Sound & Vision Magazine - Samsung LN46A750 46-inch LCD HDTV

Compared with the LED-backlit LN-T4681F set I reviewed back in January, the fluorescent-backlit LN46A750 is clearly intended as more of a "bread and butter" set in Samsung's lineup. But the company has spread a little jam on top by packing this 46-inch LCD HDTV with some unusual features. Among these is the ability to wire the set to your home network with an Ethernet cable to enjoy feeds from USA Today for weather, news, and stock-market data. Hit the InfoLink button on the remote, and you can make one or all of these pop up in small boxes around the screen. This worked flawlessly, and having instant access to local weather proved a nice boon. Also, the Samsung adheres to the new DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) technical standard, and it comes with software you can load onto your PC to stream video, photos, or music from your computer to the TV. And pressing the Content Library button on the remote calls up an attractive onscreen menu that taps into a trove of material permanently loaded into the TV's memory. This includes slide shows, recipes, some basic games, some children's activities, and a Fitness section with stretches you can do if you ever decide to get up from your armchair. Samsung has crammed all this stuff into a nice-looking package. The LN46A750 follows the company's Touch of Color styling, which adds a subtle red tint to the plexiglass base and the translucent bezel that surrounds the screen. But it's the bezel's clear, beveled edges that give this design some distinction. Another nice touch is the clean front, made possible by hiding the main speakers under the screen, facing down; two more speakers project from the TV's upper back. Surprisingly, this arrangement delivered robust sound for a flat-panel TV, particularly with the TruSurround XT circuitry turned on. Further contributing to the clean look is the heavily camouflaged touchpanel on the front bezel, which has buttons for power, source, and menu as well as rockers for channel and volume.

The Short Form

$2,400 ($2,799 list) / SAMSUNG.COM / 800-726-7864

Snapshot

Samsung's latest LCD delivers solid HDTV picture quality and some innovative features

Plus

• Very good high-def picture
• Excellent backlit remote
• Good sound quality for a flat-panel TV
• Cutting-edge features for accessing ancillary content

Minus

• Standard-def images can look soft
• No aspect-ratio button on the remote

Key Features

• 1,920 x 1,080 resolution
• InfoLink RSS feeds from USA Today
• WISELink Pro Content interface
• Onboard Content Library
• DLNA compatible
• xvYCC-compatible
• Motion-touch backlit remote
• Inputs: 4 HDMI ; 2 component-, 1 composite-, 1 S-video; RF antenna; RGB PC (plus PC audio in); USB 2.0; Ethernet LAN
• 46 x 30 x 11 3/4 in (with stand); 64 3/4 lb (with stand)

Among these is the ability to wire the set to your home network with an Ethernet cable to enjoy feeds from USA Today for weather, news, and stock-market data. Hit the InfoLink button on the remote, and you can make one or all of these pop up in small boxes around the screen. This worked flawlessly, and having instant access to local weather proved a nice boon.

Also, the Samsung adheres to the new DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) technical standard, and it comes with software you can load onto your PC to stream video, photos, or music from your computer to the TV. And pressing the Content Library button on the remote calls up an attractive onscreen menu that taps into a trove of material permanently loaded into the TV's memory. This includes slide shows, recipes, some basic games, some children's activities, and a Fitness section with stretches you can do if you ever decide to get up from your armchair.

Samsung has crammed all this stuff into a nice-looking package. The LN46A750 follows the company's Touch of Color styling, which adds a subtle red tint to the plexiglass base and the translucent bezel that surrounds the screen. But it's the bezel's clear, beveled edges that give this design some distinction. Another nice touch is the clean front, made possible by hiding the main speakers under the screen, facing down; two more speakers project from the TV's upper back. Surprisingly, this arrangement delivered robust sound for a flat-panel TV, particularly with the TruSurround XT circuitry turned on. Further contributing to the clean look is the heavily camouflaged touchpanel on the front bezel, which has buttons for power, source, and menu as well as rockers for channel and volume.

Previous Samsung remotes were slim wands that were awkward to hold. But this year's beefier design is shaped and weighted for comfort. The usual four-way navigation buttons have been replaced by a clever click-wheel that's perfectly placed for your thumb, and the whole thing glows in the dark from a motion-activated backlight. Well done! But I do have a couple of nits to pick. There's no dedicated button for the aspect-ratio function, which instead has to be accessed from the Tools menu. And though the high-gloss black finish looks beautiful, it attracts and retains fingerprints.

SETUP

The LN46A750 has plenty of connection options, including four HDMI 1.3 ports, with one in the set of convenience jacks on the TV's left side. The Samsung's Movie mode looked very natural out of the box and delivered a grayscale that measured not far off the 6,500-K reference standard.

There's a deep and sophisticated raft of picture controls for fine tuning, including an unusual Color Space function that lets you adjust all the primary and secondary color points. Translation: With the right tools, you can tune the colors from which all other colors are derived, until they're perfectly in line with industry standards. I did just that, with excellent results, and then fine-tuned the grayscale with the White Balance controls in the advanced user menu.

After some viewing, I ended up setting the TV's Black Adjust control to Medium, HDMI Black Level to Low, Gamma to +1, and Digital Noise Reduction to Auto. I also found that I could leave the set's 120-Hz Auto Motion Plus circuit engaged at Medium or High all the time. Unlike the 120-Hz processing on some other sets, it improved clarity on fast-moving objects without introducing obvious artifacts that reminded me it was turned on.

