My Venture Into High-definition...

[rayzoredge 2]

So I guess I'm kind of a tech geek and of course, I've been eye-balling the possibility of getting myself and the family a real home theater system. It's been on the back burner for the longest time, and I was hesitant to do it since I would have to purchase on credit, but I guess I just joined the flock of Americans who are glad to be in debt and have made the leap to HD.

 

I've been pretty content with our standard 32" brick and rigged it with my PC's 2.1 speaker system, but I knew that one day I would want to get ourselves the spiffy setup I've always planned to do. For the longest time, I've poured over blogs, articles, reviews, and the like, building dream systems and, of course, upgrading those dream systems with no real action, being patient enough to wait. I'm not sure why I finally gave in and bought it now, but I decided to jump in with a brand new 46" Samsung UN46B7100 LED LCD HDTV and an accompanying Samsung BD-1250 HTIB (Home Theatre In a Box).

 

 

 

I bought them both from Best Buy online and opted for the in-store pickup, which, after hearing such horror stories, I was actually pleasantly surprised and satisfied with. I bought them during the day, received my e-mails confirming that they were ready to pick up, then left at about 7:00PM to pick it up. I got to the store at about 8:30PM, grabbed some HDMI and optical cables (which are scary-expensive, but I couldn't wait to set it up and I'm planning on returning them once my cables from Monoprice come in), and after playing some receipt mix-up, we fit this 46" beast and the sound system boxes into my Honda Civic. (Yes, it fit.) It was a crappy ride, but I think I was giddy enough not to care that I finally got home at around 11:30PM.

 

The HDTV box was very long and unwieldy at 50 lbs, but even being the scrawnier type that I am, I managed to bring it into the house without too much trouble. (The HTIB was a piece of cake: light and manageable.) I dug into the HDTV box first, carefully sliding the HDTV out and laying it flat on the floor. I took the stand out next and started to assemble it, which was easy: two parts, four screws. The tricky part was to pick up and hold the LCD, set it onto the stand, and then screwing it to the stand, and trying to pick up a very wide 50 lb object wasn't exactly very graceful, but doable. I finally picked up the whole thing and set it on our entertainment center, then started to work on reducing the existing clutter of wires I already had and taking away the ghetto 2.1 sound system and other stuff.

 

I worked on the HTIB next, unpackaging everything and placing the speakers and the main unit where I wanted it on the entertainment center. Since it would have been hell to tear up the carpet to route my rear surround speaker wires underneath, I'm going to opt for the optional SWA-4000 accessory, which is basically the fancy model name for a wireless receiver unit for the rear speakers. I guess it's not too shabby for $80, but we'll see when it comes in. Right now, I only have the front and center speakers hooked up, along with the subwoofer.

 

Surrounded by styrofoam, plastic, and twisty-ties, I hooked up the component cables from my Xbox 360 to the HDTV, hooked up an optical cable from the 360 to the BT-1250 main unit, and fired everything up.

 

First thing I did was adjust the Xbox 360 settings for HDTV component input and at a 16:9 aspect ratio. The user interface, as dated as it is, became awesome again. The high-definition was clearly noticeable, and I couldn't wait to test something out.

 

For my Xbox 360, I formatted a 500GB hard drive and stored my movies on it to act as a digital library that I could access with my Xbox 360. It works really well, and I recommend that if you are looking to doing this to do it, because the convenience is great and the access to your movies is very easy and painless. (The only painful part is converting movies that don't work to formats that the 360 will accept, but that's another story.)

 

The reason why I brought up the hard drive is that most of my movies are 700-900MB files compressed with xvid or DivX, which, of course, is lossy, resulting in pretty decent but obviously lower quality video. What happens when you take a 700ish by 500ish video and blow it up to fit a 1920x1080 screen?

 

Expecting this, I didn't really care too much and fired up... Pixar's Up. And boy, was I in for a rude awakening.

 

Up looked great. I'm not sure how to explain it, but the Samsung HDTV's 120Hz MotionPlus dejudder processing made a HUGE difference in reducing blur and smoothing out the video in such a way that I could have sworn that I was watching a slightly-hampered quality version of it straight from Blu-Ray disc. It was crazy. I mean, it was obvious that it was a compressed video, but if you sat back on the couch and watched the movie, you most likely wouldn't even notice the characteristic "blocks" of compressed video. It was literally that good. (For reference, my digital copy of Up is 701MB, MPEG-4 DivX 5 720x400 @ 880Kbps, MP3 2 channels @ 128KBps.)

