Machines that go Bing!: Samsung series 7 HDTV hands-on review

Posted: 21 Dec 2009 05:11 AM PST

UE46B7020 is the unfortunate name of one of Samsung’s recent offerings of LED HDTVs. In the store Samsung’s sales people (they have teams of ‘pushers’ in the larger London stores) will show you the superlative colour quality, the anorexic thinness, the subdued styling and the plethora of plug-in options on the back of what they can an ‘LED TV’. But what is the 7-series like to live with? Having lived with one for about a month I think I can say it’s made TV addictive again — but be prepared to make some compromises!

I’ve been late coming to digital TV. Partly through intending to move house for the last four years an not wanting to put a large but delicate appliance through the moving process and partly because of not wanting to commit a few thousand dollars to a technology that is in flux (it’s like decimal currency — I’ve been waiting to see if it catches on!).

I should say something about the setup I’ve plugged it into. I’m getting my broadcasts from BskyB via an Amstrad HD set-top box. I also have an old video player connected via the TV’s scart socket. There used to be a pair of DVD players attached but I so prefer ripping DVDs to hard disk and playing them from there that they are no-longer connected. There’s also a Nintendo Wii in the mix connected by HDMI.

Should I buy an LCD TV or plasma?

LCD seems to power most of the newer TVs on offer at the moment but there are many who claim that plasma is still superior in certain respects. So here is a brief HDTV buyers guide to the plasma vs LCD state of the art:

In the beginning there was plasma, and only plasma. The first plasma screens where first introduced in 1981 in PLATO computer terminals. They were horrid. In 1988 the first consumer LCD displays became available and were widely derided for their narrow viewing angle, blurred motion, low refresh rate and inferior resolutions. Things have changed a lot since then and the belated introduction of digital TV has spurred huge investment in both technologies so that LCD is at last rivalling plasma in terms of picture quality.

Here’s a run-down of the two technology’s main features:

Plasmas

Burn-in particularly on older models
Better contrast
Size range 40″ – 65″
Screen can be highly reflective
Viewing angle comparable to flat-face CRT (close to 180°)
Brightness declines over time
Heavier than LCD
Poorer performance at high altitude

Basic LCD

Brighter
More energy-efficient
Motion can be blurry
Picture quality deteriorates when viewer is ‘off-axis’
Size range 19″ to 70″

So, common recommendations are that you should buy a plasma for viewing in a room with dimmed lighting or where several people will be watching and LCD for smaller numbers of people in brightly lit rooms.

However, one of the ways in which LCD has caught up with plasma is in the use of LED backlighting. This provides the following features to the displays in which it is used:

Greater dynamic contrast ratio making it similar to plasma units
Displays are much thinner — the 7020 is less than an inch thick!
A wider colour gamut
Less environmental pollution on disposal

Samsung calls this LED TV even though LCD is still providing the pixel colour information. The 7020 uses this LED back-lighting so we should expect to see the high contrast and rich colour promised by the technology.

I chose the 7020 for the range of lighting conditions under which it can be used, the picture quality, the networking capabilities (including DLNA) and the sleek look of the thing.

The 7-series on paper

The specifications for the Samsung 46b7020 are as follows:

Panel size 46″
Resolution 1920 x 1080
Colours 16.7 million
Viewing angle 178°/178°
Power consumption
- Standby 0.1W
- In use 110W
- (These are out-of-the-box figures, after calibrating and setting up the TV power consumption tends to be lower)
Black 0.06 cd/m2, 0.01cd/m2 when auto-dimmed
Brightness 188 cd/m2
Contrast ratio 3,000,000:1 (Achieved through the use of ‘dynamic dimming’)

This suggests that the viewing angle problems have been overcome and the contrast ratio is high giving dark blacks comparable with Plasma screens.