PERFORMANCE

Watching the opening sequence of I Am Legend on Blu-ray Disc, in which Will Smith tears around a desolate and deserted midtown Manhattan in pursuit of a dinner of wild deer, I noticed how well the set reproduced the city's hues. The blue of a mailbox, the yellow of a taxicab, the green of a trashcan, and the red of an office-supply-store banner were all delivered with unhyped accuracy. Smith's car -- a red Mustang with a white racing stripe -- popped off the screen without seeming overdone.

The image on this and other good film-based high-def material had a solidity that I'm still a little surprised to see in any LCD display. Consequently, details like the fine blades of overgrown grass that Smith wades through in Times Square were breathtakingly crisp. The black levels were very good, although not up to the standard set by Pioneer plasmas or Samsung's own LED-driven sets. I didn't make the blacks as dark as I could have, but I was satisfied with the balance between contrast and shadow detail that the adjustments yielded. I could clearly make out the texture of Smith's black jacket as he moved in and out of the shadows in the waning afternoon sun, and during a close-up of his German Shepherd companion, I saw details in the black ring of fur surrounding the dog's snout.

High-def cable programs also looked great. A Yankees vs. Padres baseball game demonstrated the TV's natural reproduction of the field's manicured grass and the white of the pinstriped Yankee uniforms. Standard-def playback was more hit or miss, though. The Samsung performed well on SD test discs, but some material -- like a DVD of Contact delivered as 480i -- looked very soft and dull, as did most SD cable programs being transmitted as 480p. A reference-quality DVD of Seven Years in Tibet looked much sharper, but the Samsung's internal processing still wasn't quite up to the quality that the best upconverting DVD players can deliver.

BOTTOM LINE

With its solid picture quality, good sound (for a flat-panel TV), and tons of extra features, Samsung's LN46A750 has plenty going for it. An average price tag of $2,400 makes it a bit expensive for its size, but several online retailers have been selling it for far less -- and as the price goes down from there, it starts to look like a pretty good deal. If you're in the market for a high-value LCD TV with some cool features, this one's worth taking a close look at.

Test Bench

Color temperature (Night setting, ACC and ACM off, before/after calibration

IRE	Temp Before	Temp After
20	7,017	6,492
30	7,036	6,454
40	7,126	6,464
50	7,064	6,436
60	7,091	6,437
70	7,199	6,531
80	7,315	6,555
90	7,264	6,674
100	7,151	6,628

Brightness (100-IRE window): 74.3 / 62.1 ftL

Primary Color Point Accuracy vs. SMPTE HD Standard

Color	Target X	Measured x	Target Y	Measured y
Red	0.63	0.629	0.34	0.336
Green	0.31	0.310	0.60	0.565
Blue	0.155	0.154	0.07	0.074
Cyan	0.225	0.225	0.329	0.329
Magenta	0.321	0.320	0.154	0.155
Yellow	0.419	0.419	0.505	0.487

Grayscale for the Samsung's Movie preset initially tracked slightly blue in the key 30- to 100-IRE brightness range, measuring as much as ±815 K off the 6,500-K standard at 90 IRE. Calibration in the set's White Balance user control menu brought tracking to ±174 K from 20 to 100 IRE, and for all but the brightest windows it was ±63 K — very good performance. Note that, while it's not desirable, it's not unusual for LCD TVs to show some lack of grayscale linearity at the brightest or darkest extremes of the brightness scale.

The primary colors measured very close to the HDTV standard before any tweaking and were brought into near-perfect alignment with the Color Space controls in the advanced user menu. Before color point calibration, I had done a standard calibration of the basic controls — including contrast, brightness, sharpness, color, and tint — after which the color decoder test revealed +5% red error, +2.5% green, and 0% blue. However, the picture still showed a subtle but noticeable red/orange lean that particularly affected skin tones, and greens looked a bit undersaturated . After I tweaked the color points, the image looked slightly oversaturated (and especially so in the reds). So I turned down the overall color saturation to affect a more natural color balance, which in turn desaturated blue as measured by the decoder check (for which the final result was -5% red, +10% green, and -10% blue). But the blues and greens looked just fine in all the high-def material I watched, and the postcalibration color with Blu-ray Discs like I Am Legend and good-quality HD cable shows struck me as quite natural and a big improvement from where I'd began.

Screen uniformity for this Samsung was very good, with minor hot-spotting showing up only on a very dark 20-IRE window. The set's viewing angle was somewhat narrow, with the image showing minor but noticeable loss of contrast and color accuracy when moving as little as 20° off center in either direction — the equivalent of moving only a couple of feet from the center seat of a couch positioned 9 feet from the screen. However, after this initial dropoff, the image remained stable for a fairly wide window — so although off-center viewers don't get a perfectly optimal image, the picture doesn't shift noticeably as you move around the room. On a related note, the screen's high-gloss surface, which Samsung uses to affect better contrast, functions like a mirror with ambient light and could be a problem in bright viewing conditions.

The LN46A750 fully resolved 1080i/p and 720p signals via HDMI, and 1080i/720p via component video. It performed well on the Silicon Optix torture tests for deinterlacing HD and SD signals. The TV also performed well with the moving-resolution tests on the FPD test disc, which present graphic characters and objects moving rapidly across the screen (such as close-ups of a scrolling map or cars whizzing by). The 120-Hz processing cleaned up blurring of these images quite effectively, and unlike the processing on some other sets I've seen, it never introduced any easily detectable artifacts, even when set to High. Likewise, the Digital Noise Reduction circuitry cleaned up random video noise on standard- and high-definition material without further softening the image, but it seemed to do little for mosquito noise that afflicts the edges of objects, and I've seen HDTVs that did a better job in general with standard-def programming.