Samsung Series 4 LCD HDTV (LN32A450)

For years, I have lived with a small, mediocre television set. In the first year of graduate school my mother was nice enough to spend $220 or so (which was unheared of in my family for a birthday present) to buy me a 19″ Zenith TV. That TV lasted me from 1993 to 2005, and was a very good, solid television. In 2005 when that TV finally died after surviving trips from NJ to SC and from SC to WA, I knew I would be moving, so I decided not to buy a high-end TV, even though by then I did have the money for it. I purchased a Toshiba 20″ regular def TV, and decided that the next TV, eventually, would be high definition. I knew that the “HD switch” was going to be in 2009, but that seemed really far away in 2005.

Also, at the time and even since, I have had certain issues with HD televisions. Besides the outrageous price, the two main types, LCD and Plasma, both held concerns for me. The plasmas look great but are both very expensive and also gigantic. Living in a medium to slightly small apartment (which I have always done and still do), a giant 48″ or something screen is just not reasonable. But they don’t make plasmas at smaller sizes (I think the absolute smallest I’ve seen is 42″), so anything in my size (and price) range is going to be an LCD. And to be honest, up until a year or two ago, the LCD TV technology was just not there… I could always see some level of smearing on fast motion in the stores, and always noticed pixelation. Now, it may be that the stores had (foolishly) hooked these TVs up to standard definition (SD) sources, but you can’t always tell in the store. All I knew was that plasmas looked good but were too big and expensive, and LCDs were the right size but looked either no better than SD, or looked worse. And I am not one to spend a thousand bucks on something that looks worse than my 20″ SD TV.

However, finally in the last year or so, when looking through the LCD TV offerings in places like Wal-Mart, they are sending true HD to the TVs it seems, and the TVs are getting better. Response times have greatly improved, making it possible for the televisions to “hold” the motion of the image without fracturing or “pixelating.” On top of that, thanks to my move, I got over a $2,000 tax refund this year. I decided that it was finally time to take the plunge, and to get an LCD HDTV with some of that money.

After doing some thinking, taping sheets of paper together to test sizes in my apartment and so forth, I finally decided to go with a 32″ television… I think anything larger is too big for my small living room. Also, there are two varieties of HD televisions — those that can produce 720 scan lines per frame (720p), and those that can produce 1080 per frame (1080p). Now, clearlly the latter have better resolution (more lines = smaller pixels and thus better resolution). However, you mainly need that many lines if you go into the larger sets. Smaller sets look fine with the smaller # of lines… because a small set with fewer lines has pixels equal in size to a larger set with larger lines. You can see this by imagining a set 10″ high with 720 lines of resolution, which has 72 pixels per inch, and thus each pixel is 1/72 inches high… vs. a set that is 20″ high with 720 lines of resolution, giving only 36 pixels per inch. Each pixel would be twice as large on the larger set, giving you a more “blocky” image. As a result, you want 1080p if your set goes to 42″ and over, but you don’t need it on 32″ and below, because a 720p set at 32″ will have pixels of roughly the same size as a 42″ set with 1080p (smaller screen, less pixels… equal-sized pixels). The 37″ size is an oddity — it’s a bit large for 720p, and thus 720p won’t look quite as good on such a set, but it’s a bit small for 1080p. Up until the last year or so, nobody made 37″ TVs at 1080p, but now they do, and if you get one of those the resolution will be super sharp. However, you pay more for 1080p than for 720p, in any given size class of TV (and by more, you’re talking nearly doubling the price).

And so, I decided to stick with 32″ because at that size 720p is a perfectly good resolution, which saves me some money and retains the resolution. A few friends expressed the thought that 32″ might be “too small” for an HD TV, but we have to remember I am used to a 20″ standard def… so 32″ high def is a huge upgrade for me.

