Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I am updating this review after one month, as my knowledge about the product has increased. Basically I think it offers one of the best picture quality available at under $1K. The features that in my opinion set this TV appart are: outstanding HD picture and black levels, anti-glare coating, 3 HDMI inputs, great picture adjustment controls and swivel stand. On the minus side, the sound is tiny and the speakers are prone to vibration if you turn the bass higher. It's not a real concern for me, since I use external speakers anyway. Also, with some older material (not re-mastered) the picture may look a bit grainy. Perhaps not the best choice if you're viewing mostly SD programming.
Here is the original review, with a few minor adjustments:
Colours are deep, rich and accurate when fed a good quality signal through an HDMI or DVI connection. Even dark scenes are beautiful: deep black levels and excellent contrast are better than many plasma TVs. The screen backlight is uniform. There is no noticeable glare from the screen, although the glossy black bezel will show some reflections.
HD material looks excellent. Vibrant colours and outstanding detail give a perception of depths that is very pleasing, especially when watching HD sports channels. I found that component cables provided from my cable company did not work nearly as well. With HDMI/DVI the picture looks much better than it did in the store. I tried three different cables and I settled for a Monster 300 HDMI cable (rated 1080i) which in my opinion works well for this TV and is probably worth the extra few dollars as opposed to lesser brand names.
The Samsung A450 does a good job with high quality SD material and some channels look much better than a CRT of comparable size. There are no banding issues or artifacts that I notice, except to say that old SD material tends to look blurry on a 40 inch set vs the typical 27 inch CRT, which is to be expected. Feeding the signal through an upconverting DVD player seemed to help a bit in this regard. You can also use the upconvert setting on your cable box, but I found it more useful to set it on Auto-DVI.
The 720/1080i display is adequate for this size TV and in HD the picture looks as sharp as I'd ever want. In fact, I set up my cable box to 1080i, rather than the slightly sharper 720p. To my eyes, this resolution seems to give a more natural picture.
The design is quite attractive and the swivel stand is very handy if you put the TV on a stand, rather than hanging it on the wall. These TV's really have only a +- 30 degrees viewing angle before colours start to fade and while this model does better than others that I saw in the store, the swivel feature is a definite plus.
User menus are friendly and provide a vast array of options for picture adjustment. You can store three custom settings for each input (for viewing in bright/normal/dark room). The factory setting are quite good for standard cable TV viewing, but I found that different sources do require adjustment and you will be happy with all the controls that this set provides. One adjustment that CNET recommends is Picture:Picture options: Film mode: auto (rather than off), which should engage the 3:2 pull down for optimum viewing of film based material.
With a picture so sharp and clear, some lower quality material shot in low light (such as concerts and movies) may appear a bit grainy. While the digital noise reduction is largely ineffective, reducing sharpness all the way to zero (if necessary) effectivelly cleans the picture with minimal loss of detail. This is also recommended by CNET for the movie setting. However, some TV's fair better in this regard (for example the PN50A450, which I also own, has excellent noise reduction and even with the larger size, SD channels look better. However, the HD material is sharper and the blacks are deeper on the LN40A450). If you plan to use cable TV, the SA 4250HD box gives a better SD picture than the older 3250, so I would recommend it.
DNIe seems more of an experimental technology at this point. I found it more useful on the larger plasma, and I almost never use it in this LCF. It is mostly useful for sports, giving exceptional sharp and bright picture but at the expense of colour accuracy (especially for the green colour). A little fiddling with the green/red balance (about 10% towards red) will produce a more natural effect. For the standard/movie settings, where colour accuracy is the main consideration and sharpness not as important, DNIe is disabled. All in all, with so many adjustment options, in the quest for that perfect picture, you will, at first, find yourself reaching for the remote control more often than you really want, which is why having three custom setting per input is so useful - a feature that most TV's in this price range lack.
Set-up is easy. The set is quite light (40 pounds) and can be handled by just one person. Once plugged in, it will find all available channels and external sources. You can customize the names for each source, which makes it easier to identify them.
Motion blur doesn't seem to be a problem with this set, at least so far. There was only one instance that I noticed and re-booting the STB eliminated the problem. However, plasma TV's still seem to have the edge here (at least on paper), but I decided to go with LCD, since I like the extra brightness and colour definition that it offers and black levels and contrast are excellent and comparable to the Panasonic TH42PX80 for example. Since I looked at this Panasonic set in detail, I can add that the colour accuracy on the Samsung is better. This is even more important since the Panasonic lacks some of the picture adjustment options. In the trade-off however, you give up a couple of inches of screen size and perhaps a higher quality cabinet.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Samsung LN40A450 40-Inch 720p LCD HDTV
With the SAMSUNG LN40A450 LCD TV, seeing clearly is never a problem. A 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio delivers crisp, high-definition images you have to see to believe. Action-packed movies and sports events are more lifelike than ever before with a 6ms fast response time, eliminating motion blur. You'll always enjoy total picture perfection with a SAMSUNG high-definition LCD TV.
Click here for more information about Samsung LN40A450 40-Inch 720p LCD HDTV
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