Samsung LN32C550 Review

This isn’t my standard sort of thing to post, but after trying to post my review on countless sites, they all want me to sign up (and thus receive a shit-ton of spam) for their sites, and they don’t want a full fledged review; this just want a garbage 500 character synopsis that would never get the point across; ever.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to post my review on my site.

I recently purchased a 32″ Samsung LN32C550 HDTV and what follows is my very in depth review of the TV.

I will preface this review by saying that I am not an expert on HDTVs, but I am knowledgeable and work in electronics retail where I do sell HDTVs.

I purchased this TV to use for my bedroom and 32” has turned out to be the perfect screen size for my uses.

I will try to break the review down into chunks.

Construction Quality/Durability:

I haven’t had the TV for very long (a week now) so I can’t tell you how it holds up over the years, but I can tell you that the set is very solid. It doesn’t have any flex at all with light pressure applied, the back is all steel and not plastic, and the front bezel, while plastic is about 1/2” thick and stable. The base for the TV is made of solid (yes, it’s heavy too) glass and is incredibly beautiful in it’s own right. It’s fastened using 9 screws in total and is very solid.

I don’t know about the TV’s internals, so I can’t comment on that, but all the ports seem solid and don’t shift out of alignment with the TV casing when you move cables around while plugged in. Some cheaper products can have ports that have weak pin headers inside the casing attaching them to the PCB in side which can bend and shift making it tough to plug cables into. Samsung’s minimalist aesthetics are very appealing. The bezel is a very dark maroon colour which shows only in bright rooms and has transparent edges; the solid glass stand is designed to match. I’m very confident in saying that from what I can see and feel, this is a well built TV. From a solid metal backing (instead of plastic) to a solid glass stand, this TV feels solid and looks great.

Video Quality:

This is something that I think is subjective and varies from person to person depending on their eye and their tolerances on what they perceive as a good picture. In my opinion, this is a nice looking display. I hooked it up to my gaming PC via HDMI for a few days to put it through some motions and everything looked great. It presented my desktop well too and the native 1920×1080 pixel resolution is great on a 32” panel (when you’re sitting close to it), a form factor that has historically only used 1280×720 pixel resolutions.

There are many options in the TV’s menu to change in order to dial in the picture exactly how you want it and the TV also has built in presets like Dynamic (extra bright to the point of annoying, full colour saturation, ridiculous blacks) or Standard (the mode you use in order to set your preferences). Natural mode looks good for some TV shows, I’ve noticed, but for sports it looks terrible. Movie mode doesn’t seem to do anything but lower contrast and back lighting, but I may just not be noticing the differences. There are a few options that I don’t understand the purpose of, but if you have a display calibrator and a ton of time, I have every ounce of confidence that you’ll be able to set this display exactly how you want it. The specifications for this TV are listed on the manufacturer’s website, but it’s static contrast ratio (the one that matters) is a mystery.

I notice that the corners of the screen have some back light bleed-through which produces a grey colour instead of a black one when the screen is black. Once there is an image on the screen, this isn’t noticeable, but it’s worth mention for those serious enough about the panel quality.

This is a 60Hz refresh rate panel, and while that’s usually fast enough for most things, it does show it’s lack of speed in sports. Watching the Stanley Cup playoffs on CBC HD produces noticeable image ghosting (residual images as motion is happening). I wasn’t looking for it at first but I began to notice it and now I can’t stop seeing it. My eyes have been treated so well by a 1080i LG plasma HDTV for too long (which refresh incredibly fast) so I notice even slight ghosting and blurring. Strangely, this ghosting does not happen when watching Standard Definition content, or when streaming HD video from my computer (which I will touch on later). Could this possibly be a problem with the digital cable signal I’m getting in my bedroom? Is my HD set top box not decoding things well, or fast enough? Is my HDMI cable to blame? I don’t know the answer.

Audio Quality:

The speakers on this TV are two down-firing 10W units. They aren’t anything special, but their frequency response seems decent enough. They are very loud. I only have to have them at 6-11% volume in order to hear everything very, very clearly. If you turn these up past even 30%, you’ve got some serious issues you need to see an ear specialist about. Blowing these speakers out is going to be out of the question since the need to turn up the TV to 75%+ doesn’t exist. The want may exist, but the need certainly does not.

Just like the video settings, the audio settings have some presets like Standard, Music, Clear Voice, Movie, and Amplify. Standard works fine for my uses, but I can definitely hear a difference while in music mode (more bass, of course, and a more fleshed out high range). I would never use a TV to play music when I have a sound system, but for someone who wants to do that, the speakers reproduce some decent tones. Clear Voice seems to boost mid-range frequencies that most human voices resound at and works very well. Commentator voices for sports are separated from background noise and sound amplified; the same goes for dialogue in any other TV show. Movie just makes everything quiet and like the Movie preset for video settings, it seems useless unless you want to have a setting you use for TV and a setting you re-calibrate for movies and movies only. I’d rather just have one setting I’m happy with, but I understand that some consumers may desire two separate settings for the different forms of media. Amplify just makes everything a bit louder; why not just turn up the volume on the set?

Features:

Ah, the features.

One of the main reasons I bought this TV was because of it’s networking capabilities. It has a LAN port on the back of the unit, and while I’m not sure if it’s 100Mbit or 1000MBit, which allows you to connect the TV either directly to a computer using a crossover cable if your computer’s LAN port isn’t auto-sensing, or to a network router/switch. I’m using CAT6 cable between the TV and my D Link DIR655 router and it works well.

