- Full HD 1080p resolution
- Ultra Slim Touch of Color Design
- Exceeds ENERGY STAR standards
- ConnectShare Movie
- Wide Color Enhancer Plus
- Brand Name: Samsung
- Model: UN40D5500RFXZA
- Display Technology: LED-lit
- Display Size: 40 inches
- Image Aspect Ratio: 16:09
- With the Samsung UN40D5500 40" Class Widescreen LED HDTV, you’ll connect
with more than just amazing picture quality – Samsung’s AllShare
feature links and syncs your compatible digital media devices, so you
can play videos from your camcorder, watch a picture slideshow from your
phone, and listen to music files from your computer, all on your TV.
All this technology is packed into an ultra slim design featuring a
narrow bezel.
I purchased this exact TV at Sam's Club but thought I would leave a
review here. I have owned the TV for about 6 months and have had quite a
bit of time to play around with everything so I thought I would write a
quick review.
Picture:
First off, the picture quality on this TV is excellent. I can't say I'm a picture purist or anything but everything I have plugged into this TV looks good. Blu-ray movies through my PS3 look great. PS3 games also look great. I have even had good luck with lower quality sources such as my old VCR (yes, I still own one) and older video game systems such as my PS1. There are some picture filters which help to clean up some of the noise from lower quality sources and my older Sony 47' LCD doesn't clean them up as well. The one drawback I will say is that if there is only one item on an entirely black screen, such as a video game menu or something, the whole screen will be pretty dim due to the way LED dimming works. I think this is probably true of most LED TV's and is different than my regular Sony LCD so I thought I would point it out.
Audio:
Audio quality is pretty good for such a thin TV. The speakers are not visible from the front and sound much better than my older Sony. I'll probably still end up getting a sound bar since I am an audio purist. The one thing that really irks me in this department is no headphone jack. There is an audio out but that doesn't work well for headphones at all. This problem is not only with Samsung, many newer TV's have omitted a headphone jack. How much could it possibly cost to add? I'm sure many people would find it convenient.
Other:
Do not pay for the overpriced Samsung wireless network adapter. I used the Rosewill RNX-N1 from newegg for roughly $25 and it works perfectly. Updating the firmware via a USB stick was a breeze. The Samsung hub is a nice feature. Netflix streaming works well. Also, I like the ability to load .avi movies onto a thumb drive and watch them straight on the TV. No more needing to hook up my laptop and mess with getting up to pause, etc. One final thing to note is that being an LED lit TV, it puts out almost no heat. This is a bonus for the smallish non-air-conditioned room that I use it in.
Overall:
This isn't the cheapest LED TV but it seems to hit the value proposition well. It is full featured and looks good. Overall, I would buy it again and would recommend to others-auto-dimming "feature": Out of the box, this tv seems to have good blacks, but the only way this is achieved is through automatically dimming the backlight when a dark scene is on the screen. This gets pretty annoying with dark movies such as Harry Potter 7. When I tried watching this in a low-light environment, the TV would crank up the brightness significantly during the brighter scenes and dial it way down during the dark ones. The result was that some scenes were painfully bright and others were so dim it was difficult to make out details. This is also a problem with video game consoles and the TV's own menu interface and other interface elements. For example, the PS3's interface is often white text on a dark background -- this tv turns the white text gray due to the dim backlighting in those instances. Star fields in sci and sci-fi are comprised of very dim stars too. The only way to turn this feature off is to switch the video mode to "movie." The trouble with that is if you bought the tv to sometimes play videogames, you can't use the low-latency game mode in conjunction with movie mode, so it will dim and brighten your games when it feels it's appropriate to do so. Also, movie mode makes everything look pretty washed out and greenish compared with the other modes.Let me first say that this is the first time I have ever bought an HDTV let alone an LED TV. So I may not be an expert but I will tell you like I see it.
Picture quality: I am finding that the picture is incredibly clear. I tend to watch quite a bit of sports and it makes following the baseball, hockey puck, etc so much easier. The refresh rate is only 60 mHz but it doesn't blur at all so it is great. I also bought a Blu Ray player and it looks really good on this TV.