Installation

The box comes containing the TV itself and the following accessories:

Software CD
Cleaning cloth
Sticky wire holders
Stand and connection cover plate and a bag of screws
AV cable
Component cable
Scart cable
Main remote
Miniature remote
Manual and various other paperwork

The first step is mounting the stand onto the TV. I found this was best done by placing the TV face down on a table with a protective covering with the mounting point at the base of the TV hanging off the edge of the table. Five screws are used to connect the final enclosure to the TV to cover the mounting point. The manual recommends having two people lift the TV into place but the 7-series is so light that I was able to lift it into position myself by simply gripping either side of the screen and carrying it across the room walking sideways crab-fashion.

The 7020 includes inputs and outputs for:

LAN (Gigabit Ethernet)
AV in
Component in
PC (AVI) in
PC/DVI Audio in
HDMI x 4
USB x 2
Optical Audio

All of the sockets point either downwards or sideways minimising mechanical strain on the connectors.

After plugging in the 7020 the TV goes through an auto set-up routine including scanning for channels. It’s important to know that this scanning by the TV is for broadcasts received through the aerial input only. If you’re not using it (because you’re using a set-top box) it won’t find anything.

You can then start exploring the multitude of options buried deep in the 7020’s menu system. This was fairly easy to navigate though the remote’s buttons are soft and unresponsive so sometimes it was necessary to press a button two or three times before it registered.

User Interface

The series 7 incorporates comprehensive set of menus to configure the TV. These are split between a Menu and a Tools palette. The Menu contains all the items to configure the TV that will probably then be left for long periods of time (probably until the TV is moved to another room).

The Tools palette is a set of setting which might be changed more frequently such as the picture size or the sleep timer.

The menus are straightforward to navigate though a little clunky and time-consuming. The allocation of buttons to various functions could have been better designed. This in particular applies to the handling of the source. Press the Source button on the remote and you get a list af all the sources available. You then have to navigate through the list an press the ’select’ button on the remote. I would have preferred the source to simply advance to the next source and post up a small message briefly on the screen to tell you which source was active. A few clicks of the same button would be much simpler than navigating a list.

Watching broadcast TV

The SkyBox delivers a range of TV channels: some normal resolution and some HD. I’m going to concentrate on the HD viewing experience. The picture was stunning. The contrast was phenomenal: even in a brightly lit room with a full-height window behind the TV the Samsung 7020 was able to display broadcasts with enough brightness to make viewing a real pleasure. The LED backlighting also showed its benefits when the curtains were closed and the lights dimmed. The blacks stayed black with no evidence at all of the light grey cast evident on earlier LCD displays.

Colour quality is exceptional and I was particularly impressed by the quality of flesh-tones. I saw no evidence of the picture deterioration when viewing off-axis that is supposed to be an LCD TV problem.

Action sequences are fairly smooth and crisp with little blurring helped, perhaps, by the 100Hz refresh rate. If you intend to watch a lot of sports you may be better off with a higher refresh rate and there are 200Hz and even 240Hz units available now. The Samsung 8-series has a refresh rate of 200Hz and this seems to be the only difference between the 7-series and the 8-series (OK, they have a different remote too).

When viewing low resolution broadcasts the 7020 upscaled the live TV faultlessly. It can’t add any further information, obviously, but there was no evidence of pixelation and large blocks of colour were smoothed out convincingly.

Audio

At low volume levels the sound was adequate and included a reasonable amount of detail for a pair of 10W speakers. but I found that if I turned the volume up to even quite moderate levels it caused very audible vibration at a specific frequency of something in the TV casing. I don’t know if this was something unique to this particular unit or whether it’s a design problem but on the face of it it seems that the 7020’s audio system isn’t up to the job of producing ‘cinema sound’ for the home. I am tempted to bypass the TV audio and just route all my sound sources into a proper audio amplifier.

Built-in content

The 7020 comes with a built-in library of content to turn your TV into an interesting backdrop for a social gathering or as a reference tool. Some entertainment content is also provided.

The gallery includes a series of slide shows of professionally taken photographs that are probably a lot better that your most recent holiday snaps.

The Cooking section includes a database of recipes but to use them you’ll have to be able to see you’re TV from the kitchen (or have it in the kitchen!)

The Children’s section provides entertainment for kiddies and the Wellness section is designed for exercising.

