Samsung LE46A756 46in LCD TV

Having recently checked out new plasma and LED TVs from the premium end of Samsung's current, expansive TV range, we thought it was time we turned our attention to its premium LCD offering - as modelled for us today in supremely attractive fashion by the 46in LE46A756.

Although we accept there are those among you who just can't stomach the ‘touch of red' design effect sported by Samsung's A656 and A756 TVs, the LE46A756 is actually the fifth TV I've seen with the tinge of red in the bezel, and I personally still lap it up as much as I did the first time I clapped eyes on it. Especially when you add in the ultra polished, glossy feel given to the whole TV by the glass layer sitting on top of the screen frame.

I'm also inclined to lap up the 46A756's connections, particularly their inclusion of four HDMIs, a USB port, and an Ethernet socket. Regular readers will know that these latter two jacks are especially significant on the 46A756 because they provide the means for the TV to access the Internet. Or at least, a Yahoo-sourced corner of the Internet that's been designed to provide ‘live' content to Samsung's Internet TVs.

The Ethernet jack is pretty self-explanatory in this regard, simply enabling you to hardwire the TV into your router or broadband ‘pipe'. The USB, meanwhile, can allow you to jack the TV into your network wirelessly, courtesy of an optional (£20) ‘Linkstick' dongle.

My painful experiences with getting other Samsung online TVs working properly meant that this time I actually didn't have to spend too long getting the LE46A756 talking to the remote Yahoo server - though I still had to turn my router's PING protection off temporarily. However, I'd recommend that anyone trying to get this TV online wirelessly for the first time should set at least a frustrating hour aside - unless you happen to be particularly IT-literate.

The rewards for your online efforts are arguably a bit more limited than you might expect, in that you certainly don't get full Internet access. Essentially you're just given access to news tickers, fuller news stories, stocks and shares updates and weather reports. But you can at least choose your weather report by region, and set favourite lists for stocks and shares. Plus this is probably just the start for this feature, with other features likely - hopefully! - set to appear in the future.

It's worth adding before we move onto other matters that the LE46A756's USB and Ethernet jacks are also notable for being able to play JPEG, MP3, and various film multimedia files from USB storage devices or even a connected PC. In fact, the Ethernet is DLNA-certified, for full access to your PC multimedia files via the TV's remote.

As if all this wasn't cutting edge enough, the LE46A756 has one other major innovation up its sumptuous sleeves: The Content Library. Tucked away in a hefty chunk of built-in memory is a diverse amount of pre-loaded multimedia content, ranging from cooking recipes to animated children's stories, a selection of photos you can use as screensavers, sing-a-long children's songs, exercise routines, and even some (very basic) games.

However, although this stuff is for the most part as beautifully presented as it is innovative, I'm not wholly convinced about how much of it most people will really bother with on a regular basis. But as with the online connectivity, it nonetheless feels like another early glimpse of the future of TV, as well as making for a great after-dinner conversation piece.

The LE46A756's screen boasts a Full HD resolution, as you'd expect these days, together with an eye-catching contrast ratio of 70,000:1 - the highest figure I can remember seeing on a non-LED LCD TV.

Also on hand is a seriously wide-ranging set of tweaks for getting pictures to look exactly how you want them. Probably the most significant of these tweaks is a 100Hz Motion Plus system that both doubles the image's frame rate and introduces new frames of image data to make motion look more fluid as well as more detailed.

Also of note are noise reduction routines, a black level booster, a skin-tone adjustment, an edge enhancement processor, backlight adjustment, a gamma adjustment, and white balance adjustment - but there are still other things to have a go at if you really haven't got anything better to do!

The recent Samsung plasma and LED sets I mentioned at the start of this group test have all proved very impressive. And happily the LE46A756 makes it a clean technology sweep, with one of the finest ‘straight' LCD picture performances I've seen.

Particularly impressive are the profound black levels the set can achieve. As Batman and Rachel are pursued through Gotham at night by the police in the Batman Begins Blu-ray, the night sky looks remarkably free of the usual LCD greyness, helping give the scene real credibility; the cinematography a superb sense of depth; and the picture overall a degree of dynamism that really does put most LCD rivals in the shade. Or to sum things up more succinctly, dark scenes on the LE46A756 look stunning to a degree not usually seen outside of the plasma or LED world.

In fact, although the LE46A756's black levels aren't as profound as those of Samsung's LED-based LE55A956, they don't suffer with the LED model's occasional ‘blooming' problem around bright image elements, and so I suspect some people might prefer the LE46A756's approach to all things dark.

Another spectacular success of the LE46A756's pictures is how sharp and detailed they look when showing HD. The breathtaking image quality of the first six minutes of The Dark Knight, filmed using IMAX cameras and included as a bonus feature on the Batman Begins Blu-ray, is delivered with exceptional panache by the LE46A756 thanks to a combination of impeccable fine detailing, perfectly blended colours, and perhaps most exciting of all, precious little in the way of either motion blur or the sort of visual artefacts often caused by motion-enhancing processing.