 

I let Up play in the background for a while during my half-arsed clean-up. After the boxes and the packaging was put away in the basement (because I never throw anything away because I'm a pack rat), I sat down on the couch and fired up Black Hawk Down. Now THAT was surreal. Seeing the soldiers move and the action exploding on-screen was like watching the actors acting out scene by scene right in front of me, again thanks to the 120Hz MotionPlus dejudder processing. It was almost "too real," which took away the "film look" that I was accustomed to seeing, so I set the HDTV to a custom mode where I reduced the amount of dejudder processing to retain a good bit of the "film look" but also reap in some benefits of the 120Hz drive. Keep in mind that Black Hawn Down was another compressed video, but with the amount of face-paced action, I didn't even notice any compression artifacts. (This video was slightly worse though: a 1.05GB video file, MPEG-4 XviD Advanced Simple @ L5 608x248 @ 856Kbps, MP3 2 channels @ 126Kbps.)

 

My final thoughts? I'm glad I jumped into HD so far. I know it's only been a day and I haven't even sat through a whole movie yet, but I am clearly impressed. The sound system has to wait for a better review, since I have to get the wireless receiver and have the time and opportunity to watch a movie within the experience. One of these days, it'll be nice to be able to sit down and watch a good war movie like Saving Private Ryan at full volume. Until then, it's back to the daily grind for me.

[Strikee 1]

That's a pretty cool samsung LCD , perfectly suited for some Xbox Game , maybe even for Project Nathal soon!.I can't wait for it to be launched , and you probabily beeing a gamer your also interested about this , they say it won't even be as expensive as peope would expect.I'm thinking of buying some LCD TV but they are kind of expensive here , about 700-800$ , it's almost not worth buying it from the store but to order it online , Im having doubts

Edited December 23, 2009 by Strikee (see edit history)

[BuffaloHelp 24]

I will be purchasing new TV sometime in July when I move to Georgia. I have been itching to purchase new TV for very long time but since this move is coming up, I have been very patient for over a year. And I just can't take it anymore!The only thing that keeps me sane from purchasing one now is that I don't think I can move with new stuff in my truck. So that keeps me from buying anything at this point.But Samsung is one of my top choices. And I'm still wrestling with LCD vs LED. LED is so nice and thin, but LCD has fallen so much in price that.. well what do you do?You just hope that you're making the right decision at the time of your purchase and always know that technology's price will fall as soon as you walk out the door. You just have to bite the bullet. Be a man, right?Good choice and good research there. I would have gone with bit more smaller subwoofer because they are so intrusive. But it's not the deal breaker.And I know about the brick model--I still have 42" Toshiba I paid over thousand dollars few years back. I just can't seem to throw that out because of the size and the price I paid.

[rayzoredge 2]

@Strikee: I actually haven't even played any Xbox 360 games yet on this thing, although I did get around to hooking my laptop up via HDMI and playing Modern Warfare 2. Now THAT was sweet. That's another thing that I heavily recommend if you have a nice gaming rig: to be able to hook it up to an HDTV via HDMI or DVI + optical audio and using a wireless keyboard and mouse combo (like the Logitech MX3200 laser mouse/keyboard combo that I have) to play your favorite games. I've never done anything quite like it, since hooking a laptop up to a standard definition TV with crappy resolution is far from being the same.@BuffaloHelp: I know the feeling... it took me a lot of patience in holding off to purchase this HDTV, but I'm glad that I did. Technology is such a blur when it comes to things becoming obsolete in the short time span of a few months, but I think that getting an LCD HDTV or a LED LCD HDTV would be the way to go, unless you don't mind aiming for a plasma HDTV (which isn't a bad choice either). Having done my research, the LED LCD HDTVs are more expensive, but they do provide power savings, deeper blacks, and I believe that they are even thinner than regular LCD HDTVs if wall mounting is a viable option for you. With that being said, a regular LCD HDTV is still a pretty sweet deal and you could get away with what I got, non-LED, for probably at least $500 less... and to be honest, unless you're a videophile, I wouldn't be able to tell any immediate differences in picture quality between the two. Maybe July will bring lower prices to the LED side of things, so it would be more of a budget-friendly spring towards the latest and greatest.I didn't even look into the size of the subwoofer. Of course, larger is better... if you like bass. And when I can feel the rumble of the lightning storms during Pixar's Up and "feel" the gunshots and explosions during Black Hawk Down, I come to figure that I like bass.

[Baniboy 3]

I'm not much of an expert in these things so I just have to say this.Why not plasma? I thought plasma TVs had better pixel quality or at least better contrast. Or is it about the price? Do you get better quality LCD than you would with Plasma with a same price? I heard Samsung makes good plasma TVs, we have one in our living room.

