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Question

Featuers and functionalities of the new Samsung smart TVs

Before I start a full blown rant on Samsung TVs I want to ask a few questions.

First up, I just bought 2 Samsung smart TV:
UE40KU6402UXXH and
UE32K5502AKXXH;

Short version:
Regarding the display settings, the movie mode seems to be the only mode I can really mess around with. Any other mode won't allow me to change most of the settings that really impact the way the image is displayed. Is there any hidden menu where I have to type my pin code to be able to edit all of these settings or do I have to just stick with the Movie mode?

Why did I receive a remote with a slow and tedious D-PAD when my previous TVs came with a nice, fluid motion sensitive remote and can I still pair one with these new TVs?

Where is the tools menu and the shortcuts therein?

Can I turn the picture off and still have the audio on when watching TV?

If the "Tools" menu, or something equivalent, is still somehow accessible, can I still access the timer and the picture off options from that menu? If not, can I somehow customize any menu to have those options, or any other option for that matter, more readily available?

Long version:
I have been a Samsung customer since 2008 and I am the first to admit that I really enjoy the way their screens look (once the tv is configured properly). I will give them that...

My issue, however, is with the Smart aspect of the TVs. Let's start with the remote..

When I first bought a smart TV from Samsung, it came with 2 remotes: a standard remote and the smart one which featured a hideous touchpad interface that wasn't really responsive. I don't know if it was because of the communication between the remote and the tv or if the hardware on the remote itself was poor or if the tv didn't have enough processing power to be responsive.

After that, the next TV came with this motion sensitive remote controls (sort of like a wii control) which I actually enjoyed. Once i got used to it it really was a nice, fast experience and it made using the smart features (mostly the browser in my case) really easy.

FF to these new 2 TVs. The smaller, 1080p TV came with just a standard remote, while the other one came with just a silly looking smart remote that featured a couple of buttons and a D pad... A slow, tedious D-PAD? Samsung moved from the fluid motion sensitive control to a D-PAD? My question is, can I buy one of those motion sensitive remotes and use it with both of these new TVs or have they made them incompatible?

Secondly, I really enjoyed the ability to turn the picture off on my Samsung tv. I have a hard time falling asleep because I tend to think about all the mistakes and worries I have and it keeps me from falling asleep, so what I do is I change the channel to something I am interested in, set the sleep timer to 30 minutes and turn the picture off so the light doesn't bother me and I focus on whatever it is on TV and it helps me fall asleep faster. These 2 features were available in the "Tools" menu. The new TVs don't even have the "Tools" menu and furthermore, I wasn't even able to find the "Picture Off" option that the older TVs had. Is this feature still available (without rooting the TV or whatever the equivalent of rooting is regarding TVs)?
For that matter, is the "Tools" menu still available somehow? The options in that menu were real helpful because, for example, I didn't have to go to menu, settings, time, off time, 30 minutes to put my tv to sleep. I simply went into tools, scrolled down to sleep and selected 30.

Thirdly, where is the smart in the smart TV? Nothing seems to have changed in the last 5 years. Apart from the fact that I have a dedicated dumbed down version of Youtube and Netflix and a slow browser, I cannot find any other use for the smart TV. From the first samsung smart tv I bought, to these 2 new additions, the only thing that changed is that these new ones are slightly faster. The only thing I can plug into the USB ports is a proprietary Samsung webcam without which the skype app doesn't even bother opening up (i thought i could use the voice recognition mic to at least talk and see the person I am speaking with, even if they couldn't see me, but no) and also a flash drive but if i try playing anything larger than 15 gigs ( 4k footage anyone?) it stutters or freezes randomly crashing the whole tv. Real smart.

Smart as it is, I thought I could stream files from the hard drive that I have connected to my Wi-Fi router, or the files from my shared hard drive on my computer connected to my Wi-fi network, but again, nope. Is this feature available somewhere (no, i don't want to stream from my phone) ? If not, what exactly is the point of the whole Smart thing?

