List Price: $2,649.99
Sale Price: $1,397.99
Today's Bonus: 47% Off
The TV is simply a very good, simple TV. As stated by many others, this TV does not have the sort of Internet Connected bells and whistles you find on more expensive sets. This doesn't bother me I have 3 devices hooked up to this TV that are already able to do Netflix, Hulu, etc... and far better than I've seen built into a TV. I recently purchased the 50" model and have enjoyed it thoroughly (and I'm very, very particular about image quality).
The TV is a bit thick compared to many other LED lit LCDs not an issue for me since it will not be wall mounted. The thickness is the result of LED rear-lighting versus LED edge-lighting. While the latter allows thinner panels, the technology inherently lowers the image quality. More expensive sets overcome this issue and provide great pictures, but at the lower-end of the price spectrum, image quality is may be better served by rear-lighting. The set also has none of the "flashlight" effect (bright spots along the screen borders) that is common in even high-end edge-lit sets.
IMHO the black levels produced by a TV are the single most important aspect of overall image quality. This TV does a pretty-darn-good job, but don't expect it to be nearly as good as a decent plasma television. If you keep a few small lights on in the room while you watch a movie the blacks will appear quite nice and dark. In a pitch-black room however, you'll be looking at dark gray instead. The trade off is this TV gets brighter than most plasmas on the market, making it's picture clearer in a brightly lit room. Some edge-lit sets can dim portions of the screen to improve the black level, but this also comes with image trade-offs such as "blooming" (seeing the edge of the brightly lit portion of the screen spilling into the dark areas). Unlike some very high end sets with "full-array" rear-lighting, this set cannot turn off individual LEDs to dim portions of the screen.
This is all really just a long-winded way to say that this TV seems like a good deal, and seems to have image quality that is comparable in several ways to more expensive sets. After weighing the trade-offs of many (MANY) TVs, this seems to have been the right choice for me. It would have gotten 5 stars, but Samsung has decided to put only 2 HDMI inputs on this set (1-2 less than others at the price point). Its a mild annoyance having to use an HDMI switch for several of my components, but far from a deal-breaker and possibly not an issue for the majority of people.
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