New tv?

I have 55" Samsung LED with edge lighting. It is just excellent. Black levels are as good as the best Plasmas while sharpness is stunning. Brightness and contrast stay during day in bright room (adjusts itself). The only problem is that Samsung comes from factory with weird colors and huge contrast. I was able to find settings that somebody posted after calibration of identical TV. I entered it (lots of settings) and it worked.

Be careful if you plan to connect TV digital audio to DAC since some TVs (like Panasonics) output only Dolby, perhaps assuming your home theater has sound processor. If you have only 2 channel PCM DAC look elsewhere. Samsung has menu selection for the oputput.

AFAIK Kuro doesn't exist since 2010. Some of technologies were sold to Panasonic and used in Viera line.

I can easily recognize Plasma in large stores because of its yellowish white. The fact that plasma, in the review, scored higher for contrast or speed doesn't make difference to me because they all have too much contrast, brightness and speed to start with. My Samsung has 240Hz refresh rate but it is only useful for sports. Movies at this rate have this "soap opera effect" - they look like video. 24 frames/s "magic" is gone. Higher than 240Hz rate, that plasmas are capable of, is overkill IMHO.

Jjrenman, when I set mine to highest rate (240Hz) movies look like video made by home camera (soap opera effect). There is a reason why movie makers still record exactly 24 frames/s while technology allows for much more.

http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2013/05/why-does-my-new-tv-make-movies-look-like-soap-operas.html

Perhaps I can train my brain over long time but for now fluid motion at 240Hz looks HORRIBLE. Watching one movie in this mode I felt like seeing "behind the scenes" TV program - all magic was gone. I switched back to low rate and the movie came back. It is nice to have it for sports but I'm not sure how much difference 600Hz offers vs 240Hz.

Bob, That is hard to understand - why to stop making something that was the best. On the other hand quality of all TVs improved so much that any choice would be good for me. Sharpness is so high, without any artifacts, that I can see tiny scratches on football players' helmets. Colors seem very accurate and natural to me, while brightness and black levels are amazing (I use only fraction of the brightness). There might be better TVs, according to tests and measurements, but I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Another point is quality of broadcasting. Live sports are often very high quality but movies are pretty bad. Even with just regular DVD quality I can see dramatic difference in sharpness, colors and noise between them. Best are very good (so it is possible) while most of them are less than perfect. Why to even bother with Blu-ray when movie is noisy?

There is only limited number of frames/s in TV transmission. Many stations like FOX or ABC broadcast everything in 60fps 720p. When 24fps movie is broadcasted they just repeat frames. Digital TV set adds (interpolates) additional frames, so if you set it to 240Hz it will add 3 interpolated frames to each "real" frame. It would be even better if TV would send movies in original 24fps because TV would be able to interpolate, especially at 120Hz that is even multiple of 24fps.

I don't thing that images are "drawn" anymore. Each pixel on the screen of LCD TV has corresponding bit in frame memory buffer and whole frame appears at once. Frames itself are very sharp even with 24fps because shutters in film cameras are very fast. The problem is transition between frames that appear to be jittery with fast motion. If you smooth it up too much, tossing in too many interpolated frames, you'll get "soap opera effect". I'm still trying to find optimal setting for movies on my TV - not too fast and not too slow.

Jjrenman, Great link, thank you. It would appear that plasma vs LCD is a little bit like inkjet vs. laser. Laser cannot create shades of gray (or color) so it uses halftoning - pretty much the same as one used in publishing (newspapers magazines etc). Plasma halftones by manipulating time instead of space for black or white dots. To me it would sound really like only 60Hz rate but eyes might see it differently. As I sad before - any new TV would be good for me. I decided on Samsung because it looked better in the store but half of TVs there are set wrong and work much better at home. Perhaps I would like plasma more - who knows. I had older Samsung DLP before and this new LED is much better. Originally I planned for Panasonic but it doesn't have 2 channel digital audio out.

This article mentions at the end silly claims made by sales people and I think they are absolutely right about it. A lot of idiots there in sales (young and old). I think that it is getting worse every year. A while ago I asked for plastic Toslink in Best Buy and they couldn't find anybody in store who knew what it was, until I finally found it myself. The worse is when instead of saying "I don't know" they make up things.

Again - great article.