Samsung 40in. LCD HDTV LN-T4061F - Testing Continued

Testing (continued): 

Brightness Uniformity:

The backlighting on this TV is fairly standard.  Here at BCCHardware we have acquired a light meter so that we can take a more unbiased look at things like this.  So without further ado here is the result from the samples we took from this TV.

Lighting Uniformity - Profile Chart

Lighting Uniformity Top Chart

Let me point out that the graph looks much scarier than it actually is real life.  While I was able to notice a dimming of this TV towards the edges the rest of the screen was quite uniform and exhibited very little backlight bleeding to the naked eye.  I will be greatly interested in seeing how much difference LED backlighting makes in evening out this graph in future reviews.

Viewing Angle:

This is an important area where TVs  generally differ dramatically from your average computer monitor.  A TV that is sitting in your living room needs to be able to be viewed from a larger range of angles than a computer monitor that you typically sit right in front of.  Today’s typical computer monitors use a technology called TN in their panels, and if you try to view a TN monitor from the side the colors will be drastically different than those you see when sitting head on.  S-IPS offers a much better viewing angle although it has to sacrifice some response time to do so.  I found the range of viewing angles very acceptable on this TV.  Even when sitting quite a ways to the side, the colors were still fairly true.  I have included some images that illustrate this.  Please ignore the poor image quality as I have a new camera coming this month.

Head on	From The Side
From The Top	From The Bottom

Gaming:

Personally this is my favorite part of any monitor/TV review, and so I have done my best to evaluate this TV’s gaming performance from as many perspectives as possible.

•    Gears of War (XBOX 360)
•    Far Cry (PC)
•    Bio Shock (PC)
•    Supreme Commander (PC)

In all of my tests I only encountered a few problems.  Far Cry had a small amount of ghosting in it but not enough to detract significantly from the gameplay.  The other thing that I noticed - especially when playing PC games – is that some games are pretty much unplayable with “Dynamic Contrast” turned on.  I’ve included some pictures that illustrate this when playing Far Cry.  However when “Standard” contrast is turned back on, the game becomes quite beautiful.  Other than these few issues, gameplay was spectacular.   40” worth of HD Gears of War is quite something to behold.

Contrast Mode Select

Gaming Standard

Gaming Dynamic