[ background music ]
>> Hi I'm CNET senior editor David Katzmeir [assumed spelling], and I'm with the Samsung LM46B650. This is one of actually seven screen sizes in this series, but this review applies to the 32, the 37, the 40, 46, and the 55 inch screen size. They actually all have identical specs, should have very similar picture quality. This is Samsung's mid-range TV. It actually has a whole bunch of features on it, but it doesn't have the 240 hertz feature. It does have 120 hertz, however, we'll get to that in a little bit. But the first thing you'll notice on this TV is the styling. Now it's got this kind of V shape along the bottom of the panel here, very distinctive. And in addition to that, it's got this very overt red coloring. So you look closely at this TV, you'll notice that there is a lot of red here. If you don't like the red color, well it's kind of too bad, it's not really offered in any other shades, although there are similar TVs in Samsung's lineup that are. The main interactive feature on this TV is Yahoo Widgets. It's a little engine built into the television that can go out on the internet and give you things like weather, stock ticker information, and even Twitter and Facebook interfaces. There's also a couple more coming down the pipe later in the year. They're even talking about Netflix. So Yahoo Widgets again, really kind of a lot of potential there. But on this TV it does operate relatively slowly. So if you're used to the quick response time on a cable box or something, Yahoo Widgets does seem to kind of take forever. This TV can also stream music videos and photos from your home network, cause it's DLNA certified, so that's a nice little feature built into here. It's a pretty good networking TV, but if you want to have a wireless option on this set you're gonna have to purchase a special dongle separately. You got to plug a cable into the back of this TV otherwise. Speaking of the back of the TV, it does have a good selection of inputs back there. There's three HDMI, two component video, and a PC input. The side panel adds two USB inputs, another HDMI, as well as an AV input, but there are no S-video inputs on this TV at all. As we mentioned, the feature package is pretty extensive. You do have a lot of control over the picture, you can mess with gamma, color, temperature, those sorts of things. Samsung's standard suite of extensive picture adjustments. There is also the ability to contact Samsung, this nice contact screen. If the TV does run into trouble, you can immediately give them a call. It's a kind of nice little added customer service feature. Picture quality on the 650 series not quite as good as the better Samsung's that we've reviewed this year, but it is pretty darn good. It has relatively deep black levels, although those blacks do tend to get a little bit blue in dark areas. That's something that we couldn't really adjust out, despite the number of adjustments. But we were able to get a nice color out of this TV, very accurate overall. As we mentioned, the set also has 120 hertz processing. We really like the ability to adjust the blur and dejutter [assumed spelling] controls separately. In fact it's probably the best implemented 120 hertz we've seen this year.
[ background music ]
That's a quick look at the Samsung LN650 series, and I'm David Katzmeir.