The next step of course, was to decide the brand to use. After doing some research, I crossed off the list all of the “bargain” sets, as those sets have questionable reviews. I thus refused to consider brands like Vizio, Olevia, Westinghouse, and so forth. I have heard too many horror stories about these low-end, bargain priced sets of the type you get at a place like Target. Yes, they save you money, but you get what you pay for. With a nice fat tax refund in my pocket, and a good salary coming at the moment, I have no need to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

My research indicated that four main brands were the solid performers on the market. The top end brands seem to be Sony or Sharp, followed close behind by Samsung, and then followed in fourth place by Toshiba. The Toshibas in the reviews seem to perform as well, but they are less expensive and less popular than the other three. As the Sonys are always way more expensive for equivalent specs to the other three, and as I have had problems with Sharp over the years in other products, and as I have had nothing but good experiences with Toshiba electronics, and as the Toshibas were the most cost effective, I decided to get a Toshiba Regza 32HL67. I still wish I had been able to find that set. Unfortunately, however, by the time I went shopping, Toshiba had stopped making that model (just within the last couple of months) and replaced it with a new model — and this new model is not in any stores yet. Literally there is not a single Toshiba in the 32″ and higher range at my local Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal-Mart. Even online, most places had it listed as “out of stock.”

This sent me back to the drawing board, and I noticed a few good reviews of the Samsungs. A friend of mine recommended Samsung as a good brand. But they, too, have just recently changed their “model year” and the new models, the Series 4, 5, and 6 models, are only sparsely reviewed (I found a total of maybe 8 customer reviews on them…. vs. over 200 nearly all positive on the Toshiba Regza HL67). The reviews were mostly positive, though one person mentioned intolerable “ghosting”, which concerned me. I took a triip back to the stores and watched, and decided based on what I saw there, and the fact that the Samsungs seem to be the best quality for the price (based on specs), I would try the Samsung Series 4 (specifically, the 32″ LN32A450). What follows will be my review of this set’s ability to respond to motion, produce color, tolerate an SD signal, and so forth.

Setup – 10/10
I had heard nightmare stories about people trying to get their HD TV set up to the way they like it and it taking hours, or days — many have complained that their TV has to be “messed with” and thousands of options set before it’s even remotely watchable. This is not the case with the Samsung Series 4. It took me about 20 minutes to physically set up the TV onto its base, and much of that was me having to disconnect and move the old one, and so forth. Once it was in place, the wiring connections were obvious and explained clearly in the manual. Within moments of connecting all the wiring, I had the TV on, and cable box, VCR, and DVD player were detected as sources and projected images. I did not have to fiddle with any of the controls to get acceptable sound, color, contrast, etc. It’s one touch of a button to swap between the obvious “modes” (boosted vs. default sound, 4:3 vs. 16:9 aspect ratio, etc). The remote control is labeled in a (mostly) obvious way. In short, setup was a snap. I brought the TV physically into my apartment around 6 PM. At 7:15 PM, I was watching an upconverted episode of Seinfeld off of my DVD on the new TV while eating a quick dinner.

HD image quality – 10/10
The image on High Def cable channels is simply unbelievable on this set. I got my HD cable box just yesterday (swapped the boxe at the cable company myself and installed it myself — took 5 minutes). I started out just “exploring” the HD channels and ended up spending four hours practically mesmerized by the TV, watching shows like Vegas and stuff on the HD travel channel that I would not normally watch. But I just couldn’t believe how crisp, sharp, and downright gorgeous the images look on this TV. If you have HD sources giving you true 720p images ont his set, you will be simply blown away. It’s gorgeous. I could not take my eyes off of it… I had plans to do all sorts of things yesterday and got none of them done because I was staring at this set watching it as if I had never seen television before. I can only imagine that this must be what it was like when people used to black and white for decades finally got a color TV set. The HD images on this set are simply outstanding.

