Samsung UE40B8000
The basics
The Samsung UE40B8000 is a 40-inch LCD television with LED backlighting and a 1920 x 1080 full HD resolution. Its ethernet port allows it to connect to your home network (and from that, the Internet), and there are also four HDMI inputs. It measures 998 x 29.9 x 612mm.
The good
By having its LED backlights dotted around the edge of the screen, the Samsung UE40B8000 can be much skinnier than the average flat panel TV. At a mere 30mm in depth, it’s positively size zero – and that’s with all the electronics, tuners and everything else crammed inside rather than in a separate media box. Thankfully, the wafer-rivalling thinness doesn’t impact on picture quality: you get bright whites, deep blacks and plenty of detail, plus reasonably (if not class-leadingly) smooth motion thanks to the 200Hz processing technology. Meanwhile, the DLNA and web tech adds an extra layer of usefulness, allowing you to stream videos, photos and music, plus view web widgets.
The bad
One thing the skinny frame does impact upon is sound quality, as the speakers have to be extremely thin to fit. This makes audio reedy and, well, thin, which means you’ll need to team the Samsung UE40B8000 up with some separate speakers if you want to marry the strong picture performance to ear-pleasing sound. If we’re being particularly picky, we’d also point out that you can get better black level performance on other, cheaper TVs.
The bottom line
There’s no denying the stylishness of this super-skinny telly, and it’s not a shabby performer on the picture front either. Its substandard sonic performance is a disappointment, though.
User comments (2)
Leave a comment
Chiltern07 December 2009
The internet enabled TVs are really Local Area Networked (LAN) Tellys PC that can communicate with your home PC and as an aside they (as pointed out) poorly browse the internet. So if you have home movies, photos, even music on your home PCs the internet TVs come with a software disc to allow them to access the fiels off your PC and play them on the telly. saves having to burn home movies to DVD and then playing on a DVD player. the Samsung has an optional wireless network add-on as specified in the userguide
Report as inappropriateThis comment has been removed.
Join Channel 5
Creating an account is free, will only take a few moments and will allow you to enjoy the full benefits of 5FWD and Channel 5:
Leave a comment