DVDs and USB drives

Similarly, the 7020 had no problem in upscaling and playing standard resolution DVDs. I’ve read a review or two of the high-end Samsung TVs that say they are fussy about the quality of the player that they receive a signal from but I had no problems playing programmes from the following legacy equipment:

Matsui VN9720 VHS player
Sony DVP NS300 DVD player
LG DV374 DVD player

Viewing content on a USB memory stick was no problem either except that occasionally the 7020 claimed that it didn’t understand the sound codec so the movie came up silent. The Samsung 7020 manual contains a chart of the compatible codecs you have to use to get movies to work via Ethernet, USB stick and, supposedly, WiFi network (see the next section).

Experimentation has shown that almost any USB device requiring a cable will not work. The documentation says that only MSC (Mass Storage Class spec) HDD devices are compatible and limited to 5v draw and 0.5mA. I tried an external LaCie pocket HDD rated at 5v and the Samsung 7020 just ignored it.

I haven’t had a chance to try a powered USB HDD but it is unlikely that these will conform to MSC specs.

Networking

The Samsung 7020 is certified by DLNA (Digital Living Network Association) which means it conforms to a networking protocol which allows the TV to access selected folders on your home network, play music and video files and display photographs. What a great idea! Unfortunately I had no success in getting it to work. I purchased the Samsung WiFi dongle along with the TV but as things turned out I shouldn’t have bothered.

My home network runs on a BT HomeHub which is able to penetrate all areas of my home upstairs and down. The Samsung series 7 TV had no problems picking up the network although it has no way of allowing you to identify hidden networks so you have to make the network visible, link the TV to it and then make it invisible again. I had a Mac Mini and a MacBook on the network at the time of testing which had no problem communicating with each other or with the internet. They are running MediaLink software designed to connect Macs to Playstations but its DLNA too so should be compatible. While the 7020 was able to navigate the folders on these machines whenever I tried to play a movie I got a message saying that the file was in an incompatible format. This even happened when trying to view JPEG photographs!

Some devices have in the past had trouble connecting to this WiFi network so I tried switching back to a BT Voyager 2100 which has proved to be very stable and compatible with every device thrown at it: it made no difference. I will be trying a Netgear router soon to see if that helps.

Samsung’s has a list of supported video formats and codecs which appears to be valid for direct USB and wired LAN but not wireless LAN playback.

Media Centre Options

I had hoped to use the WiFi connectivity to connect the Samsung to large hard disk in my home office in a front-room back-room sort of way but since this hasn’t proved possible I’m going to have to set up some sort of storage system in the lounge. By getting a dedicated box to handle data storage and connectivity I will be able to bypass the Samsung’s file format problems since it will just be getting another video source from the box by HDMI and it shouldn’t object to that. Here are the options I am considering:

Playstation 3

Playstations include Blu-Ray drives so in theory could be used as the Blu-Ray source for a home cinema system. However they do the decoding by software rather than by a dedicated chip so performance could be an issue. Storage space isn’t huge either at only 250GB (500GB upgrades are available). However, my mouth waters when I think of all those games I could play on it.

Mac Mini + Plex

The Mac Mini is due for retirement as a desktop machine and setting it up as a media centre would be a nice way of ‘putting him out to grass’. I’ve tested Plex on it and it looks like a great candidate for an all-round media machine. I’d need to get a large external hard disk connected for it to really be viable though.

Purpose-built

There are plenty of media boxes out there which do nothing but provide storage space and play facilities for your ripped DVDs. I may end up getting one of these and combining it with the Mac Mini.

Summing up

The Samsung 7020 is an exceptional TV for the price (£1400, $1900) with picture quality I’ve only seen bettered by higher priced plasma screens. However since all the features of the series 7 which differentiate it from the series 6 (wireless LAN, internet access and widgets) were either disappointing or just impossible to get working I would have been better off buying a series 6. It’s possible that some of my concerns may be addresses in a firmware release but in a fit of utter stupidity Samsung has decided to distribute its ‘All OS’ compressed upgrade files as windows executables rather than a simple .zip file which anyone could use.

I feel like punching someone.

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