SD image quality – 7/10
Standard Deifnition quality is an issue for most HD TVs, especially LCDs, because LCDs have trouble projecting images that are not at the native factory set resolution. I have seen this with my computer’s LCD monitor, which has a native resolution of 1280×1024. Some older games can’t project that resolution and they look much worse on it than they did on my older CRT minitor. CRT is much better at projecting non-max resolution than LCD is, and that’s just an unfortunate but true reality. This set is good, but it can’t quite overcome this issue when you get a lower res (<720p) source. I can’t fault it too much, because, after all, the source is low resolution, but you will notice some blurring or “pixelization” of the images on regular SD sources. The good news if your source is a DVD, simply getting an HDMI cable and an upconverting DVD player will do ya. I have DVDs of Seinfeld and the Simpsons, and they look pretty darn lousy on my computer’s LCD monitor unless played in a tiny window. I was afraid that would happen on my TV, but it doesn’t. Seinfeld looks perfectly fine using the HDMI upconvert function and upconverting to 720p. There is no ghosting, no pixelization, no fracturing of the image. It looks exactly like it would on a normal 26″ regular TV, and maybe slightly crisper and better. Since the source is SD, I don’t think you can really ask for more than this. You do have to be smart enough to set the DVD to “widescreen TV mode” and then set your TV to 4:3 mode to get the right image. If you do anything else, your image will look stretched, squeezed, or pixelated. But as doing it the way I recommend both works and is the correct way to do it, getting bad results using other methods is not a surprise.

Standard definition received over your cable box on an SD channel is another story. This seems to vary from network to network, and within a network even from show to show. The news stations, especially CNN and Fox News, are the wost of all… for some reason their SD images on my HDTV look somewhat blurred and pixelated. In particular people’s faces look like they smear out as the talking heads move their head up, down, and side to side while they talk. I do not get this kind of blurry response on other stations, so watching Animal Planet or A&E gave me very good even SD performance. Because it seems to vary from station to station, I can only conclude that the problem is with the broadcaster, NOT with the television. After all, if it were the television, no stations would look good. That Animal Planet’s SD channel can look almost HD crisp, and then I flip stations to Fox and Bill O’Reilly’s face looks smeared, seems to me to mean there is something up with Fox News, not the TV. It’s also not just something about faces, because re-runs of Friends and Seinfeld on SD broadcasts did not have this effect to any great degree.

You will, of course, notice some issues with video tapes. Playing a good recorded tape like a movie will look all right, but not incredible… you will see some blurry motion if it’s an action film and some pixelation even if not, but it is not too bad. However, if you have old tapes recorded on extended or super long play, which does sacrifice resolution for slower tape speeds, you will definitely see poor image quality. Unfortunately I don’t think eve the best Plasma or LCD TV on the market could help you with this. The problem is that your tape is of poor quality and you just have to live with that. My solution has been to move the 20″ CRT TV into the bedroom and hook the VCR up to it, and I’ll watch my video tapes (if I ever do) in there. Slowly over time, anything that is important, I will get on DVD or even blu-ray (like my old Disney movies such as Mulan), and stuff that’s not important will end up being tossed one day, when that old SD TV dies.

Overall, I’d say that this set works all right in Standard Definition, but you’re clearly not seeing its most impressive performance in SD. Nor should you, really. I’d be careful if you have a large VHS collection and want to totally replace a TV (say, a broken one) with this set. Especially if you have old home movies converted to VHS, like my mother has, this set will not make those look good. I don’t think most other LCD sets could either, though.

Speaker/sound system – 8/10
Sound on this set is good, though not incredible. One issue that the salesman in the store warned me about, and he was certainly not wrong, is that the new Samsungs for some reason try to “hide” the speakers behind the set, rather than having them on the sides or bottom like the old ones (and the current Sony Bravias). The Series 4 has speakers behind the screen, facing down toward the floor. This seems an odd choice, as one should want to project the sound toward the audience, not toward the spiders crawling beneath the floorboards. The speakers are certainly acceptable and give you decent sound, but don’t expect to be blown away by home-theater style sound coming out of these speakers. If you want that, you’ll probably have to spring for an external speaker set. The SRS sound feature does seem to help, improving the bass and reducing the “tinny” quality, and Cinema mode seems to do something similar to the sound to improve it. I recommend using SRS or Cinema mode to watch this TV, and the sound will be reasonable in quality. Again if you are a huge sound freak you will want to buy your own speakers. But then, if you’re a sound freak, you probably already have them.

