If you are seriously consider purchasing this tv, please read this review completely. This is a bit critical in nature, but I hope to provide a balanced review based on my experience with this unit. Depending on what you are looking for, this set may or may not work out well for you.
Just for background context, I mainly watch HD content hooked up via hdmi on my PS3. This includes bluray movies, hd content and some gaming. Regular tv and sd viewing were not as much of a concern to me. I own a 3 year old 26 inch sony lcd, and have also more recently owned a vizio 42 inch xvt, and samsung's latest 40 inch b550, which is the non 120 or 240hz model of their current lineup, and most recently the 50 inch Panasonic G10, which I purchased after returning this B750 that I am reviewing. I may refer to some of these in the review.
As you will read there are a few major issues I found that made me return. If you feel these wont be a problem for you, this model should work great for you. After all if you are going to pay a little under $1,700 for a tv, one should be completely satisfied with it.
Design
This tv looks beautiful, understated, elegant and simple. It has a very slight touch of gray at the bottom that you can barely notice, and it should complement pretty much any decor in your home. The unit is quite thin at around 3 inches, and I was able to lift and set up the tv myself. Cheaply made screws, almost as bad as ikea used to setup the stand were a bit of a pain to put in and remove when I decided to return the unit. After a correct assembly, the tv still sort of wobbles around and generally doesn't feel like it is solid on the stand, though it shouldn't pose any problems. I noticed the same thing on the Samsung B550 by the way. The swivel design works smoothly and easily, and though I didn't use it at all, I could see how it would come in handy.
Picture Quality and Viewing Experience
The picture quality in general on this unit is gorgeous. Nicely saturated colors and comfortably deep blacks for an lcd. I tested several blurays and they all looked excellent. You will definitely need to dial back the setting to get a more realistic picture, as much of the regular setting have over-cranked saturation, brightness and contrast to impress in stores like best buy. Overall, I can say even the most discerning movie goers and enthusiasts will find it hard to really put down the picture quality itself, though there are definitely better sets out there for the money. The picture was definitely an improvement over the cheaper Samsung B550, but wasn't drastically better. i think much of the sense of better picture over the b550 was the glossy screen and better motion processing. It supposedly has a better/newer panel (10-bit vs 8-bit) over the b550 and other cheaper model lcd's. I guess the difference between very good and very very good is a subtle one.
You are given a bevy of picture tweaking options to adjust the picture to your particular room and your eyes. If you are like me, you will fiddle at least a little bit with these, and will switch between settings depending on what you are watching.
The 240hz processing to my eye, and many other reviewers will not provide any visible difference from 120hz. But the manner in which it is implemented is really nice. You can adjust judder and blur separately to get the picture to the way you like it. I felt this worked well, and really helped in the overalls smoothness and motion intense scenes. I had blur at 10 and judder between 3 and 6 depending on what I was watching.
However, this was all marred by a few issues, the worst of which was auto dimming. I had read about this on the led side lit samsungs 6 & 7000 series (which you can also find at your local best buy and amazon as well), but did not know this was included with the b750. Gizmodo did a feature on this for the b7000 with the phrase "avoid!" in the title. Basically, anytime the scene gets dark, the tv will sense that and automatically drop or dim the backlight dramatically to get deeper blacks. The problem is that is happens usually a split second after the scene has already started and it is extremely distracting. It also darkens many bright spots in the picture somewhat, like city lights over a dark sky, or stars in a dark sky. This is very noticeable for example on the Dark Knight bluray. The more I watched, the more annoying it got. The fact that the lcd already does a good job of getting very black without the dimming is what makes it really unnecessary. It also does this while flipping channels on tv, and pretty much anything you watch. There is no way for the consumer to switch this off, as far as I know. I tried everything in the menu, from dynamic contrast to eco mode etc. There might be a more techie way, but I am pretty well versed in tech, and was not able to turn off this distracting feature. It is possible the autodimming wont bother you, but if it sounds like it might, please take note. This was a bit hard to swallow for me, because almost none of the reviews mentioned this on the b750, including cnet. This also may be solved by a future firmware update from samsung, but don't hold your breath for it. (UPDATE: Apparently this can be fixed from the service menu. However the average consumer should understand that this could potentially void your warranty and mess up your tv. If you are confident though, search some forums online and try to fix this yourself.)
