11/15/2012

The TV when attached to Comcast cable produces excellent picture quality

We purchased the Samsung 1080 LED "smart" TV specifically to get the live coverage of the Olympics. NBC offered 2,000+ hours of live video coverage from their website. "Smart" TV's have the added benefit of being able to access the internet directly from the TV so theoretically you could sit in your favorite comfy chair and surf the web, watch live streaming Olympic coverage without sitting in front of a tiny computer monitor. Wrong.

The TV when attached to Comcast cable produces excellent picture quality. When you access the internet and try to watch video streamed from a website like YouTube, NBC, CNN etc, the image quality is bad, pixelated, halting and just plain lousy!

Logically, in order to provide this technology, smart TV's need much of the guts of a computer to access the web. Therefore as long as the feed is good, the processing capability in the TV controls the quality of the image. On their site Samsung advertises core 2 duo processing for fast web browsing but apparently they skimped on the video card. The TV's ability to show video from the web is like 5 year old weak laptop capability using a 56k modem.

I called Samsung support and after talking to a few people one finally confirmed that the image quality while web browsing is poor compared with the quality of the TV when being used as a TV.

Next logical step is to use the TV like a giant monitor and connect to a laptop or desktop with a vga cable. That way you're able to bypass the TV's limitations and use the compute capability of your desk or laptop and not depend on the TV's lame brain. Bad news. Samsung discontinued vga connectors in this new generation of "smart" TV's! Why? To save a buck?

The only solution they offer is to use hdmi connection but the vast majority of desk and laptops in circulation today don't have hdmi connections.

Pretty doggone frustrating. The TV side of the device get an "A" grade. The web side gets a "C-" grade yet that is supposed to be a large part of the justification of getting a "smart" TV in the first place.

Samsung should have been more forthcoming about the real limitation in their technology, they could have easily included a better video processor and/or not eliminated the vga connection which is the most viable workaround option for most consumers.

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