Contrast – 10/10
Another issue with LCD TVs besides dealing with non-native resolution is the contrast ratio. LCDs are notorious for either being able to project a good “bright” but then having too bright of a black, or producing a good deep black, but then having the brights be too “dim”. In other words, you could have either a good white or a good black on the screen but not both at the same time, at least wiht older sets. This is not a problem with most of the newer sets and the Samsung Series 4 is no exception. Right out of the box it gave me good deep blacks and nice bright whites. In fact, the first thing that I saw on this set was an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (I was still fiddling with the set so I just had it “on” and tuned to TBS as a test of SD performance) where the main characters were at a wedding. The first scene I saw was the three main male characters, all dressed in black tuxes with whte shirts. This random scene was a great test, and it showed what the set was capable of even in SD — the blacks were deep and dark. The white looked bright and crisp. There was no feeling that any part of the scene was over or under exposed. I have not touched the contrast setting on this set once int he 4 days I have had it so far… and contrast always looks great.

Color fidelity – 9/10
Color is, for the most part, outstanding on this set. People often complain about flesh tones looking too “red” or “pink”, but usually I have not seen that on this set. Colors seem generally good and faithful to how they should look. Flesh tones look appropriate. Greens, reds, blues, oranges, pinks, purples, all look fine on the set. In standard def only (not HD or upconverted DVD) certain colors do have a slightly higher chance to “pixelate”, notably reds and oranges. This may be why certain channels show more pixelation, especially with faces… flesh tones are in the range of colors that seem most likely to smear, blur, or fracture in SD. I’m not sure why that is, but I never see such smearing with, say, blues. And it’s not just due to brightness, because whites and yellows don’t seem to pixelate either. It may be that you need a medium amount of brightness to see the smearing, and that whites are too bright to notice it, and blues too dark… But in any case, this problem only exists in SD. In HD or upconverted DVD, I have never seen any smearing with any colors, and the color has been excellent.

Motion response – 10/10
My #1 issue with LCDs up until recently has been their inability to “hold” fast motion. By “holding” the motion, I mean that the image stays clean, crisp, and sharp in the face of fast objects moving across the screen. LCD TVs have had a habit of “fracturing” or blurring the image when objects move really fast. The edges tend to “break” into pixels, and the back-side of the image will even “smear” across the screen. The result of this is you will see streaks trailing behind the moving object, and the leading edge of the object will look like it is shattering. I watch enough action movies that this is simply not acceptable. If Luke’s lightsaber is going to look like it’s breaking into a thousand pixels during the fight with Darth Vader, I’m not going to be happy.

I’m pleased to report that the response time of Samsung Series 4, which I’ve seen reported as both 8 and 6 ms, is more than sufficient to “hold” motion, even very fast motion. When I finally had it set up and had some dinner in me, I tested it with the battle sequence from Narnia, as well as the last 30 minutes or so of Star Wars Episode 1 (the lightsaber battles and the gungan and space battles) and it looked excellent. I noticed no smearing or fracturing of the image, and everything looked great — it looked like I was watching film projected onto a movie screen. The colors were sharp, crisp, clear, and smooth.

In the store, I was able to compare a Sony Bravia, a Sharp Aquos, and this Samsung Series 4, all side by side on the same images. The three TVs were in the same price class (all around $900). In this price class, the Series 4 was the only TV that held the motion correctly. I saw smearing on both the Sony and the Sharp — the Sony was the worst. Now, the higher-end Sonys and Sharps will hold the motion, but they’re going to cost you more. In other words, this Samsung, at least in the 32″ range, was the best at holding fast motion together and not smearing or fracturing.

Final remarks
I have had the Samsung Series 4 TV for about 4 days now, and watched about 15 hours of TV on it. I’ve watched it in broadcast SD, broadcast HD, and upconverted DVD. I really have no complaints and only good things to say about it so far. Snce I just bought it 4 days ago, I certainly can’t speak to the longevity of the set. I did read one comment where the person complained that the set started making a “whistling” noise after a couple of weeks, he broght it back, got a second set, and it started making the same noise. Again, if that’s going to happen, I can’t predict, because I haven’t owned it for that long yet. But so far, it is an outstanding set and on the basis of my first few days owning it, I can highly recommend it. Of course, if anything were to change, I would post it here and revise my score.

Overall score: 9.1/10 (average of the 7 scores above)