HDTV Reviews

The Samsung LN-T4665F is from Samsung’s latest 2007 line up and offers some of the best, if not the best quality images from any LCD HDTV this size. The LN-T4665F has a black gloss finish in a nice thin frame around a 46-inch glossy LCD screen, the glossy screen helps to produce even deeper black levels and contrast ratio, but in a lit room, the reflections can cause somewhat of a problem during viewing. Cnet seem very impressed by the LN-T4665F and give it an excellent write up saying, the LN-T4665F is one of the first TVs with HDMI 1.3-compatible inputs, which have higher bandwidth than the older versions. In itself, that fact doesn’t mean much, but the addition does enable the LN-T4665F to offer a menu selection labeled “xvYCC,” which refers to a wider color space that supposedly comes closer to human vision’s capabilities than the current HDTV color space.

Simply put, in a darkened room the Samsung LN-T4665F is the best-performing LCD-based HDTV we’ve tested yet. We specify “darkened” because of its screen’s reflective coating, which according to our nonscientific observation reflects even more light than that of a glass plasma screen. It’s basically a dark mirror. If you’re setting this TV up in a room where you can’t totally control the light that hits the screen, we recommend looking for an LCD with a standard matte screen, or a plasma with proven glare-reducing properties, like Panasonic’s TH-PX77U series.

The Samsung also delivered an exceedingly clean image. The twilight sky above Nolte’s shack provided a good example — we saw far more moving motes of noise in those areas than we did on the Panasonic, for example, although the Pioneer was about equal.