A Terrific Tube Preamplifier From Korea, And A - Ultra High Fidelity ...

scene, such as a video game page. This
doesn’t happen much, fortunately,
though plasmas do currently suffer from
image retention, a temporary storing of an
image. After you watch a 4:3 movie, for
instance, the sides of the screen will look
(temporarily) different from the centre.
How long can an LCD set last? The
fluorescent-backlit sets have a limited
life, because few people ever spend the
large amount to change the bulb. These
are essentially throwaway sets. LEDbacklit
sets can be expected to last much,
much longer.
The LCD has one final advantage:
brightness. This is more of a sales feature
than an actual advantage, because
shoppers in the typical overlit Big Box
store, it is believed, are drawn to bright
screens as moths to a flame. Most sets
are turned up to torch mode, so bright
you could get a tan watching it. It’s disconcerting
to think that some purchasers
will actually run them that way at home,
though it might make sense if they watch
with sunlight streaming in through the
panoramic window.
Samsung sets do have a torch mode
(actually called “dynamic”), though
to the company’s credit it doesn’t ship
them that way. Both plasma and LCD
sets arrive set to a global setting called
Warm2, which is the one most likely
to give you maximum detail. What is
confusing is that there is another setting
labelled “Natural,” which you might be
tempted by, but which actually punches
up the image in grotesque fashion. The
Samsung instruction manual does recommend
Warm2 for use in a darkened
room. Need we add that such a room is
the only setting for anything but casual
viewing?
Setting it up
We assumed, not unreasonably, that
using the same settings as we had used
for our Samsung plasma would get us
at least close to optimum performance.
Our review set had come from another
publication, unnamed, and had therefore
been preset for that test. Some settings
looked right, but we looked askance at
the contrast setting, which was way up
at 90%. We took it down to 45%, and we
adjusted the brightness accordingly, to
give a moderately brilliant image with as
wide a tonal range as possible. It looked
right…until we began watching actual
movies.
The problem was in the dark parts of
the image. What should have been inky
black was actually muddy and brownish.
We could darken them again with the
brightness control, but then the highlights
would look dead. This LED-LCD
panel has an extra control our plasma
doesn’t have: backlighting. We juggled
the three settings until we came up with
what we could consider acceptable over
a wide range of scenes. Final settings:
contrast at 95%, brightness at 45%,
backlight at 5 (out of 10). That wound
up quite close to the settings on our own
plasma panel.
With that done, we selected three
scenes on particularly good Blu-ray
films, and watched them on our reference
HDTV. We then set up a stand in
front of it so we could place the LED
panel in front of it. Since it would then
be blocking our Thiel centre speaker, we
ran the test with our preamp/processor
in “phantom” mode, with the centre
audio re-routed to the left and right front
speakers.
The comparison
The first selection is one we have used
before: the Parkour (chase) scene early in
Casino Royale, the first James Bond film
with Daniel Craig in the 007 role. It has
color and plenty of fast movement, with
a very wide tonal scale. It would give us,
among other things, a look at how well
the LED-LCD’s 120 Hz mode could
handle movement.
Both the print issue and the paid
electronic version at magzee.com have
the complete text of this review. But for
now we revert to filler text, which looks
like Latin but isn’t.
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ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 37
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