. On blu-ray we tested the Transformers from chapters 18-25, just to check if the extremely fast paced action, which involves high speed chases and rapid mech transformations would slow the unit down. Pleasant surprise! No hitch at all! With everything flowing smoothly despite so many things happening on-screen at the same time. For black levels, we used the very dark Underworld Evolution blu-ray and switched off all the lights to verify just how consistent the backlight and black levels are, it's still not as solid as my Panny 42PY800 with pockets of somewhat grey areas that's supposed to be pitched black, and we still observed a few sections of uneven lighting. Not really a big deal and you can simply over-look this minor set back. Since this is LCD, you don't get any green phosphor lag (those annoying green trails on plasma) in high contrast areas and some may say - That's lcd and you'll get motion blur instead! Based on what we've seen with our test materials above, the A650 does not seem to have that issue.
PS3/Xbox 360
The weakness of the so-called "game mode" feature of Samsung was that it gave you great input response time but at the expense of picture quality (lower models define graphics in a somewhat pale manner). This unit has a very good looking picture with game mode switched on! Colors are vibrant and with jaggy's kept to a bare minimum. The game we used to test this is a 2.5D Japanese game called "Battle Fantasia", the game is known to bring out jaggy edges because it's a mixture of hand drawn sprites over polygons. Normally, the overly sharp picture definition of an LCD will make you want to slip this game back to your CRT monitor. We didn't have that feeling with this unit, as it displayed the game in a crisp and clean way. If this model displays great picture quality on a graphically inferior game, I can't wait to see it play 1080p native games like MGS4^^^
Cable
No cable yet, still need to channel this thing.
Sound
No complains here, I'm not really into the audio stuff.
Initial impressions
May not be the cheapest LCD but based on how it performs so far, it's
ONE OF THE BEST LOOKING, BEST PERFORMING FULL HD PANELS OUT THERE! Hopefully, when I do get the time I'll compare this with the Panasonic 42PY800! I'd like to see how Sammy's 1080 24P "Real Movie" or it's Auto motion plus compares to Panny's intelligent frame creation.
I'm still playing with this toy and will try to give more updates...soon
Added info:
Dvd and Blu-ray set to 1080p, game was set to 720p.
Thanks to Vic of Sights and Sounds for another smooth purchase, too bad I was not able to get this during those funky sale dates=(
Anyone care to share their experince with this unit? You may also want to share a few settings as well
Thank you...