Then there is the price. At least for me, locally, the price for the smart version is double that of a normal version and with the cash I would have left over from buying the standard one I could buy not one, but 3 or 4 intel compute sticks that, guess what, runs windows 10, which is exactly what I did and works a treat. I can check my emails, surf the net faster, watch any movie on any video player I want, install any app that works on windows, it can't get much smarter than a computer running windows 10 on it. If I also buy one of those motion sensitive remotes from logitech that works with windows then I pretty much have the smartest TV that no TV manufacturer seem to be able to manufacture.

Lastly, why oh why do these TVs pretend that they actually do a good job at digitally processing the image? Every setting apart from the movie mode either over sharpens the image so that every spec of noise looks as if someone took a knife to the screen, it over saturates the images and looses details, it dims the image during dark scenes to hide their poor contrast ratio also loosing details and it is annoying to have an incredibly bright scene followed by incredibly dark scenes where I could barely make out the actors faces just because 80% of the screen is dark, the ultra hdmi balck setting thing blackens the image even further and if you disable it the image looks horribly washed out and, above all, the only real way you can play with any of these settings is if you switch to Movie mode. The other modes have most of these settings greyed out so that you can't play with them. With each new generation they seem to introduce new features that make the image look even worse and they also don't let you disable them unless you're in movie mode. I get that they may actually work with the studio quality footage they play in their shop demos but they are of absolutely no use when watching anything but studio quality footage.

Perhaps I am narrow minded, but what exactly can I do with the smart TV that really justifies their existence?

Their display panels are great but seriously, what is it with all of the junk they put around their display technology?

I guess this did turn into a rant after all....

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Agreed, but some of this is price point related. YMMV
Sep 12, 2016 11:39AM PDT

I agree that the vast majority of smart tvs are <ahem> , not so smart(!) You would be hard pressed IME to do better than a simple laptop connected via HDMI. A much more pleasant experience that you can customize too.

That said, what sort of Samsung apps have you tried already to facilitate the network streaming of files you wish to accommodate? Unless this is some sort of region limitation of your particular model (not sold on my side of the pond, btw), I'm surprised. The price point may be an issue though, including why the remotes seem less responsive.

Dumb question which you will probably hate- why didn't you research these subtle points before buying(?) Are you still inside the return window?

cheers

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Reply
Sep 13, 2016 12:13AM PDT

Your question about the research is actually justified. I have had them for a week so I can return them no questions asked but, in all honesty it's not so much about the price. Yes they are over priced, yes they are probably not worth it considering the alternatives. It's about the fact that so little changed since I had the first smart tv (2010 I believe).

As far as research goes, I wasn't able to find anything concrete regarding the functionality I talked about and I guess I've fallen in the retailer agent's trap when I believed him that they are still going to have those features. I also thought that, being a newer generation and "smarter" that it would be highly unlikely these would be missing.

About streaming, I know that if I had a Miracast (not sure if that is exactly what it's called) enabled device I would be able to stream straight to my TV. In fact, I have had a friend over that owns a Samsung laptop and we did try it successfully. My laptop however does not support this feature. I didn't look into searching for an app that does this, I admit. Why you may ask? I have both windows and linux computers running in my house and I have to hard drives shared on my local network. One of them is connected to the router and is used to back up files, the other is a drive connected to my windows computer that is shared through windows that I use for media storage and sharing (on my local network, no piracy Happy ) I can access both shared drives from both OSs. From the TV... well not straight out of the box. There may be an app, I'll look into it when I get back from work, but I thought that since Samsung is basically aiming at making their TVs the media center of ones house that this would be a feature straight out of the box. As I said, I'll look into it when I get back home.

That's what I don't like about new hardware / software. In their attempt to control their devices and to make them user friendly, the manufacturers seem to give us dumbed down, simple products that you need to root or unlock or whatever if you want to actually have more control over it.

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Edit
Sep 13, 2016 12:16AM PDT

I forgot to mention this earlier, you said that You would be hard pressed IME to do better than a simple laptop connected via HDMI. Well, a tablet running android connected to the HDMI of the TV or streaming to it is still a more enjoyable, customizable experience than a smart tv.