11/15/2012

As for the TV tuner, I live in a 'fringe' area for TV reception

Let me start by saying I am not much of a TV watcher. I don't have (or want) cable or dish. I simply refuse to pay the price for something that would be of limited use to me. (I don't want/need 150 channels of junk, shopping, physical fitness, etc.) I do like to watch an occasional movie, so I have a Blu-Ray player.

As far as the image is concerned, it's fine, and I spent 35 years in the medical xray business, so I know a good image when I see one (which is why I bought Samsung to begin with). The blacks are black and the whites are white. I haven't seen any image 'tearing' or pixelating.

The speakers are what you can expect from something this small. Don't expect ground shaking explosions. But for people talking or watching Victory at Sea or something like that, they're fine.

Turn on/start up was fast and easy. I plugged the TV into my U-verse modem and let it do what it wanted. It took about ten minutes, I think.

As for the TV tuner, I live in a 'fringe' area for TV reception, so I bought a 'Jack OA-8000' antenna which has a preamp built into the plastic housing (which houses a modified Yagi antenna, for anyone interested). After installing the Jack antenna I'm able to pick up about 14 digital stations from town, which is about 50 miles away. The 'front end' on the TV must be pretty good, because this is supposed to be a bad area for TV reception, according to my neighbors. So now I can at least turn on the local news and weather. (You can believe the weather, mostly...the news??? I don't believe a word of what they say.)

HDMI connection from the Blu-Ray was a matter of plugging in the HDMI cable. I'm pumping the audio back out via fiber optic cable to my Pioneer amplifier. Not so sure the decoder in the TV is doing things right, because I don't seem to be getting the DTS signal back to the Pioneer. I may switch the audio back to direct from the Sony Blu-Ray or just add another audio fiberoptic cable and do a bit of reprogramming on the amp.

I have an ancient VHS tape recorder and it does as good as it ever did using the simple video/audio inputs.

My laptop has an HDMI output, and it also works just fine, so I was able to bring in the recent presidential debates via the internet.

I have not tried connecting to Hulu, or Netflix, so I have no idea if that part works or not.

Colors are near perfect. The green is down about 3%, according to my test equipment. That's about right, I think, for Samsung. They've always done red and blue much better.

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