Glare: The biggest thing I noticed with this TV is that there is virtually no glare. I used to be able to see myself in my old TV while it was on because there was a lamp beside me. I can't even see a hint of myself, let alone the lamp. Amazing!
Sound: I don't have a surround sound system as of yet but I am happy with the sound quality from the TV. It is nothing amazing but it certainly does the job and sounds good.
Setup: I found that it was very easy to setup, even for someone who knows practically nothing about TV's.
From what I have used on this TV so far I have been extremely happy with. Well done Samsung!
-brightness uniformity: Like I mentioned, if you don't want the auto-dimming to annoy you, "movie" mode is essential. In this mode, the backlight seems to stay at whatever level you set it to from the picture settings without fluctuating all over the place. This is also the case when the screen is mostly "black." What I mean is when it's supposed to display dark things, like black bars above and below when the movie is a wider aspect ratio than 16:9 or very dark scenes (like space). What you get, thanks to the edge lighting is what some refer to as light leaks or flashlights around the sides and especially the top corners. If I put an all-black image on screen, there are grayish clouds of light shining through the attempted darkness in addition to the very bright corners. After researching this issue online, it appears that this is common to all edge-lit tvs to some extent, but I guess I'm too picky to not let this defect annoy me.
-interface: The interface is easy enough to navigate, but the options provide no real meaningful explanation of what they do. It's basically trial and error to figure out what the various settings are for. They're written for the types of people who would never bother to drill down the depths of the settings menus to begin with. As a technophile, I somewhat resent the marketing nonsense within.
-media streaming: The tv supports UPnP media streaming, but it doesn't even play AAC-encoded audio files. If you use iTunes, or have ever bought anything on the iTunes music store, you can't play those files on this tv. I tried streaming various videos I had, but none of them worked either. The only media type I had success with was audio encoded in MP3. I didn't bother trying to figure out what video formats it actually would play since this feature is so limited that it's effectively useless to me.
-tech support: I tried contacting Samsung about turning the auto-dimming off and their tech representatives are pretty clueless about their products. We spent 30 minutes trying to upgrade the firmware, when the representative finally realized that the version I had given him at the outset was the current one.
Outcome:
-I really had hoped that LCD tvs were getting better over time and decided to take a gamble upon reading so many favorable reviews on Amazon, but after doing lots of research after-the-fact, I've come to realize the manufacturers don't care about actual picture quality. They only care about making these tvs thinner and brighter because that's what consumers are attracted to in stores. LED tvs were actually better a few years ago when they first came out because there was a matrix of LEDs behind the screen and instead of dimming the entire picture (which is terrible) to compensate for the pitiful black levels of LCD tvs, they were able to dim discrete portions of the screen. This was known as local-dimming. It still wasn't perfect, for the lighting elements were far bigger than the pixels on the screen, so if you had a small bright object (like a star in space), you'd see a bright halo around it but at least the rest of space was black. It was a step in the right direction. These edge-lit sets are a step backwards. I'm planning on sending this tv back and picking up a Panasonic plasma instead (ST30). That tv has more uniform brightness and great blacks without the need for artificially compensating for them by varying the brightness of the entire screen. The only drawback there is that the case and form factor aren't very pretty. The screen is much thicker and the case is very basic and kind of ugly. The only reason I refrained from going that route in the first place, despite knowing the picture quality of plasma is far superior, is because the plasma was a little too wide for my space, but I've decided the better compromise is to angle the screen about 19ยบ to make it fit. If I had the room for it, I'd get the GT30, which is quite a bit prettier.
I hope my experience helps someone make a more informed decision. If I had read the review I just wrote, I would not have purchased this tv. I bought this led tv at Bj's at a very good clearance floor model price. The picture was clear, crisp and sharp in the store and just as good once I got it home. I was a little unsure about the 60Hz thinking I would see a blur with quick movement but I noticed none. One thing that I really liked is that it's easy on the electric usage. Something like $9. a year with using 5 hours a day. In my house it's on all day and we have had no problems at all. The picture frame is just the right thickness to look great hanging on the wall or sitting on a tv cabinet. We use this tv in a 15ft by 23ft room and it looks great.
