High Definition Television is the new standard that will be mandated for British broadcasting in the next few years. With a maximum resolution of 1920x1080p, it offers unprecedented clarity of picture, and full digital sound specifications. There are many high definition television manufacturers, and one of the ones with the highest quality of product is Samsung, with their N73 series of LCD televisions.
To date Samsung televisions only support 1366 by 768 resolution – Samsung is addressing this with newer models. This makes their televisions “HD Ready” rather than “1080 Compliant”. As most broadcasters aren’t even using the full resolution specification yet, this won’t have a significant impact on your viewing pleasure. The things that will have an impact are a number of unique features to the Samsung models.
First, Samsung is the industry leader in dynamic high contrast ratios in television, going as high as 6,000:1 in current models. Their colour performance is very crisp and sharp, using 10 bits per channel for their interface, giving 12.8 billion colors – more than the human eye can reliably distinguish, to be honest! This is part of the Wide Extended Color Gamut, and in combination with their computer controlled textured backlighting, simply makes watching color television a new experience.
All Samsung televisions are built with state of the art 8 millisecond response times – this makes them ideal for showing fast moving sports matches, or for playing computer games at full speed. If you’ve stayed clear from LCD televisions before due to “trailing blurs”, that problem has been reliably fixed. The Samsung models go from “white to white” in under 8 milliseconds, with a bit slower for extreme color variations.
One particularly interesting feature about the Samsung models is their I/P backlighting, which has 1,316 distinct levels of lighting, and can deliver this shading information in real time due to digital signal processing, on a near match for the pixel elements for the front of the screen. This is one of the reasons why the Samsung TVs have such remarkable color, even compared to other television models.
Like most modern televisions, the Samsung models offer a gamut of options, HDMI (High Density Multimedia Interface) connections, picture-in-picture, and similar functionality, and if you’ve got a Blu-Ray DVD player, you’ll be grateful for this. (Right now, the best Blu-Ray DVD player is the Sony PlayStation 3, which also looks stunning on these Samsung televisions.
The Samsung models are very thin, ranging from 10 cm thick to 15 cm thick for the largest models, making them ideal for wall mounting. We do recommend, given the large size of these things – screens ranging from 80 to 120 cm in diagonal dimensions, that you hire a professional for mounting them. They’re big, and at between 35 and 50 kilograms, heavy. For something that costs five thousand pounds, it only makes sense to spend a few hundred pounds to have a professional install it for you!