Samsung UN60D6000 60-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV (Black) Reviews

Auto Motion Plus – the price disparity, May 18, 2011

By 

K. Singhasiri (USA) –

  

After owning this TV for exactly a month I’ve finally decided to write a review, you know, after the excitement wears off and what not. Actually I’m still pretty excited about it. My previous set was also a Samsung 26″ LCD and upgrading to this one was worthwhile.

Since this is a television, I’ll comment about the picture first. Out of the box it’s very good, after adjusting the settings a bit – excellent. The colors are very vibrant and no problems with viewing angles. I actually like my images to have a bit of contrast to them; I prefer black to be black and not grey. At first I was having a hard time trying to get it right, since my initial reaction was to reduce backlight and gamma, but crank up contrast and brightness. After a while, I finally figured out ‘brightness’ had the biggest effect. Around 30% was where it really kicks in, but it didn’t occur to me to drop it that low. It’s all about preference though, and this TV should have enough settings for anybody. Aside from contrast though, I don’t see an insane amount of difference between this and a non-LED set… Something I must mention about the settings though, depending on which of the 4 picture presets you’re on, certain selections like advanced video settings become unselectable for reasons unknown. Though I pretty much left that setting untouched. Despite that, I really like the fact that settings are saved independently across the 4 presets for EACH input source. So, for example, if you have 4 connections coming in, you can have a total of 16 presets – good stuff. I also tried the PC input through vga and found the picture to be very sharp. Colors are accurate though a bit strong and text is easily readable from a few feet out and this is coming from a practically blind gamer. The audio, I found to be pretty good. The bass isn’t going to blow your neighbors away, and it’s not going to replace any home theater system, but there is a very capable, customizable equalizer on board which should help a bit. Loudness for this set wasn’t a problem for me.

Now I must talk about the 120Hz Auto Motion Plus(AMP) dealy as it seems to be the main feature that drives up the cost from lower models. What AMP does for you is, well, readable in the product description, so I’ll describe it. AMP made every thing move faster while maintaining picture detail. (more frames in the same amount of time = faster) So, to me, everything looked like either home movies or daytime soaps which, if you can picture them, tend to move faster than most television programs and movies. Despite the bit about daytime soaps, I generally watch movies and sports, and after a few dozen years of watching them in ~24 frames per second (a bit higher for sports), I found the added (double?) frames to seem unnatural. After a few days found myself turning the feature off completely even for sports. Though there’s nothing wrong with the quality of the image presented per se, I’d just prefer to see a blue flash go by as opposed to Ironman’s actual chest piece go by, for example. And it only really kicks in at what seems like certain intervals, so the inconsistency in framerate got to me as well. I did find a use for AMP while gaming. Everything moves at what seems like 60 fps even when the game is not natively known to. Though, again, it’s not 100 percent consistent in high frames (more like 60-80) and certain, very fast moving, games, like racing, cause what seems like screen tearing at the edges. You probably won’t notice it (AMP) on games that already run at 60fps, and also it won’t work miracles for games with already poor and inconsistent framerates. Overall, it looks fantastic for games, as I didn’t give it a second thought about leaving it on, but for everything else I finally decided not to.

The main selling point for me was the Connectshare. I was thinking of purchasing a digital media player a while back, but here it’s already built-in and it’s a very capable one indeed. Though, there’s too many to list here, the TV’s e-manual actually lists suppurt for a dozen file types spanning several dozen video and audio codecs with bitrates as high as 30 Mbps for certain file types. It’s played pretty much every thing I’ve thrown at it and handled any ‘usb device’ I’ve used so far, which includes NTFS formatted sata hard drives with external enclosure, no worries. Though once in a while the audio cuts in and out on my .vob straight rips, and I’ve yet to test files with very high bitrates since I feel the tradeoff for file size isn’t worth it past 7-8 Mbps. Something I must mention about the media player is it does an admirable job of reducing video artifacting from down-conversion, however you’re not able to zoom past the actual video while maintaining aspect ratio. In other words it won’t crop the black horizontal bars for you on a 4:3 ratio video. You have to do it in the conversion. I found it strange since the option to zoom in is there for all the…

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Excellent Quality, Extremely Functional, and Amazing Stylish HDTV, June 22, 2011

By 

Kyler Christensen (Kent, WA) –

  

Whoah, I really did my research on this one (I always do when I make huge investments into things that I plan on owning for a long time) and I am not disappointed!!! For those that don’t know, LED TVs are arguably considered the best class of HDTVs (including LCD and plasma along with all of their variants) and this particular model I feel is really the best in its class (considering all things: quality of picture, pricing, features, and, in my humble opinion, size – I really didn’t need anything larger than about 40-something inches for my purposes).

