One classy bit of kit: Samsung’s 55 inch F8000 3D TV reviewed

Performance

Samsung has quietly made a few improvements to general picture quality this year with the UA55F8000 TV, primarily in the area of 200 hertz performance.

By default it operates in the ‘Standard’ mode for its Motion Flow picture smoothing facility, and this does indeed smooth the picture, eliminating all judder and providing a liquid motion that allows fine detail to be seen even while a great deal of action is occurring on the screen. This is achieved with almost no picture distortion artefacts, an impressive performance.

The default ‘Sharpness’ setting with most signals was ‘50’ on a 100 point scale. This was too high, but didn’t seem as bad a last year. Winding it down to 5 delivered a natural picture without the harsh edges that the higher rating produces.

Free-to-air TV gets an interesting advance in accessibility. Last year Samsung’s TVs offered the enhanced ‘Freeview’ menu.

This year that has been dropped in favour of something better: a ‘Now & Next’ type panel called ‘On TV’. This displays images from the shows and graphical logos from for the stations available, and is derived not from a free-to-air broadcast, but from Samsung’s own Internet server. Just a little added value for the user.

The 3D performance was good, too. Not perfect, but Samsung seems to have biased the leakage of each eye’s content into the other eye so that it only happens when light objects appear over dark backgrounds.

This is rather less common than the other way around, so the 3D effect was impressive, and of course provided with full resolution rather than the reduced resolution of ‘passive’ 3D systems.

Two sets of active 3D glasses were included. These are spidery affairs that use disposable batteries (providing 150 hours of use) that proved to be very comfortable. They use an RF synchronisation connection so they don’t interfere with IR remote controls.

Smart Hub interface

Of course, it is the smarts of this TV that offer so much. Samsung has reorganised its interface into four main panels.

When you first switch on the TV, or hit the ‘Smart Hub’ key on either remote, the first panel deals with traditional TV functions. The current TV show (or external input) is showing in a window in the corner, while the enhanced EPG is laid out around it. Four icons to the top of the screen represent the four panels.

The next one is ‘Photos, Videos and Music’, which you use to play back content from USB (including TV shows you’ve recorded using the TV’s PVR functionality), content from your network, or (as we’ll see) content from your Cloud providers.

Following that is the ‘Social’ panel. You should spend a little time linking this to your Twitter and Facebook pages so that it can track what you’re up to and link you to your friends. There’s a lot of sharing here. It also offers a ‘What’s Hot’ page which primarily shows trending YouTube videos.

Finally, the Apps page lists all the apps in the TV in one place, some that are pre-installed and some that you can download from the Samsung Apps store.

Apps provide the catch-up TV services, a web browser, use of the built in camera, games for kids, horrifying fitness feedback functions and such.

Thanks to the quad core processor the TV uses – which means that more processes can be run independently in addition to it simply running faster than last year’s dual core processor – all these functions worked fast.

The panels scroll across smoothly and everything responds promptly to the remotes, and indeed to the voice and motion commands (we’ll get to those). Not once was there any of those pregnant pauses that some TVs display, where you’re sitting there wondering whether the TV has seized or is just taking its time.

Sharing and networking

The music playback format support of the TV was surprisingly broad. It played not only the usual MP3s, but added WMA, WAV, iTunes-style MP4 and FLAC. That was from USB, and photo delivery (both .jpg and .png) was equally impressive.

But you can link some of your online resources to the TV so that it can play via the DLNA protocols video, photos and music from your computer. And also from your Dropbox or Skydrive ‘Cloud’ services.

You can set the TV to automatically log on to those services for you so that their contents are readily available, and once I’d set up the link to my Dropbox service – and worked out how the TV linked – it worked seamlessly.

Be aware, though, that the TV doesn’t draw from the default Dropbox folders. Instead, it sets up a new one called ‘Samsung Link’, and it is there where you should put the music and photos that you want the TV to be able to use.

YouTube videos looked surprisingly good on this TV, as did Sky News. While you have to subscribe (a month at time if you want, remember) to really take advantage of the Foxtel capability, Sky News National is provided for free, presumably as a teaser. But it is a substantial bonus in its own right.