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This review is for the 60″ model.

First Impressions
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The box is *huge*. The TV is *thin*. Not even an inch at the edge, and maybe just over in the center. The menus are pretty straightforward. (I don’t care too much about the 3D or Smart features of this TV at the moment, and don’t have much frame of reference for how to judge modern 3D, so I can’t really review these aspects.) The screen doesn’t seem too glossy, but it apparently works very well as a mirror because I can see a negative image of my kitchen when it’s off.

Struggle
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One extremely annoying “feature” of these TVs that I’ve found out after purchase is the “CE Dimming” feature. This is not the “ECO Dimming” or anything you can control; It’s hard-coded into the certain picture modes (Standard and Native, at least). This feature is something that will reduce the backlighting when there is mostly black on the screen. (For example, if there is 100% brightness white text on a pure black screen, it would actually display at a fraction of that intensity due to the backlight dimming). I’ve read that this is to reduce the appearance of light bleeding in from the edges, since it’s edge-lit. This “feature” annoys me significantly, particularly because I am not allowed to control it. After searching around I found out this is called “CE Dimming” and you can hack it by going into the service menu (you can find the instructions online yourself), however messing with it apparently voids the warranty. The only picture mode I found that doesn’t use this is “Movie” mode. But, movie mode looks terrible with its default settings.

After 3 days of struggle, experimentation, and research, I’ve found settings that actually give me a picture I can call “good” or better. I’m not an expert, but I’m technical and pretty picky. So, because I have found no calibration settings for this series of TVs yet, I’m going to provide the ones I am using, if only to prevent any of you from having to obsess over this for hours and hours. I’ll offer a little bit of explanation as to why I’m setting it the way I am. I got some guidance and expertise from a known site, but as of right now they do not have professionally calibrated settings. What I did is by eye only.

Settings
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Picture Mode: Movie
Backlight: 15
Contrast: 100
Brightness: 46
Sharpness: 10
Color: 50
Tint: 50/50

Dynamic Contrast: Off
Black Tone: Off
Flesh Tone: 0
RGB Off: Auto
Color Space: Auto
White Balance: 25 for all
10p White Balance (R, G, B): ON
– Interval 1: -8, -7, -7
– Interval 2: -10, -3, 2
– Interval 3: -9, -2, 6
– Interval 4: -9, -1, 8
– Interval 5: -10, 1, 10
– Interval 6: -6, 3, 10
– Interval 7: -9, 5, 10
– Interval 8: -1, 5, 8
– Interval 9: -5, 1, 6
– Interval 10: 0, 2, 0
Gamma: 0

Color Tone: Warm2
Digital Noise Filter: Off
MPEG Noise Filter: Off
HDMI Black Level: LOW
Film Mode: Auto2
Auto Motion Plus: Clear
LED Motion Plus: On

Comments on the Settings
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Movie mode is the only mode I found that doesn’t use “CE Dimming”, which is a huge annoyance to me. (I’d rather see edge-lighting, easily. Not sure why I can’t control that, Samsung.) Backlight, brightness, and color are kind of like salt and pepper: Use to personal taste in your environment.

A note about almost all the other settings: I like an eye-popping, colorful picture as much as the next guy, but I don’t like it at the expense of information loss. From my own experimentation (in Standard and Native modes), all the Dynamic Contrast and Black Tone settings did was flatten out the low end of the blacks. Dark scenes look like “paint by number” with all kinds of banding and digital multiplication/division. Lame, worthless settings if that is the effect, and a problem in general with “digital” stuff.

Standard white balance isn’t fine-grained enough to make the adjustments to any of the picture modes that are necessary, in my opinion. I messed with it for a long time, so I know. 🙂 The only way to get actual, fine-grained color control is to use the 10p White Balance settings. Now, I only know this from messing around with it, but what this does is allow you to control the individual colors R, G, and B as 10 different intensities, from black to white. So, Interval 1 is the darkest reds, greens, and blues (close to black), and Interval 10 is the brightest R, G, and B, close to white. If you use “Expert Pattern 1” you can see how this works. Short summary?: Red is WAY over-represented and blue is WAY under-represented when everything is set at 0. Everything looked neon until I calibrated this, particularly the reds, and greens to some extent. (Maybe they…

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