Review: Samsung Series 8000 LED TV

The Samsung Series 8000 LED TV.

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I was watching a movie on Samsung's Series 8000 LED television when I heard crying from the main lounge. It was my television, packing a sad because I was showing the shiny new Samsung more attention than it.

How could I not? The Samsung LED made my roughly four-year-old 40-inch television look pathetically small and bland. There was a new kid on the block and it looked gooooood.

Samsung's Series 8000 LED is an ultra-thin backlit LED (which stands for light-emitting diode) television which is barely two centimetres thick. It oozes class, from the chrome and clear plastic pedestal to the glossy screen and the transparent, thin bezel that runs around the edges. The blue light that shines from the bottom of the set every time you push a button on the remote looks pretty neat, too.

Remarkably, Samsung managed to incorporate an analogue and digital Freeview tuner into the set.

Samsung is pushing the Series 8000's energy savings - LEDs generally use less energy than an LCD. Pressing the remote's info button brings up not only an electronic programme guide but a dial that shows how much less power the set is using against an LCD set. I didn't quite understand what it all meant, but it looked impressive.

Performance-wise, it was just brilliant for watching shows and movies, although occasionally the tuner would strangely swap the positions of TV2 with that of TV3. I don't tend to get too technical with colour levels on a television: I don't have the patience to tweak the settings to the nth degree, and used to watch them straight-out-of-the- box.

Since I've had my Sony Bravia I now always change the factory settings just a little, as I find colours are often washed out and the blacks not quite perfect with the manufacturer's settings.

With the Series 8000 LED I tweaked the black a little and changed the preset dynamic setting to natural and dropped its backlight level to four. Blacks looked stunning, with a richness I hadn't seen on any other television, even my Sony, which does black well.

I also used the Samsung for gaming, specifically James Cameron's Avatar: The Game on PlayStation 3, as well as watching Blu-ray discs. The set's gaming mode, which apparently reduces screen lag, seemed to do the job and the alien landscape looked vibrant, with brightly coloured foliage and alien life forms.

Blu-ray discs, too, such as Death Race and The Dark Knight, looked stunning, with even the most minute detail visible in brilliant clarity.

If there's one sting in the tail, it's the price. Just shy of $5300 is a lot for a set, no matter how glorious it is. Although, I suppose if I'd forgone buying my daughter braces, I could have had a nice shiny Samsung 8000 series for Christmas. Oh well, family first.

* Samsung Series 8000 LED television, $5299.

SPECS: 46-inch, 4 x HDMI, 200Hz motion plus, digital tuner incorporated, 1080p high definition, 2 x USB, DLNA- certified ethernet port to transfer multimedia files from a computer.

- © Fairfax NZ News