I bought a new TV last week. My Sanyo projector has been my only HDTV display for the last few years but seeing as how it’s difficult to enjoy/review Blu-ray films on it during the day (it’s in the living room!) and I’ve got a lot more titles to cover these days, I thought I’d step up my game with a nice, modest, LCD display. I chose the Samsung LN40B750. And so far, it’s kicking my ass!
I had to go fairly small. Around 40″ seemed ideal. The living room isn’t very big and the far wall is taken up by a window during the day and a projector screen at night so the the new HDTV would have to live on a wall a very short distance from our viewing area. Besides, if I need to see anything larger than 40″ I’ve got the 110″ of the projector screen so getting the biggest screen wasn’t an issue. It then became a question of brand. Seeing my sister’s Samsung LN46B610 solved that dilemma for me. When I showed up for a few days over the holidays I brought a big bag of Blu with me for my family to enjoy. My nephew immediately fired up G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra on the LN46B610 and I was blown away. So, there it was. I was all set to buy an LN40B610 when my old arch nemesis Future Shop decided to make me a deal I couldn’t refuse. And now I’m the proud owner of a Samsung LN40B750. And it is truly gorgeous!
The Future Shop delivery men showed up a few days ago and hauled my new TV into the house, carrying it with only one arm. That should give you an idea of how light this thing is. My girlfriend and I had it out of the box and on its stand in no time flat. A little HDMI from the old PS3 and we were in business! No setup required. Gorgeous picture right out the box. Before we set to watching a film, I shot on over to CNET to scoop their calibration settings for the LN40B750. They seem right on the money to me. I might tweak them sometime in the near future but these seem like a great place to start.
So, the picture is great. The sound is thin but no more so than you would expect from down-firing speakers on a screen like this. It’s certainly good enough to watch TV. And for anything more, I’ll use my audio setup. It’s got networking features that I had up and running quickly by yanking an ethernet cable over from the modem and plugging straight into the back of the panel. No calibration necessary here! We’ve got a bunch of Yahoo widgets to play with and the ability to stream content from our MacBook Pros straight to the TV (great in theory but I haven’t gotten it to work properly yet). The streaming, however, isn’t a big deal for us as we’ve taken to just putting TV shows we like onto a USB stick and plugging it into one of the two available slots on the side of the TV. So far, it’s been able to play every format we’ve thrown at it. No more need to fire up that PS3 to watch AVI files!
After these first few days with the LN40B750, I have to say I’m quite pleased. I most likely won’t be returning it to the shop, even though I have 30 days, no questions asked, to send it back whence it came. I’ll give it a few more weeks and write up a more thorough review.
One last note – this was a pricey set last year. But seeing as how Samsung’s 2010 models are about to hit the streets any day now you should be able to find the LN40B750 at a fair discount soon. Keep your eyes peeled!
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