I’m going to go on a small side note: Some will argue that plasma has the best picture. However, LEDs have better picture at identical resolutions. I checked this model out on the floor at Best Buy along with two other (42″) TVs that I was comparing, an LG LCD and a Panasonic plasma. The sales associate swore by plasma and couldn’t even tell the obvious difference in contrast between the 42″ and this model (the LED one was obviously better). I’m not going to patronize you on the pros and cons of each class of TV (although I could) but, all things considered, LED really is the best overall. Do your homework if you haven’t.

Anyways, I noticed that some people whined about: 1) the sound, 2) the remote, 3) screen glare, 4) light leakage, or 5) whatever dud/lemon of a TV they got. I’m going to address these points with rebuttals in the following bullet points:

-1) In truth the sound is very decent (you’re buying a stand-alone HDTV, what did you expect?) and most people may want to purchase a sound bar/system down the road. Plus there are multiple sound options that enhance and isolate individual parts of the sound that matter to you (“Clear Voice” is a good one sometimes).

-2) Hey, it’s a REMOTE! Come on, people! Seriously though, the remote is intuitive enough and has some cool features (the menus are very simple and a joy to navigate once you get the hang of everything), like button back-lighting that you can toggle on and off with one glow-in-the-dark button. Plus the buttons have a good feel and good travel to them.

-3) Unless you keep the windows open and they’re facing the TV, this is not really a huge issue at all – especially when the TV is actually ON!

-4) Here’s where I think that I will acknowledge some peoples’ pouting and concern; on the upper and lower right and left corner portions of the screen, and even upper-center (where the light is sourced from), I did notice some faint circular light leakage/blooming spots when watching a movie at night. It is minor but they are there. However, this is only noticed when the following conditions are met: you’re watching in a super widescreen letterbox-format picture, it’s night-time or the house lights are off, and the movie scene is a really dark one. I’m not certain if this is normal of LEDs or not. Either way, it is very minor, can easily be ignored, and is definitely not worth taking my TV back for. I’m already too happy with it as you might guess.

-5) Mine arrived in perfect condition. I recommend a free trial of Amazon Prime. You can get this TV with free standard shipping rates or $4 for overnight shipping in the continental US.

-One last initial worry of mine that I wanted to insert into this review is concerning the bezel/frame style. the outer edge is surrounded with an additional clear edge that contains an even smaller and extremely subtle clear red edge. Aesthetics are an important thing for me so looking at this model in the store was a MUST. However, the red edge along with the clear edge was virtually unnoticeable in the store. When you do look closely and see it you will notice how stylish it all really is. The frame is ultra thin, black gloss, and sits on a mostly-glass base. the shaft of the base mount is clear glass so the TV kind of seems like it’s floating. I think that that was what the designers were going for.

Now on to some of the features that previous reviewers didn’t touch on… This TV has really got you covered. There are a multitude of sound and video options in a very intuitive menu interface. I haven’t utilized any of the Internet-accessing options yet. My main plan was to hook my laptop up to the HDMI port and do a lot with that. But here is where the TV really shines for me: the HDD USB port. If you have a USB flash drive/external hard drive then you can view photos, play music, and even watch movies straight off of it. Playing movies has no slow-down whatsoever. If you somehow acquire Blu-ray disc movie rips or whatever video file type/extension you have, chances are great that it will play them all with no problem. The TV has played almost every movie file type that I’ve thrown at it. I love the streamlined menu within the videos. You can’t ask for anything better in this aspect. And HD videos all look glorious.

Lastly, some people complain…

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