Samsung LE40B650 internet LCD TV review
Samsung's added a dash of 21st century entertainment to your humble home television
With the LE40B650, Samsung has taken the internet and squeezed it into a TV. Plenty of brands have tried to do this trick in the past, by mating the PC with the TV, but this is the first screen we've seen that utilises the internet widget platform developed by Yahoo and Intel to get the same effect. And the result is as cool as a family-pack of Jaffa cakes.
Much like standard PC widgets, these saucy little apps, dubbed 'Internet TV' by Samsung's canny marketeers, live in flash memory and can be accessed via a funky horizontal dock at the bottom of the screen. Out of the box, the LE40B650 offers news, weather, YouTube and Flickr. More widgets will become available in due course, we hear.
It's a very simple process of plugging in an Ethernet cable and taking the LE40B650 online. And if you don't have a wired network Samsung will sell you a wireless dongle for £50 pre-loaded with all the correct drivers. The set's considerable network credentials extend to streaming audio and (standard-def) video files from PCs on your network, and twin USB 2.0 ports for quick access to your digital stuff (dubbed Media Play), plus a whole heap of resident guff like still image artworks, recipes and kids stories, in the Content Library. Unlike previous Samsung sets which have offered such diversions, you can add and delete new material as it becomes available (quarterly) via USB.
For straight-faced traditionalists, this shiny black flatscreen can also be used as a telly, with image quality proving to be very good. The full HD panel offers plenty of fine detail and colours zing.
Interestingly, one of the giant-brained boffins who developed this TV confided to us that it features an entirely new picture processing IC developed by Samsung at a cost of billions. Previously, the company sourced off-the-shelf scalers from an unnamed Taiwanese vendor. It comes with a mountain of picture parameters which can be tweaked to your heart’s content.
You might expect HD material to look good – and it does, be it Blu-ray or BBC HD via Freesat, but the quality of standard-def is also extremely high. Even on relatively undernourished SD channels (of which there’s no shortage on Freeview), images are clean and pleasing. Interestingly, this Sammy will revert all incoming video to its original resolution, even if it leaves your DVD player upscaled. The screen insists on doing its own upscaling.
Connections are many and useful: to the sides are composite AV, twin USBs and HDMI, while at the back lurk three HDMIs, a PC connection, component video input, two Scarts, analogue audio input/output, optical digital audio input/output, and that Ethernet jack.
As the set uses a standard CCFL backlight, blacks are a little shallow, but we suspect only the hyper-critical will be disappointed with its performance.
Audio though remains an ongoing achilles heal for Samsung, and the 'invisible' speakers used here really are little more than squawk boxes (even if the drivers are made of eco-green kelp!). This, despite the promise of multiple music modes and an integrated five-band equaliser.
The LE40B650 isn't the slimmest TV on the block, and it doesn't push back any picture barriers, but mark our words, the arrival of widget TV in the UK is hugely significant. Hopefully, forthcoming widgetry will concentrate on entertainment (news and weather - how much bad news can you stand?). But to see it is to be impressed.
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