Samsung PN50C550
I had tried to buy the previous “B” model at close-out prices, but I missed the boat. Thought I might be outta luck until the “C” version started showing up a day or so afterward and it turned out to be basically the same TV, just about 25lbs lighter – only 2 people needed to wall mount – I was down with that and $1,100 bucks still didn’t seem too bad. I had already researched for some time and Plasma was it for me. The Panny G-10 had a similarly good picture too, and although it offers much to consider, I liked the Sammy’s picture just a bit more, but you may want to check it out as well. I received the set with zero problems or issues: no dead pixels or any buzzing, whines or anything amiss at all. Outta the box the picture was quite good, and showed me good resolution performance even with SD cable with no video noise issues (although initially I did find it necessary to use the 3 supplied ferrite, choke magnets that snap onto the power cord. These not only eliminated the several horizontal noise bands in the picture, but cleaned up the resolution on the overall picture with no downside – an easy fix that totally nixed the problem for me).
But, tweaking the picture a bit is where this set shines the most. When researching, I came across a site that offered a list of picture control settings for the “B” version. Since this is really the same panel, I factored it into my buying decision accordingly. Especially since the settings were said to be obtained with a Sencore color analyzer (about a $10,000 pro device for calibrating video displays and is the sort of thing used by the Imaging Science Foundation – ISF. They at least did pioneer and continue to legitimize the video calibration practice, but more to the point, it WASN’T done by any of the more lame imitators that have since cropped up (like Geek Squad, Spyder and others) whom, I feel, exist to separate you from your money (at about $300 a calibration) while hardly giving you a better picture adjustment than you can get on your own with a $25 calibration DVD).
What this means to us is that the results of, what I’m taking to be the equivalent of a $300 (legit) picture calibration, for this particular set anyway, have already been posted on the web for free – not an inconsequential consideration, for anyone interested. I’m posting those numbers here, for those who are:
White Balance Settings:
Red-Offset: 22
Green-Offset: 25
Blue-Offset: 12
Red-Gain: 33
Green-Gain: 25
Blue-Gain: 33
Picture Settings:
Picture Mode: Movie
Color Temp: Warm 2
Brightness: 56
Contrast: 90
Color: 53
Tint: G35/R65
Sharpness: 10
Black Tone: Off
Dynamic Contrast: Off
Gamma: 0
Colorspace: Auto
Flesh Tone: Off
Edge Enhancement: Off
Digital NR: Auto
HDMI Black Level: Low
Film Mode: Auto
When I tried these settings I noticed a very organic, natural-looking picture, one that offered me a few surprizes. This set happens to be inherently capable of showing a more-than-generous amount of color saturation without problem. I personally prefer a picture that’s just slightly undersaturated, if anything (but, I expect this set will accomodate anyone’s taste on that score, if yours are different than mine). With all this, what I found was that even when slightly undersaturated and I felt the picture was indeed realistic-looking, whenever an unusually colorful object was displayed (like a particularly vivid piece of clothing, or a brightly flourescent color – like some NASCAR colors, for example), this TV displayed BOTH the less intense colors of the more mundane objects, and the most decidedly vivid ones, equally well in the same scene AT THE SAME TIME – never subduing the most vivid colors even when the overall color level looked ‘properly’ undersaturated to me on the more everyday objects. Nor was it unnaturally emphasizing them, for that matter. The result was a TV that, on any good, HiDef, cable feed, regularly showed me a surprisingly wide (yet natural-looking) “dynamic range” of color intensity in the images. I could just about feel as if the TV itself were getting out of the way and showing me clearly (and more truthfully than I’ve seen in my home before) just what the camera saw. Very nice and, as I say, surprizingly convincing (and this with simply 1080i and 720p cable feeds – a Blu-ray player is definitely next!). This set, after my preferred adjustments, didn’t make all the colors look too subdued, like some plasmas I’ve seen have ended up doing, nor all the colors too vivid, like some LCD’s. I felt like it walked the line beautifully – not merely a good compromise, but it seemed truly the best of both in this regard. Black levels were great and with excellent detail – no complaints.
In the end, I did opt to deviate from the settings above, but only with respect to overall contrast/brightness and color level settings, everything else was the same. This gave me an appreciable gain in contrast that suits me and my family’s tastes in our well lighted, daytime living room. Plasma is usually not as vivid in the contrast department as most LCD’s or LED’s, but in the mid-price range ($1,000-$1,500 retail) it’s a small price for me to pay for a picture that I feel (with adjustment) is otherwise decidedly sharper, clearer, more life-like and dimensional than anything else for the money. I haven’t felt that any comparative lack of overall contrast has resulted in any buyer’s remorse for me at all, as no such notion has yet remotely entered my head anytime I’ve watched it.
I’ll add that in my experience with LCD’s vs. Plasmas, Plasmas kill LCD’s and LED’s when it comes to motion – at least in the sets in this price range. Up over about $2,000 and differences between the panel types start to get quite a bit smaller to me. But, just before I settled on this Sammy, I went to Wally World and dragged home a Vierra LCD, mainly to see if ‘taming down’ an LCD picture to suit my tastes could possibly be better than trying to ‘pump up’ a Plasma. In this case, a huge waste of time! What I saw was a 120-Hz LCD on sale at just under a 1,000 bucks that just couldn’t do motion very well at ALL. I popped in a SD DVD of Lawrence of Arabia and it looked like it was shot “live-to-video”, perfectly goofy. I also found out just how bad a 5-ms response time can look on a 47″ set. The 120Hz feature DID work as advertised and made fast motion MUCH better than without, but any slow-speed pan or movement caused a nearly instantaneous defocusing of the area of motion, until the motion stopped and the blurred area was able to snap back into focus. When watching a head shot of someone speaking, for example, their face would perceptably blur in the areas of facial movement while the face of another person in the scene next to them (not talking) remained in sharp focus – too disconcerting. And too much of a disconnect to the experience to NOT want to look at a person while they were talking(!). Plasma (600Hz or no) inherently has no such motion problems that require the consumer to spend money on to overcome. If that wasn’t enough (and, believe me, for me it was) the somewhat artificial vividness to the picture proved, at least on this LCD, to be something I could never quite tame, no matter what the settings.
For me, to pass muster, a flat panel must make no major blunders in the 4 most important performance areas of color, contrast, resolution and motion. To me this Sammy does all of that and at a very nice price – I don’t know how I can do much better than that, especially without another free video calibration. In fact, the only Plasma that I’m confident could beat it hands down is the discontinued-but-still-available Pioneer Kuro 50″ plasma. But then, it should, it retailed for a mere $4,500 when new. But, a few months ago it could be had on the web for only 1,600 bucks. It’s just that at the time, I didn’t have the scratch. Now, the remaining ones, if you can find ‘em, were, the last time I looked, hovering around $3,000. Oh well, I’ll tell you one thing, though; this machine at this price, has certainly eased my pain…;) I know this isn’t 3D, or more colors than RGB or anything, but I’m more than content now to wait all that out. Til the next round, this will do me just fine!
Reviewed by : jartwo “jartwo”, Mar 22, 2010
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