One thing to keep in mind is that the TV is using DLNA technology to make this all happen, and you must install a software package on the computer(s) you want to use as media servers. The software is available on the manufacturer’s website and is easy to install. When it is installed, it installs some services that run at system start up so that the media server is always accessible. From there, you just need to select folders to share. To access the media, it’s as simple as pressing the Media Play button on the remote, or selecting Media Play from the input menu, or by selecting Media Play from the main menu for the TV itself. The layout is simple and easy to use and music files and videos and pictures are automatically sorted into individual sub directories with their own icon.

I do have some concerns/gripes with the software though. One, when you update the server (I assume to build a library/metadata file for the TV to use as an index) it takes a terribly long time. I’m talking hours, upon hours. I set up a 1.8TB share and I actually had to stop the updating/indexing process because it was taking too long. Another thing the software does is it creates an “.mta” file for each video file. I haven’t had luck with searching for a clear reason for this, but it appears to create an index and thumbnail image for the TV to use. It makes folders incredibly messy for my tastes since I hate having unknown file type files just taking up room for no apparent reason.

Some other features of the TV are the very nice and responsive capacitive touch controls on the bottom right of the TV’s front bezel. I’m not a fan of HDTVs with their buttons on the side of the TV, so the capacitive sensors being on the front of the bezel is a great change of pace. Since there are no buttons on the TV, Samsung’s elegant minimalist aesthetics are preserved.

Samsung’s AnyNET technology is also integrated into this TV which works with Samsung products, allowing you to use the TV’s remote as a universal remote. I am unable to use this feature so I cannot review it.

There is a nice array of inputs on the TV including 4 HDMI ports, one of which is on the side of the unit. Only 3 are fully functioning; HDMI 1 only passes through video and not audio, since it is intended for PCs using DVI to HDMI cables or DVI to HDMI dongles which traditionally do not pass on audio, although ATI cards from the HD4000 series and HD5000 series can and do pass audio over DVI and into an HDMI to DVI dongle, or through actual physical HDMI outputs on the cards (which usually take the place of a composite output). Using HDMI2, 3, or 4, I can pass audio and video over a single HDMI cable from one of my HD4870s in my gaming PC.

In light of the fact that I don’t need to use one cable for sound (3.5mm stereo, which plugs in an input called PC Audio), and one cable for video, this HDMI1 port with reduced functionality is actually somewhat of a nuisance and likely won’t be used for anything for as long as I have the TV. I would rather have 4 fully functioning HDMI ports and the ability to select the sound input between HDMI and 3.5mm stereo. Of note is an Ex Link port on the rear of the TV for use with remote controlled, motorized wall mounts. There is the required digital optical output (S/PDIF or fibre optic) as well.

One strange thing about the TV’s inputs is that one of the component inputs (red/green/blue + red/white) can be used as a second composite input (yellow + red/white). What this means is that if you want to use two composite devices (like an N64 or SNES, or even a camcorder), you can only have one component device plugged in. Likewise, if you want to use two component devices, you can only have one composite device. I would have rather have had two component and two composite input sets, but you can’t win them all and Samsung was trying to fit in functionality along side space saving minimalism. The only component device I’m using is a DVD player anyways so I’m not really all that bothered, but it’d be nice to have the option. In years to come, I see the phasing out of analogue standards like component and composite on all home theatre devices and a pretty strict adherence to the HDMI standard.

I like the general layout of the inputs and I do like that there is one HDMI on the side of the TV along with one dedicated composite input. A great addition to this TV is the presence of not one, but two USB ports. These ports can both be used for different purposes, and at the same time. One of the main uses of the USB ports are for TV firmware updates that you download from Samsung’s website, copy and paste onto a USB drive, and then run from the TV. There are however a few other great uses for the USB ports including plugging in a USB drive with media on it like a movie file and playing it directly from the TV using Media Play (mentioned above, for streaming media over a network), or even plugging in an entire external hard disk drive into the TV via USB and using Media Play to browse the drive and play files. The ability to plug in an external hard drive via USB enables you to quite literally turn the TV into it’s own Home Theatre PC, which can significantly cut costs and save you space. The one thing to watch out for is that the TV supports just a few file types, which are outlined in the user’s manual. The supported file types and containers is impressively large for a TV, but far from complete. Some files that are supposed to be supported still won’t play sometimes due to strange encoding, or version differences. The built in Media Play feature thus will not replace a HTPC in all cases, but it’s a great idea which could get better with later firmware releases. Lastly, if that wasn’t enough, you can plug in Samsung’s proprietary USB wireless 802.11n dongle to the rear USB port and connect to your home wireless network instead of using the LAN port with a CAT5e/CAT6 cable. Only Samsung’s dongle will work, but I don’t have one or need one so I can’t comment on it’s performance.

Value:

After all is said and done, what is the bottom line? What is the bang for buck? What value to you, the consumer, does this TV present?

In my educated but non-professional opinion, in the $599 CAD price bracket, this TV is looking hard to beat. The bundle of advanced features, a 1080p resolution, solid construction, and warranty set it at the top of the pack to be sure. The 720p version of this TV sells for $50 less and in my opinion, should be overlooked completely. For $50, you have some future-proofing, a great, crisp panel, and the ability to use the TV as a computer monitor some day if you ever upgrade to a different TV.

If you can buy this TV for $599 CAD or less, I would whole heartedly recommend taking the plunge. I have a few nitpicks, like anyone would, but I am overall very impressed and happy with my purchase. I have wall mounted my TV (so I’m currently not using the stand) and have enjoyed every moment I have spent watching it.

-Cam