Samsung LE40M87BDX/XEU - 40" Widescreen 1080P Full HD LCD TV - With Freeview Product Description:
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59 of 59 people found the following review helpful.
STONKING FOR THE MONEY
By Q
See HDTVtest.co.uk for full reviews, but from a more average customer rather than a videophile the following may be helpful.Out of the box the picture really is a bit rubbish. You have to get into the controls and set brightness, contrast & colour among a few others. There are loads of things you can tweak which might put some off.ALSO, there are three picture modes - dynamic, standard and movie. Make sure you know which you are setting if you want to make use of all the modes, or set to standard and adjust that and don't use the others. They explain that really you should set dynamic for a brightly lit room, standard for normal light and movie for a darkened room. You don't need to set dynamic for games etc because you can set the games input independently. This is both a blessing and a curse - see below.AND then, you find that these settings only apply for the source you were using at the time. SO if you have DVD, Video, game, and the TV itself, that's four times minimum you need to do this, or 12 if you want to set dynamic, standard and movie. If you have more inputs, more settings. Great flexibility, but if your kids play with it and re-set to factory settings - well I won't use the words here! There is a parental lock - I have not checked if this locks these settings.BUT, once you have spent 2 evenings tweaking you have a most fabulous TV, hence 5*. If you can't be bothered with this, it will be your loss (quality and/or cash) but look elsewhere at something that's reviewed better out of the box.I am not sure, but I also think it needed "running in" for a few hours - picture seems to improve.Other than the picture, great things are:-Looks as small as any TV of this size can in your room.Swivels on its base to improve view angle - really very useful. It all honesty, the viewing angle is good enough - by the time you've got poor picture you would not want to be viewing at that angle anyway.Actually looks better with some ambient light in the room. In the total dark, the blacks don't quite cut the mustard (mind you if I played with the myriad of settings a bit more, maybe I could fix this). Oh and its got beter blacks than my 3 year old Panasonic CRT, so it's all relative. With the lights on the blacks look like pitch.It will show up any poor Freeview source, but actually renders VHS video quite well.Well worth having even if you don't have an HD source in my view. Looks brilliant with the philips upscale player 5980 and is very much better than a standard TV with a GOOD freeview source (BBC1 etc, but not some of the cheaper channels)Be wary of:-Sound is a bit weak, very little bass - if you don't have additional amp or cimema system, then maybe consider something else.Glossy screen which gives such a great picture could be a problem if it faces a bright light source (ours does not).It will reveal poor sources, but that's true of any large high definition TV, and quite tolerable for me - not really a reason not to buy, just a warning not to expect miracles.The other reviewer incorrectly says this is not 1080p - it is, just the amazon spec is wrong.In summary, don't spend loads on something more "future proof". In 5 years all the current new TV's will be obsolete to some degree (HD freeview should have arrived, and the current Sony HD freeview costs £2K won't necessarilyt be compatible), but this will give great pleasure in the mean time.Exceeded my expectations.And then I had a small fault - and it still gets 5*. Why? I shall explain - the optical audio out drops out sometimes. I mailed Samsung - got a reply 4 hours later telling me its a known fault and a firmware update will be broadcast automatically to fix it next month. As I can use the RCA connection for now, I can live with that. Excellent response rate. I was worrying I'd hear nothing or have to send it back.
85 of 86 people found the following review helpful.Samsung LE40M87 Review
By N. R. Postlethwaite
Absolutely fantastic TV, SD quality was better than I expected via SCART and on a par with my redundant Sony WEGA Triniton CRT. HD is glorious from SkyHD and PS3 with vivid images and the blackest blacks you will see this side of plasma.TV *does* require some setting up to get the best picture, but this is not too hard and there are settings threads on avforums.com for this. The shiny panel is a bit of a dust magnet, but when the screen is on is not a problem unless you have a light directly shining at the screen - which would look crap on anything !! Freeview EPG is better than everage aswell.At the £1Kish price point, this is the *BEST* 1080p panel you can get - don't waste your money elsewhere. The TV looks drop-dead gorgeous aswell.
44 of 45 people found the following review helpful.It's fine
By Gord
A beautiful TV! I've mounted mine on the wall along with a piece of trunking for the various cables and it looks a real treat! The picture is rather good - I've not seen anything better. I'm using phono leads into my Hi-Fi and the sound is glorious! Even the inbuilt freeview pics are much better than expected and the on-screen menus are very easy and user friendly. Nothing better (at the moment) for around the grand mark. You can wait for ever to get that big flat TV and there's always something better coming along, but this one is fine for everything today's technology has to offer with no flaws or missing facilities so take the plunge - I'm glad I did :)
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