The next issue was what appeared to be slight "clouding" or patches of grey-whitish color on the panel. I didn't notice at first, but once a few black screens or dark scenes came on, it was both noticeable and distracting. This could be just my specific unit, or a defect. I had read that the b750 was very good in this respect and had a uniform screen, but the whitish patches became very noticeable, and in dark scenes, it looks like there were subtle hints of cloudy patches on top of the screen. I have read that this is a common issue with many lcd's, so it depends on what you end up with. But you do run the risk of this problem with the b750 or maybe any lcd. Still, my old sony, and the samsung b550 never had this problem, so it was a little disappointing.
Another issue was a thin flickering white/silver line that would flicker on top of the screen right under the bezel during many dark scenes. It was not too noticeable, but enough to become a slight nuisance. This was really obvious on dark knight, and also the Planet Earth bluray during the immersive underwater scenes.
I know the issues of glare on lcd's has been addressed ad nauseam, but I just thought I should chime in. The screen is pitch black and VERY reflective, to the point of acting like a mirror. I have a room that gets ambient, not direct, sunlight and it was quite distracting during the day. It is rather difficult to see, so you need to crank up the brightness, which helps a bit. The display definitely gets as bright as you need. In the evening, with very dim lighting, it is still possible to see yourself reflected in the tv when it goes black in between scenes. The Samsung B550 (a cheaper tv), has a sort of matte-glossy hybrid display that I thought worked much better when compared to this one. But, the glossy display is partly responsible for the richer color and deeper blacks you get on this unit. Always tradeoffs. If you are ok with glossy screens on tv's, you will be ok with this one too. P.S. best buy is not a good place to figure out if you are ok with glossy screens. They don't look the same at home.
Off angle viewing on this unit is just not very good. The moment you move even a little bit away from the sweet spot of the couch right in the center, the blacks start to wash out, and the whole picture starts to look different. Not necessarily terrible, but different. The cheaper B550 had much more consistent viewing angle experience for some reason, I'm not sure why. Basically, if you have 3 or 4 people over for a movie, some will probably be seeing a slightly different picture.
Gaming
Reading several reviews of the b750, some said gaming was too laggy (ie: when you press a button it doesn't register right away) on the it, some said it was fine, so I had to give it a shot. I felt it was far too much lag to play games well. In other words, you will die or miss more often. You wont know why, you just will. The lag is on a millisecond level, but much of the twitch response in gaming is that way. Your eyes wont really notice that it is lagging, but it is definitely there, and significantly I might add. The "Game" mode does a little to remedy this, but it is still not perfect and the picture a bit harsh in game mode, since you can't adjust any picture settings. If you are a very casual gamer and are playing games that don't really require good timing, then the lag wont really bother you. For me, I can't really recommend it for gaming. For reference, I was playing games like Resistance 2, Little big planet, Street Fighter 2 hd remix, guitar hero etc for testing. The lag is much better, almost nonexistent on the Panasonic G10, which is a plasma. For lcd, I believe the Samsung B750 gives average or maybe below average performance. Strangely, the Samsung B550 for comparison was a little better in my experience and so was my old sony lcd.
User Experience, Menus and extra features
Going with the theme of lag, I have to say Samsung's menus are extremely slow to respond and laggy. They look ok I suppose, with a blue graphical touch. All menu navigation has extra animations and movements that make them less responsive (reminds me of a Samsung cell phone I used to own). Compared to other tv's I have used, Samsung menus tend to cover more of the screen, which I feel is also a bit of a minus when you are making adjustments based on what you are watching.
