Got this, my first HDTV, for $749 total delivered. Seems like a great deal. Has the AA01 panel:
PROS: Very good HD picture, which becomes stunning with good source material (after calibrating the picture); excellent SD picture (better than the good CRT TV it replaced); tons of controls for picture calibration; streaming Netflix is great, the Pandora app has become my household's new source for music of all types, either through the TV speakers or piped to the stereo; ethernet makes upgrading firmware and internet apps very easy; lots of connectivity; easy to set up; light; swivel stand works well; power efficient; doesn't get hot; no noise or buzz; no dead or stuck pixels; has analog audio out jack (important for old A/V receivers); functions as an outstanding computer monitor (with DVI-to-HDMI cable); glossy screen helps picture and repels dust; can't even notice the red "Touch of Color" design.
CONS: Though black levels are generally very good, when the screen and room are both dark you can see some flashlighting around the corners and some bleedthrough of the backlight; very fast motion on screen will cause brief pixelization and loss of picture clarity (has to be very fast motion -- football and other sports look great); picture quality degrades quickly as you move off-center (though not as much as in some other LCD TVs); requires major picture calibration out of the box (I used settings found in reviews of this TV on the web, tweaked them a bit to preference, and the picture's much better, though it's hard to get it right); most of the current internet apps are useless; the factory preset modes are useless.
Overall it's a very good TV, with a picture that can sometimes be mesmerizing. And I'm glad I paid a bit extra for the C650's internet connectivity and glossy screen. But my main complaints - backlight bleedthrough, motion pixelization and off-center picture quality - lead me to believe that my next TV might be a plasma. Sound is adequate, neither a pro or con really. Four stars. Samsung LN40C650 40-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV (Black)
I'm not going to focus on picture quality, there are plenty of reviews for the other Samsung TV's in this class (LN**C6/5**)that will give you some idea. The short of it: Excellent picture quality, and superb build quality. Instead I'm going to focus on the extra "Internet@TV" features and it's media playback abilities. After all, that's the only reason to spend an extra hundred or two on this model right?
Some of the Internet@TV apps aren't as gimmicky as you might expect. Sure, there are some really awful games, some of which are trials. I certainly wouldn't expect to buy any games for this TV. Graphically, it isn't a capable machine. They sort of remind me of a set of mediocre 2D-only flash games with really poor framerates. So, game apps are out. That said, a small collection of the apps are actually very useful. Netflix works great, and did so right out of the box. Pandora is excellent, and unlike the online version, has no ads with a free account. The youtube app also works great, although searching for videos can be a pain using the remote since you have to use some sort of phone-like input method for typing. It does have T9 and a decent dictionary to speed things up. There are a couple of other video streaming apps that seem polished including Hulu Plus, Vudu, Blockbuster, and CinemaNow. Hulu Plus is still in beta, but after trying out a few of their samples, it seems well made. Vudu, Blockbuster, and CinemaNow are too expensive for my tastes, renting movies for 25%-30% of the price to own isn't worth it to me. And buying a digital copy from either place without also having a physical copy doesn't cut it. Especially if they are the same price.
There are twitter and facebook apps, but a lot of the use of those apps comes from communication. I haven't yet tried either of them, but I can't imagine trying to type out any sort of response using the remote. There's also a daily motion app, that works well and fits in the youtube category. Google maps is almost useful, but like the rest of the graphically intensive apps, there's a fluidity issue. Scrolling the map is a little choppy, and typing in addresses to get directions is slow using the remote. When you throw in the time it takes to load the app, type the addresses, and get your directions, you might as well have got up from the couch and used the computer. It's at least a cool toy to show friends.
The slideshow apps GettyImages, and Picasa Web Albums sort of fall in the same category. They both get a bunch of pics from the web, fine art, and photos, and display them as a slideshow on the TV. They work well enough, but could use a little polish; it would have been great if there was a smooth transition between pics, but both just lazily switch from one photo to the next.
There is a Napster app, but I don't have a subscription to try it out. I'd imagine it would work fairly well, and have a similar flow to the Pandora app, which is great. The AP news ticker app is pretty well done. Instead of interrupting TV, it puts a small ticker at the bottom of the screen and displays various news bytes. At any time, you can change the category or call up the news article being displayed to read it in it's entirety complete with pictures. All without any interruption.
The last app of sorts is the Yahoo! app, although what it amounts to is a gadget bar that runs across the bottom of the screen. You can call the gadget bar at any time by pressing the Yahoo button on the remote. There's a bunch of gadgets you can get for it, and a few redundancies with the apps. In a lot of ways it is more useful. For example, the Accuweather app is fairly lame and not really worth the time it takes to open it. But, the Accuweather gadget is quite a bit better - faster to open, doesn't interrupt what you are watching, has a five day forcast, radar, weather alarms, and a bunch of small bits of weather info. The news and finance gadgets aren't bad either.
The other reason you might want this TV over the lesser models it it's media playing capabilities. The TV itself doesn't play a whole host of formats. It doesn't seem to directly support a lot of fairly common codecs like h264 or AC3; it's possible that the videos I had in those formats, the TV just didn't like for other reasons like resolution, though. Your best bet are the older mpeg4 codecs like xvid/divx with simple mp3 audio in an avi container. This only matters though for videos that are on a device directly connected to a TV, like a flash drive or external hard drive. If you are using the networking capabilities to stream video from another computer, it can support just about every format and resolution. It has never failed to play a video from my PC. And those videos are in just about every format around. It's played DVD VOB's directly from a folder, mkv and avi containers, h264, xvid/divx, AC3 audio, etc.
Here's the key: You have to install a proper DLNA media streamer on the computer. Only one free one exists that'll to the job. Pay attention now. You have to use Serviio if you have any chance of playing all those formats. Serviio.org has all the details and a great community of Samsung TV users that have had excellent experience using the program. Some gripes with streaming on the TV though is that you can't fast forward or rewind yet. I believe Samsung is working on a technique to do it properly, but it's tricky to do from a DLNA protocol standpoint. Serviio also does a great job of grabbing meta-data (video art, genre, director etc.) from the title of the file. With Serviio, media streaming is a pleasure.
Some other things to note, Samsung does seem to be supporting the platform - every week or so, some apps have updates, the TV itself has had an update or two since I bought it about a month ago. With it connected to the internet all of this is painless and fast.
All in all, it's a great purchase. For the price I paid, the extra features were worth it. But it may not be for some others. If you don't want/need network media streaming capabilities, there isn't any reason to get this TV over it's lower cost brothers. For me, it was great having exactly two cables connected to the TV: Power and Ethernet. That's all I need for all my media. - 1080p - Samsung Lcd - 120hz - 40 Inch Hdtv'
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