My wife and I bought a new TV and received it a few days ago, and I’d like to share our experiences with it. It’s a great set, overall. It’s a 50″ plasma, the Samsung PN50B650.

(I’ll post pictures soon. I’m more a writer than a photographer.)

Video and Screen

The picture looks fantastic. After fiddling with CNET’s recommended adjustments, I ended up settling to the “Standard” factory-default. I thought that worked well in my living room, which has a medium amount of brightness. The screen does glare a bit–it’s fundamentally a giant pane of glas, after all–but as long as the lamps we have directly in front of it (on each side of our loveseat) aren’t on, it is not a problem at all. Even when those lamps are on, I don’t notice the glare much at all unless I’m watching a very dark scene.

Audio

I’ve listened to cable TV, DVDs, and streaming Netflix and Pandora radio through the TV speakers. I think it sounds pretty good: at least as good as the old 32” Toshiba CRT TV that it is replacing. For serious music and movie watching, I’ll eventually get a receiver and a speaker package. The TV won’t output anything other than stereo from HDMI, so I will need a separate connection to the receiver, instead of being able to route everything via HDMI through the TV. That is a little inconvenient, but no worse than I would expect.

Connections

There are 3 HDMI ports in the back and one on the side, as well as two USB ports on the side. All the older component and composite video inputs are there, too, except for S-Video and DVI. I’m only using the HDMI ports and the USB ports, and they are fine. For wired networking, there is an Ethernet jack on the back, too. The TV has a pretty graceful way of managing the source of the TV. You can name each source “Cable,” “Blu-Ray,”and so on. It automatically recognized my DLNA server on my home network, too.

Remote

The remote is good, and has some cool functions that integrate with other Samsung products via HDMI, so you can use it to control their Blu-Ray player, for instance. It is not a universal remote, which makes it useless if you have to have a cable box, like I do.

USB Media Support

The TV supports every video format (Divx, MPEG4, H.264), audio format (AAC, MP3), and container format (.avi, .mp4, .mkv) that I could come up with. You have full playback control (pause, fast-forward, and rewind), and the TV can resume viewing where you left off. The TV does not properly stretch out anamorphic videos, however, which is a definite minus. That is not a problem with any downloaded content (from torrents, let’s say), but ripping your own DVDs with Handbrake requires a custom preset. I’m still trying to figure out good encoding settings. This feature is fantastic, except for the lack of proper anamorphic video support.

DLNA

DLNA allows you to stream audio, video, and pictures across your home network from a server to this TV. It is an exciting but fundamentally broken technology. It’s broken because format support is very poor, and playback requirements are ridiculously minimal. It is spotty not just on this TV, but all media players, apparently. I don’t have a Windows PC available to run the included Media Connect DLNA server software, but I found that minidlna worked like a charm on my Ubuntu Linux server. (Don’t even bother with MediaTomb, which is in the Ubuntu repositories. It doesn’t stream videos to this TV correctly. ) I found that the TV supports minimal DLNA video playback. With the latest firmware, as of 10/17/09, the TV does not support scanning, pausing, or resuming playback. It also doesn’t properly stretch anamorphic video, either. You can stream HD video in certain formats (MP4, DIVX) and it looks beautiful, but it’s difficult to figure out just what formats are supported.

Networking

The TV has an Internet jack in the back, and you can plug in a proprietary Samsung wifi-a/b/g/n adapter into one of the USB ports in the back. You have to order the adapter separately. I did, and it worked well. It understands the various flavors of wireless security, and hasn’t given me any problems.

Internet Functions

I’ve tried to play with the Yahoo Widgets, but they load slowly and don’t seem too useful. I wouldn’t get too excited about the Internet features. It is nice, however, to do the firmware upgrade over the network. The TV will even notify you when new firmware is available. The main reason to use networking is DLNA, which is good but not great, as discussed above.

Overall Impressions

This is a great TV. The picture looks fantastic. The build quality is great. It looks nice. The speakers are adequate for everyday viewing. I don’t knock it for having inferior audio-out and run-of-the-mill DLNA support. The price is very good on this set, too; I picked it up for far less than a much smaller LCD TV.