If you are the type to change picture modes often (like movie, vivid, standard etc) depending on what you are watching, you may be a tad annoyed to learn that Samsung removed the picture mode toggle button from the remote, which they have on the cheaper b550, so you have to dig into a submenu just to change the picture mode. The remote is pretty easy to use, but I feel it is not naturally intuitive compared to some other brands, but this may just be personal preference. For example, the context of the tools and menu button seem to change and give you different options depending on what you are doing, and not necessarily in a logical manner.
The picture mode button was replaced with a "content" button that takes you to Samsung's "content" if you can call it that, in one press. Samsung's content, is really inane and pretty useless. It's actually kind of funny. It has recipes, nature sounds, and some random children's songs. They are all very slow to load and extremely average to poor in quality. You might take a look at it once or twice just to see what it is, but I wouldn't imagine that anyone would use the features frequently.
The internet widgets by Yahoo! widgets I would say are pretty close to unusable. I don't factor this much into the review or my decision to return the unit, because I didn't buy the tv for these features. I used to use Yahoo widgets some years ago on a windows computer, and the were pretty good, so I think it is just a poor implementation. In keeping with the menus, the widgets are extremely slow and unresponsive and feels like a very slow computer using a dial up connection, when you are actually using an expensive new piece of equipment with a broadband connection. For the record you get weather, stocks, flickr etc. No youtube, but it may come soon. For comparison, the Panasonic G10 has a few internet features that are very responsive and easy to use like youtube, weather, stocks, and picasa. All of this could also be improved with a firmware update from samsung.
Content can be played on the tv via plugging in a hard drive or usb stick to the usb port on the side of the tv. This feature was my favorite and has been implemented extremely well. It plays nearly any filetype, including the commonly used but rarely supported mkv format. The picture quality is good, very smooth and best of all it supports subtitles! The subtitle has really nice looking text and you can adjust the size and the sync time of the subtitles. This usb feature really surpassed my expectations and it was really tough to let this one go when I returned the unit. People who download alot of video, especially mkv could potentially buy the B750 just for this feature, its that good. Of course all the picture issues I mentioned before still stand though.
I did not try the dlna networking features, because they didn't support mac out of the box, and I didn't have a real interest to try it at the time.
Overall, I would say many things about this tv live up to the positive reviews. Beautiful picture quality and design really shine. But unfortunately I just couldn't live with the the issues that I noticed
- extremely distracting auto dimming feature that can't be turned off in the unit i received (trust me, i tried every option in the menus!)
- whitish, cloudy patches that are apparent during dark scenes
- significant gaming lag making most action-oriented games difficult to play
These three were my main issues for returning the unit, the many other things I highlighted just added to my decision though they were not deal breakers (or deal makers for that matter). I feel that if you can live with the issues I highlight you will really like the tv as the picture quality really is excellent. As a side note, I jumped into the plasma world with the Panasonic G10. While it's not perfect, I feel it worked out much better for me than this particular Samsung and am very happy with it. If you are in the market of this tv, I highly recommend checking out everything that is out there.
Amazon was easy to deal with. The unit arrived on Friday after ordering it Monday morning via Pilot shipping. The Pilot folks did not help me setup the tv as other reviews mentioned. They were in a real hurry to leave the moment they dropped off the tv, but no big deal for me -- could be for folks that need more help. When we decided to return, Amazon was cooperative and helped us with the procedure and is already processing the refund. Someone is supposed to come pick up the tv in a day or two. This was my first time ordering such a high ticket item from Amazon, and though it didn't work out for me this time, I think it is pretty safe to do so.
I gave it 3 stars because the actual picture quality was very good some of the issues could potentially be fixed with a firmware update.
Good luck! I hope this helps you make a decision on this tv. If I had read a review like this, it might have saved me some time. But ultimately you have to see for yourself.
Samsung LN46B750 46-Inch 1080p 240 Hz LCD HDTV with Charcoal Grey Touch of Color'
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