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Let me introduce myself. I’m a one-percenter! No, I don’t mean I’m a mega-rich billionaire; I mean I own a Plasma TV. Now, I understand that people who have never owned a high-end Plasma TV will probably never realize what they are missing. How about natural looking skin tones, or richly detailed dark scenes, or maybe the consistent illumination of bright areas – like when the sky fills almost half the screen?

Anyway, according to my wife, I started hyper-ventilating when my 2011 Panasonic 55″ GT30 (and lots of other equipment) was damaged by lightning. You see, having researched LCD/LED TVs every year since 2009, I knew exactly what I was in store for. I was going to play the panel lottery (e.g. lots of lighting, color and sharpness issues). I was going to go cross-eyed watching all the motion blur and judder. I was going to spend my evenings looking at people who spent way too much time in the makeup room (i.e. flat, lifeless skin tones). I was going to suffer the dreaded “black crush” (i.e. no detail in shadows or with dark clothes, etc.) . And I was probably going to receive a tan from the overly bright LED backlighting even though it makes the LEDs look so good in the showroom. Well, guess what? I got rather lucky on my second attempt.

The first LED TV I brought home (from another manufacturer) only lasted 12hrs before it was packed up and shipped back to the hall of junk. Then, reluctantly, I tried again with a 55″ 7150 from Samsung. Full disclosure: My TV has the Samsung TS02 panel. I guess I got luckily with the panel lottery because I read that Samsung uses different panel manufacturers for this TV based upon panel size. The 55″ gets pretty good marks for consistency because it’s thought to be a genuine Samsung panel (panel code TS01 or TS02). Well, I can certainly report that I’ve never seen a LED panel with such uniform backlighting as my TS02.

Anyway, time is short so I will just say that I’m really growing to like this TV. It has several advantages over the Panasonic Plasma in usability, while sporting a picture that to my eyes is very competitive with my GT30 (now repaired). So, while I still plan to do more picture tuning (maybe with white balance) the settings I’m posting below appear to work really well in medium to well lit rooms with both Cable TV and Blu-Rays. Incidentally, I found the ‘Dynamic’ picture mode on my new F7500 Samsung Blu-ray player was best for maximizinng the additional color information available on Blu-ray disks. This setup also means that I don’t have to toggle back and forth between pictures modes like I do with my Plasma TV.

Picture Mode Standard
Backlight 9 – 10 (update: I now use 8 for 2D and 13 for 3D)
Contrast 98
Brightness 45
Sharpness 15
Color 49
Tint 50:50
Dynamic Contrast Off
Black Tone Dark
Flesh Tone -6
RGB only Mode Off
Color Space Auto
White Balance (factory settings)
Gamma -1
Motion Lighting Off
Color Tone Standard
Digital Clean View* Auto
MPEG Noise Filter* Auto
HDMI Black Level Normal
Film Mode* Off
Auto Motion Plus* Off
Cinema Black Low

* A global setting for all picture modes on the same HDMI input (not clear from the manual)

Incidentally, quite by accident I found that you can almost totally eliminate motion blur and judder by just switching to the ‘Standard’ picture mode and turning the ‘Auto Motion Plus’ to OFF. I know, not exactly intuitive, is it? If you use a picture mode like ‘Movie’, you may find that you need to turn it back on, but with mixed results. In the past, I have always had better luck with using the Standard mode on Samsung TVs for most of my viewing.

Well, that’s it. Others have discussed the Smart features, etc. but, for me, picture quality comes first and all other things a distant second. I think I now have a TV for movie watching that should last me until OLED comes down in price and makes us Plasma owners a little less sad about the end of the line for that technology.

P.S. Despite what you read on forums, I would try setting Digital Clean View* and optionally ‘MPEG Noise Filter* to Auto. In my back-to-back testing with my GT30 using the 2003 Last Samurai and other older Blu-rays, the Auto setting made a huge difference at eliminating “snow” in scenes with the sky, etc. Most forums tell you to turn these features off to speed up processing. However, I have never knowingly had a processing problem with any Flat panel TV using these features unless you are gaming using a game console or PC.