Samsung’s Super thin Plasma
Samsung PN50B850
$2,299.99
PROS Thin panel design. Excellent color. Very good SD picture quality. Energy efficient. Tons of media features.
CONS Below-average picture contrast in a dark environment. Some white-balance inconsistencies. No de-judder feature.
The term “flat-screen television” has been used to describe any TV with a screen that isn’t curved like a classic tube TV. The Samsung PN50B850 1080p plasma, however, is a true flat screen. At only 1.2 inches, it’s the thinnest big-screen TV currently available, and it has admirable picture quality, loads of multimedia features, and impressive energy efficiency. This set is a strong reminder of plasma’s unique strengths: It renders consistent color and contrast at wide viewing angles and produces detail that rivals the latest 240-Hz LCDs.
The PN50B850 has no distracting indicator lights, which is a welcome change. The amber-backlit remote control has clearly labeled buttons, solid tactile feedback, and snappy performance. This set also does a good job maximizing the number of integrated input connections, including four HDMI, one VGA, component video, RF, and Ethernet, and two USB ports. In addition to 148MB of internal storage available for personal multimedia content, the PN50B850 is also compatible with streaming content from a DLNA-compliant server device.
This TV’s Movie picture preset produced the most accurate color measurements I have ever recorded from an uncalibrated display. I was less impressed, however, with this preset’s white balance. The set’s dark screen produced a well-contrasted picture in brightly lit rooms, and energy consumption is significantly less than that of other 50-inch plasma sets I’ve tested recently (224 watts in-use average). Aside from a few quibbles, this is the strongest plasma I’ve seen so far in 2009— Robert Heron
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