Samsung UN46B8000

The picture quality is outstanding, but there is ghosting and a halo effect based on the factory settings. You have to play around with the 240HZ settings for a minute to get a good balance of picture… quality and smoothness of picture. The only downside is that when dark scenes occur, the entire picture goes dark to get a true black. White writing looks grey when this occurs. The other downside is third party wall mounting. The screws in the back of the TV are too short to accomodate a 3rd party wall mount. So you either have to go out and buy longer screws, or buy the Samsung brand for $250. Overall a great TV. Got it on sale on Amazon for $1,850 and it is worth every penny.

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I bought this TV from a big box store and brought it home on Friday. I also bought the Samsung Blue Ray, BD-P3600 and Sound bar HT-WS1. All I can say is wow the TV is quite the sight to see. The picture is… incredible even right out of the cable box in standard def. But high def is truely a great picture. But the picture out of the Blue Ray with a BR disc, all I can say is that it is like I have been watching black and white all these years and now I have color. Keep in mind my previous TV was a Sharp Aquos LCD, about 5 years old and it was a 30" model. It had a great picture. Setup was very easy. The BR player came with the USB wireless dongle and it was a snap to setup and connect to my wireless network. I downloaded the current firmware, took about 20 minutes and went smoothly. Next I put the wireless dongle on the TV and set it up. Difference between the BR player and TV wireless is that the BR player allowed you to type in the network config where the TV had to see the network broadcast. I keep my SSID broadcast off so I had to turn it on for a few minutes while I got the new firmware update for the TV. It went quicker and finished in about 10 minutes. Along with my purchase I did get the high end Monster HDMI cables. It figure I am spending this much on the setup the price of the cables are worth it. And they are. The Sound bar came with an optical cable so that was a snap to hook up. I am looking forward to the great quality I have seen so far.

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Much has been said here about picture clarity, features, design, etc... Let me pass on a few different comments which may benefit those contemplating this purchase, or who have already made the… purchase. To those of you who are skeptical about buying electronics online, relax. Although it is risky buying from those Manhattan online electronics resellers, every step of ordering my Samsung UN46B8000 from Amazon was perfect. Lets start with pricing. After a little web surfing, I found a site that mentioned a significant discount would appear, once the TV is placed in the shopping cart at Amazon.com. I tried it and it worked. For kicks, I printed the page and took it to Best Buy. They admitted they could not come close to matching Amazon's price. Went home and ordered it from Amazon, saving hundreds of dollars. Emails from Amazon soon followed with updates on my order. A couple days later, a phone call to schedule delivery. Two guys delivered the TV and lifted the box cover to verify no visible damage in transit. After a brief conversation, they explained they do a lot of deliveries for Amazon. BTW, I also ordered the Slim-Mount Wall Mounting Kit from Amazon. Best Buy = $250, Amazon $125. A bit about wall-mounting the TV. Two grooved, hockey puck size disks mount to the wall, spaced about 7 inches apart. Another pair of disks connected together with a cable, mount to the back of the TV. You then hang the TV over the wall disks. Like everyone else, all I could envision was my TV crashing to the ground, but it works....scary, but it works. Note, if you need help aligning vertical placement, drill your wall holes 7 inches apart and 22 inches above where you want the bottom of the TV to be. Note to Samsung: Put this in the manual. The instructions that come with the mounting kit are worthless. And now, the TV. More features than I have time for. I noticed a new firmware update had been released, so I downloaded it from Samsung. It's a single executable, which you run to unzip as a folder containing several files. Open the folder and drag the files to the root of your USB flash stick. Plug the stick in the back of the TV and perform the software upgrade. The TV wont find the files if they're still compressed or not at root level. Samsung: Put this on your website. For users connecting their TV to the Internet via the TV's RJ-45 or optional USB Wifi Stick, the process may be simpler. Other process' like deleting unwanted channels are not accurately explained in the manual, but after a few minutes of screwing around, you learn how to select the channel lineup, pick a channel then press Tools to get a pop-up menu and choose Delete. Connecting my laptop to the TV via a 15 pin VGA cable yielded a sweet, finely detailed image. If you're not planning to display movies/pics from websites via an Internet connection, you can still display content from your PC, if your PC has video out. The TV also has a 2.5mm audio in jack, so you can run audio from your PC as well. One other cool feature is by holding down the Volume Down button on the TV for 10 seconds, the Remote Control beeps making it simple to find a lost remote. All in all, a very nice TV with some cool features. This is our first flat-panel TV, so nothing really to compare to. BTW, to the guy who commented on two hot spots on the bottom black bar during movies, I'm getting none of that. Just a perfect picture from all sources: HD Cable, SD Cable, SD DVD, PC and PS2 (PS3 and Internet coming soon).

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