I should clarify here that you do have to be a little careful with the TV's settings to achieve this impressive motion. In particular you should only have the 100Hz Motion Plus system set to its ‘Low' level, for pushing it higher invariably results in clear glitching around edges, while leaving it off altogether results in judder and a generally less distinct look to moving objects.

I'd also recommend using the Standard image preset (not the awful Dynamic one) with contrast set between 75-80, the backlight set around 5, the brightness no higher than 50, Dynamic Contrast set to Low, the black adjustment switched off, and finally the Edge Enhancement tool set off too, as to me this over-exaggerates contrasty edges and makes the image look inconsistent and rough as a result.

Follow the above measures and as well as the picture looking stunningly sharp and rich in black level, it will also enjoy a scintillating combination of vividly saturated but also unusually natural colours. Maybe the colours produced by Philips' Wide Colour Gamut sets (such as the 42PFL9703D) are even more expressive still, but it's a close run thing. And don't forget that this Samsung set costs considerably less than an equivalent-sized 9703 model.

I do have a trio of gripes with the picture, though. Firstly, there's one traditional LCD weakness the LE46A756 has not been able to overcome: an uninspiring viewing angle. Watch from 45 degrees or more, and the familiar problems of diminishing black levels and colour saturations set in.

Secondly, I found the screen to be a little more reflective of ambient light in my test room than most TVs I see these days, to a degree that really could become tiresome if you happen to have one of the lights in your room positioned in such a way that it's likely to be reflected by the LE46A756.

Finally, there's occasionally a sudden moment of edge smearing even with the 100Hz Motion Plus system correctly set. But thankfully these moments are seldom truly distracting, and so the positives of the system far outweigh the negatives.

The LE46A756 isn't nearly as outstanding sonically as it is visually. There's a bit more of an open feeling to the soundstage than we noted with Samsung's A656 and lower models, but a shortage of deep bass and a tendency to sound thin during action scenes still keep it out of the audio A-list.

Verdict

The LE46A756's lovely design proves to be an entirely appropriate portal into a world of LCD picture quality that's up there with the very best we've seen. What's more, the set's feature count is as prodigious as it is groundbreaking, and its price really isn't out of the way at all considering what's on offer. In other words, the Samsung boys have done good. Again.

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Philips Aurea 42PFL9903H 42in LCD TV

Whether you loved it or loathed it, one thing you certainly couldn't do with Philips' debut Aurea TV was ignore it. For the way its bezel used a sophisticated array of LED light sources to provide a luminous, multi-coloured frame around its pictures was as outrageous as it was unique, making it a must-have background item for any self-respecting daytime TV show, and a consistent ‘stand out' product at technology shows the world over.

Even better, the original Aurea TV didn't just look fancy. Its so-called ‘light frame' effect actually seemed to improve the experience of watching the set's already impressive core picture quality.

There were only two big problems with the original Aurea from our point of view: its relatively high cost, and the fact that it seemed to be the televisual equivalent of Marmite, with people either being drawn to it like moths to a flame, or repelled by it as if it was some sort of TV antichrist.

Happily the second generation of Aurea TV, the 42in 42PFL9903, has a stab at tackling both of these original Aurea objections. Its price of £2,500, while certainly not cheap, is at least a few hundred pounds cheaper than its predecessor. And the new design Philips has created for the 42PFL9903 is a really striking improvement over the original Aurea, making it much easier to tempt people into the ‘love' rather than ‘hate' camp.

For starters, the light frame bezel looks much slinkier and cool thanks to the application of a full sheet of glass that uniformly covers both it and the screen. Second, the set now benefits from the chic transparent ‘shroud' effect curving forward around the TV's edges that's so illuminated Philips' other 9 Series models.

Next, Philips has considerably toned down the impact of the little 1.5cm or so ‘strip' that runs directly around the image just before the light frame starts. This inner frame was pretty much black on the original Aurea and so made a significant barrier between the picture and the supposedly complementary light frame. On the new Aurea, by comparison, this inner frame is almost white, and so creates much less of a distraction.

The extra aesthetic glories of Aurea Mark II are raised even further when you actually turn the TV on. For as well as that new inner frame proving much less distracting once the light frame starts glowing away, it's also immediately apparent that the new Light Frame's effect is much more sophisticated than that of its predecessor, for two main reasons.

We'll come to the second reason later, but first, the latest Light Frame contains more LED light sources than the original Aurea Light Frame; 150 versus 128. This enables the new light frame to deliver more localised subtleties and differences in its colours than the original one - and it's remarkable just how striking a difference this extra flexibility makes.

For while the way the light frame responded to colours in an image with the original Aurea was dazzling and clever, here it becomes so accurate it's frankly uncanny. And in the process of redefining the precision with which parts of the light frame's colours tally up with the colours in the image you're watching, Aurea II makes the Light Frame effect appear much more natural and engaging.

In fact, whereas with the original Aurea I experienced a couple of days of resistance to the Light Frame effect before finally embracing it, with Aurea II I found myself loving the concept right from the get-go.

Trying to describe just how endlessly subtle and precise the new light frame effect is brings to mind the old saying that ‘a picture can say a thousand words'. For seriously, if I were to try and outline here the precise location of every colour tone and colour intensity shift the frame portrays to back up a typical TV image, I'd be having to write hundreds of words.

