Thursday April 23, 2009
Thin is in
By TAN KIT HOONG
The Samsung Luxia Series 7’s LED backlighting helps keep this TV’s thickness to a svelte 1.2in.
IT IS all about planned obsolescence isn’t it? Last year’s HDTVs got way cheaper yet had even better picture quality than the ones a year before.
This year, the trend seems to be to add LED backlighting into the mid-range models.
Having LED backlighting has a three-fold advantage — it not only makes a TV thinner because LED backlighting takes up less space behind the LCD panel than CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lighting) but it also improves picture quality and power efficiency.
In terms of picture quality, an LED backlit HDTV has better colour gamut simply because LEDs produce purer white light), is brighter and through a very nifty trick of selectively dimming different groups of LEDs depending on what’s happening on the screen.
This gives you better contrast ratio — i.e. darker blacks and brighter whites.
However, the Samsung Series 7 LED backlit TV does not feature localised dimming as light source comes from an array of LEDs on the edges of the display instead of directly behind the LCD panel itself.
The LED backlighting on the Series 7 does provide very good power efficiency though as Samsung claims a 40% reduction in power consumption compared with CCFL panels.
Form and function
Samsung is calling this model a Luxia Series 7 which could lead to a bit of confusion as it bears the same series number as the models from last year which have different features and do not offer LED backlighting.
But the most obvious difference is in how thin the TV is — at its thickest point, the UA46B7000WR is only 1.2in thick, thanks to the LED backlighting, which takes up significantly less space in the cabinet than traditional CCFL.
Because of this relatively short depth, this Series 7 46in HDTV’s inputs and outputs face downwards and sideways instead of facing backwards, which makes the TV ideal for mounting flush to the wall without cables sticking outwards from the back.
The interesting thing is that this Luxia Series 7 comes with two remote controls — one is the traditional rectangular remote while the other is a small, pebble-shaped remote with very few buttons.
SMALL: The tiny pebble-like secondary remote from the Samsung Luxia Series 7 allows you to access basic TV functions. This pebble remote has only one button and a large directional pad and is meant to perform basic functions — you can adjust volume and switch channels with it, and bring up the onscreen menu to do anything else.
The complement of ports are pretty much standard — arrayed on the side of the Luxia are four HDMI ports and two USB ports, while near the bottom, facing downwards, are the VGA, component and composite inputs.
Being an upper mid-range model, the Luxia Series 7 comes with an ethernet port and the ability to connect to the Internet to download special Yahoo! widgets from the Samsung website.
This TV has about 500MB of built-in storage space for these applications and widgets but only about 8MB was left on our review unit because the TV was already preloaded with a number of applications.
The built-in applications include a Gallery mode with a number of digitised paintings so you can use the TV as a sort of digital photo frame, a Cooking channel has built in recipes (with more downloadable from the Net) and some simple games, amongst other things.
Loading Yahoo! widgets allow you to get customised news (such as a Yahoo! news or a Flickr widget) and other stuff on the TV as well.
Unfortunately, getting Internet access at the office is a complicated affair so we didn’t get to try widgets on the Luxia.
However, we extensively tested out the various applications that come built-in.
These applications for the most part worked well, ranging from a simple illustrated recipe book application to a simple bowling game.
All of them are nice, but we wouldn’t miss them even if they weren’t there.
What we did like was the video playback support — you can just plug in a USB hard disk or flash drive right into the USB port on the Luxia and it’ll play back any photos or videos stored there, without any other playback device required.
We tested a variety of common video formats on it and found that the Luxia plays DivX, MPEG2 and MP4 well, even when encoded in High Definition but does not support modern H.264-encoded Apple Quicktime files.
We could even play videos encoded in the Matroska (MKV) file format, but unfortunately, while the video portion played fine, there was no audio.
The Luxia also has upgradable firmware, and in fact, if you’re connected to the Internet via the ethernet port, you can download and update right from the TV itself.
Alternatively, you could download it from your PC into a USB thumbdrive then plug that into the TV to upgrade.
Video quality
You can’t go far wrong in terms of picture quality with any modern HDTVs and the Luxia Series 7 doesn’t disappoint in this respect.
Straight out of the box the UA46B7000WR exhibited very good contrast and colour, especially when the picture mode was set to Movie mode.
SLIM: The Luxia Series 7 is only 1.2in thick at it's thickest. If you’re not satisfied with the default settings, the Luxia Series 7 has extensive colour, contrast, brightness, gamma and colour temperature settings for you to tweak.
The Luxia also has a few preset settings to reduce juddering (the slight jerky movement inherent in LCD panels when images move horizontally across the screen) and motion blur.
This feature is available in most HDTVs, but the Luxia goes one step further by allowing you to create your own custom setting and adjust just how much blur and judder reduction you want.
Popping in the THX Optimiser found in my Terminator 2 Extreme DVD, I found that the contrast and brightness settings needed a little bit of adjustment to get it just right, but colour balance was nearly perfect and required little or no adjustment at all.
Black levels were very good, with the TV capable of some very dark blacks.
We did, however, see some unevenness in lighting where the corners were sometimes a tad brighter than the centre portion of the screen, which we assume is because of the nature of the LED sidelighting.
This was more noticeable when viewing the screen off-centre, although even then you’d really have to look for it to be able to see it.
One thing we didn’t quite like was the sound. While the Luxia Series 7 is capable of quite high volumes, because of the limited space within the TV’s cabinet, there’s a distinct lack of bass when watching movies.
This is a common problem with most modern HDTVs, actually, as the race to make them thinner and thinner means having to sacrifice sound quality.
Conclusion
Overall, the UA46B7000WR is a great HDTV with some very good image quality.
At RM12,999 it is a little on the expensive side, compared with the current top of the line Series 9 LED backlit panel which offers localised dimming, and better black levels as a result.
However, if it’s thin you’re going for, then the UA46B7000WR is worth a serious look.
Pros: Thin; extensive picture quality controls; good image quality; relatively low power consumption.
Cons: Lighting can be a tad uneven from edge to centre; audio lacking in bass.
UA46B7000WR
(Samsung)
LCD HDTV
Resolution: 1080p (1,920 x 1,080-pixels)
Refresh rate: 120Hz
Response time: 4ms
Contrast ratio: 3,000,000:1
Inputs: Four HDMI ports, composite, component, 2 USB, Ethernet port, VGA out
Speakers: 2 x 10W
Dimensions (H x W x D): 76.7 x 112.9 x 27.5cm
Weight: 22.5kg
Other features: Yahoo! widgets, games, photo, video playback via USB
Price: RM12,999
Review unit courtesy of Samsung (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, 1-800-88-9999
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