[rayzoredge 2]

Plasma would not have been a bad choice, really. With the leaps and bounds in HDTV technology, plasma is still quite the competitor for a damn good HDTV.The reason why I went with an LED LCD HDTV was because I liked the features that the Samsung UN46B7100 had to offer (DLNA, 120Hz MotionPlus, connectivity, AnyNet with the HT-BD1250, etc.) and I got suckered into the energy savings of the LED. (Of course, I paid a premium to get into the new tech which probably negates any energy savings until it comes back around for me to break even.) Apparently blacks appear much better on the LED LCD HDTV because it can selectively turn off light to produce the deepest black possible (effectively) so that you have the best picture quality you can get for LCD technology.Plasma does offer 600Mhz drives and an awesome picture quality for less, but I was turned off by the "half-life" of the plasma (usually 5-10 years before the display actually loses half of its brightness) and the burn-in qualities that plasma is infamous for. In all reality, if you could squeeze out 5-10 years out of a TV before upgrading (by impulse or by necessity), that's pretty damn good in itself as a return-on-investment, and the burn-in "problems" are more of a thing of the past since most plasmas come with technology to minimize burn-in and "wash it out" anyway, but I was still drawn to the hype of the LED LCD tech. I believe the main advantages of plasma over LCD technology would have to be better picture quality, but LCDs and now LED LCDs have the edge in having picked up in vast leaps and bounds in image quality as well as bringing the moniker of reduced power consumption. If you want to do the analysis of cost of ownership, I'm sure that a plasma will burn through more electricity to power its now-slightly superior picture in comparison to LCD/LED LCD HDTVs, but they still are king when it comes to panels larger than 50" for image quality alone.However, plasma is going away, so if you want to pick one up, I would do so within or after the next few years to get the best bang for your buck. Companies are ditching plasma in favor of the consumer hype for LCDs.

[deadmad7 4]

Nice tv! I have a 50' inch hd lcd tv with a Sony Home Theater system but i never tried connecting my PS3 to it , will it work with PS3 and movies? And also i got my HDMI cables from a friends , how much did you pay for them? I heard they were expensive! I hope you and your family enjoy this holiday season with movies!

[Baniboy 3]

Oops sorry didn't notice it was an OLED one. Does LCD LED-TV suffer from pixel loss like regular LCD? Anyway, the problem with OLED is that it loses its performance somehow(I don't remember), I think it had something to do with the blue color. I think the burn-in problems occur when you leave the same non-moving image on the screen for a relative period of time.Anyway, great buy and I hope your sound system can match up.

[rayzoredge 2]

Looks like your PS3 will hook up to your HDTV via HDMI or component + optical audio, provided that you have similar connectivity options on your HDTV. If you want to utilize your sound system, make sure that your audio is connected from your HDTV to your sound system receiver if you're using HDMI, or just connect your component cables to the HDTV and an optical audio cable to the receiver... or however you have your home theater system set up. As of right now my cable set up isn't exactly the way I want it to be, but that's because I'm waiting for cables from Monoprice to show up before I actually set everything up the way I want it to be set up.

I knew that home theater cables were expensive, but I was still surprised to see how much of a markup it is at even Walmart and Best Buy. I picked up a 6 ft. Rocketfish digital optical audio cable at Best Buy for $49.99 and a 6 ft. Philips HDMI cable at Walmart for $34.99. To me, that's robbery... which is why I'm going to return both cables when I get my HDMI and optical audio cables from Monoprice.

Keep in mind that with digital cables, a cable is a cable, because the signal either makes it or it doesn't, 100%. The only issues that you will run into when it comes to audio and video cable would be if the signal was analog and if it were to go beyond certain distances like over 10 ft. I believe HDMI has signal issues and introduced artifacts at a maximum optimal length of 30 ft. and optical cable is fiberglass, which means virtually no loss at any length. (Most of us won't ever have to worry about cables longer than 6 ft, though, since sources are usually located at the input/output (HDTV is within close vicinity to the BR player/audio receiver/etc.).

Oops sorry didn't notice it was an OLED one. Does LCD LED-TV suffer from pixel loss like regular LCD? Anyway, the problem with OLED is that it loses its performance somehow(I don't remember), I think it had something to do with the blue color. I think the burn-in problems occur when you leave the same non-moving image on the screen for a relative period of time.
Anyway, great buy and I hope your sound system can match up.

Yeah... LED LCD HDTVs are basically LCD HDTVs with a LED backlight instead of the traditional CCFLs, so you are still prone to dead pixels.