What's more, those words would probably start to sound pretty dry and boring by the end, whereas if there's one thing the Light Frame effect certainly is not, it's dry and boring. So all I can say is, look at some of the pictures accompanying this review, and imagine the drama of the effect shown happening ‘on the fly', as the light frame continually and instantly changes in response to the content of the image you're watching. Better still, try and see an Aurea II in action for yourself. Be careful, though; once you've seen the latest Light Frame strut its stuff, you may no longer be able to live with the relative drabness of your current TV…

If you've got a good memory(!), you might remember that I said there were two reasons why the new Light Frame technology used by Aurea II is better than that used by the original Aurea. And the second reason is that the new Aurea approach brings much more precise frame colour matching to the table.

In other words, Philips has improved the light frame's colour reproduction to the point where it can produce shades much more tonally consistent with the content of pictures. This perhaps doesn't sound such a big deal when you just write it down like that, but believe me when I say that it actually has a profound impact, enabling the frame to forge a much closer bond with the image - and thus with you - than was the case before.

I should add at this point that the 42PFL9903 has LED lights on its rear as well as around its bezel, so that pools of immersive coloured light - dubbed a ‘sensorial halo'! - also spill across the wall behind the TV. This means that in an ideal world you'll be able to stand the TV in front of a white wall, or even hang the TV from a white wall to best appreciate everything the TV has to offer. But if this isn't possible in your home, then at least you still get the impact of the forward-firing light frame - something you wouldn't get with a standard Philips Ambilight set, where the coloured light only comes out of the TV's rear sides.

Having established that the 42PFL9903's Light Frame/Ambilight Spectra system is far more accomplished than that of the previous Aurea model, it's nice to find, too, that the new set is impressively loaded with other features. The set's connectivity, for instance, includes four HDMIs, a DLNA-certified Ethernet jack so that you can access MP3, .alb slideshow, JPEG, and MPEG1/2 movie files on your PC and home network, plus a USB jack for playing the same sort of multimedia files from USB storage devices.

Click to enlarge

It's also good to find the 42PFL9903 sporting not only a Full HD resolution and a Wide Colour Gamut backlight system, but also Philips' Perfect Pixel Engine HD image processing engine - the same key technology that recently made the Philips 42PFL9703D such a winner.

Since we've necessarily had to spend a large chunk of this review focussing on the 42PFL9903's key Ambilight/Light Frame technologies, I won't go into detail here on exactly what the Perfect Pixel Engine does, referring you instead to the 42PFL9703D review. But what I will say is that as with the 42PFL9703D, the Perfect Pixel Engine HD really helps the new Aurea TV produce picture quality to die for.

Fine detail levels are absolutely outstanding with standard and high definition sources alike, for instance, and the image is extremely bright. Also, motion is superbly handled thanks to the TV's 100Hz Natural Motion processing, and colours are luxuriously rich and vibrant. Plus, of course, colours gain an extra boost thanks to their reinforcement by the whole Ambilight Spectra/Light Frame situation. hat's not the only positive thing the Light Frame brings to the 42PFL9903D's picture quality either. For the vibrancy of the light frame has the cunning effect of seeming to exaggerate the TV's black level depths, making the image look more contrasty than it would otherwise.

To some extent I guess this is just an optical illusion; the reality is that the black level response of the 42PFL9903's core panel is only marginally if any deeper than that of the fractionally disappointing 47PFL9603D we reviewed last week. But as optical illusions go, it's a cracker!

As usual where dealing with the Perfect Pixel Engine, I need to stress that it is possible to really muck pictures up if you're not careful with some of the huge amount of image tweaks available from the TV's menus. For instance, if you leave the HD Natural Motion tool set too high, it can cause twitching noise and even, occasionally, a phenomenon during sports where you see three balls instead of one. In fact, you're probably best leaving it set to Low for most movie and TV viewing, and possibly deactivate it completely during sports viewing.

Leaving the set's noise reduction routines can make pictures look softer than they need to as well, especially during HD viewing. But provided you're willing to revisit the 42PFL9903's on screen menus to tackle potential issues more regularly than you would with a more basic TV, it will still reward you for the vast majority of the time with a really outstanding picture given added impact by the sheer drama of the Light Frame system.

It would have been easy for Philips to have forgotten about audio in its drive to raise its Aurea game. But in fact the 42PFL9903's sound is very good indeed, delivering bags of distortion-free power and a striking dynamic range - thanks in no small part to the presence of two subwoofers on the TV's rear.

Verdict

I'm quite sure there will still be those among you who shudder in horror at the whole Aurea concept, even in the much-improved form on show here. And there will be far more of you entirely unwilling to consider coughing up £2,500 for a 42in TV in the current economic climate, light frame technology or no light frame technology.

But nobody can deny the immense quality of the 42PFL9903's core AV performance, and I, for one, love the Aurea Light Frame effect to bits. After all, contrary to what naysayers might tell you, I believe it really does enhance your viewing experience in a unique way, and I'm all in favour of anything that does that - even if the unique improvement does come at a price.

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