Samsung PN50B550 Plasma 1080p HDTV - First Look, Setup and Installation
Article Index |
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Samsung PN50B550 Plasma 1080p HDTV |
First Look, Setup and Installation |
Subjective and Objective Tests |
Viewing Angle, General Usage and More |
First Look:
I'll be honest, the 50" Plasma from Samsung is nothing really ground-breaking in terms of looks. It looks like most other Samsung TVs and my only concern is the stand that supports the TV by a acrylic pillar. It does swivel though and that is a good thing if you have the TV set on a stand perpendicular to a wall and want to angle the TV for better viewing. The back of the TV is quite well ventilated and contains a lot of ports that we'll look at in a minute.
The ports are located on the rear of the unit as well as along the left side (when facing the TV). They include almost everything you'll ever need - including 4x HDMI ports. You can connect non-HDMI devices through the VGA connector or the 2x Component inputs on the rear. One of these can double as a straight up composite input as well. The PN50B550 is not merely a plasma monitor; it also has a TV tuner for those of you that are still trying to get analog signals into your TV. On the side of the TV we find the fourth HDMI port, a USB port and a regular set of composite inputs.
While we're on the subject of hooking things up and cables, I highly recommend that you check out monoprice.com
if you haven't already. Independent tests show that their HDMI cables
- of any length - have identical quality to overpriced cables such as
the monster, and it can save you $500 easily. It is important to note
that if you are hooking up a computer from a DVI port, you'll need to
use HDMI 2, and the appropriate audio cables to make things work
seamlessly. Other than that, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
TV Menus:
Although the TV picture and audio seem to work very good out of the box, there are a lot of settings that allow you to tweak, mess, and possibly degrade your picture quality. Samsung has included several pre-defined settings that control both audio and video settings. For example, "Sports" mode boosts the saturation and brightness while "Cinema" drops the color to a more neutral tone and the brightness dims for a better viewing experience in a darkened room.
As the menu was pretty boring this time around, I didn't include pictures of them. The only thing that really interested me was the Dynamic contrast ration level. It appeared to make a bit of a difference, but we'll take more about that when we test this large TV.