Samsung LE-32R74

A 32″ high-definition LCD television, I’ve had it for about two months.

Pros

• Great colours
• Bright image
• Lovely HD quality
• Good looks (ie the surround and casing)
• Hidden speakers (ie. good looks again)
• Nice looking remote that relative to most remotes, is quite well designed

Pros relative to other LCDs in its price range

• Includes a digital and analog tuner, which is very handy for those of us who can’t get a good digitial signal yet. But also means you are future-proofed for when they do turn off the analog signal in 2008.
• Looks

Cons relative to more expensive LCDs

• The 16.2 million colour dithered display is obvious the first time you see a large area of graduated colour, more expensive panels are 16.7 million colour, 16.2 million colour screens have to mix two colours to produce some colours, which you really can’t notice most of time, the exception being large flat areas of graduation.
• Upscaling isn’t brilliant relative to Sony Bravia’s (which use the same LCD panel, but Sony-tech scaling chips)

Cons relative to CRTs

• Blacks suck, although are good relative to other LCD screens
• SD images look clearly upscaled, which bodes badly for Gamecube and Wii, DVDs look upscaled, maybe a decent upscaling DVD player would solve that,
• You can sometimes see ghosting when dark and bright colours move over each other, it’s good relative to other LCD

Pros relative to mid range CRTs

• Geometry is perfect
• No convergence issues
• Physical size

Minor Annoyances

• Channel switching could be faster
• Source switching is annoyingly slow
• It doesn’t auto switch to my Xbox 360 when I switch the console on
• No feedback when you switch it on that it is going to switch on, until 5 seconds later when the picture appears

Source switching is badly thought out considering how often you have to do it – the set has exactly no detection for source-signal, so when you turn on your DVD player, the TV doesn’t switch to the DVD input source, so you have to do it manually.

Doing it manually sucks because there is only one toggle button to switch between the 6 or 7 sources, so you have to push up to 7 times or so to get to the source you want. And to make this even more infuriating it takes ages to switch between each source. Frantically pushing the button at a tremendous rate has no effect.

It is especially annoying since the remote has the functionality to control other devices, and there are 5 separate buttons to switch the remote between devices. And who uses that? Probably nobody. Yet you have one button for source switching, which you have to do everytime you play a DVD or turn on the Xbox.

So overall?

I wish I could buy a HD CRT, but there isn’t a decent option for sale in the UK. It’s a good screen, I just hate the blacks and the fuzzy SD. I mostly use it for Xbox 360, and since that is HD, the games look great, apart from in dark scenes.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 15:43 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.