Samsung LN46A850 46" LCD HDTV 46-inch 120Hz 1080p LCD HD Television

When watching in a dark room, there's massive backlight bleeding, meaning there's big white-ish areas in the bottom left and top right. The color is of course completely washed out in those areas. Going to try exchanging it first, in hopes that it's just this unit. Typically this type of thing results from shoddy design, though.

Other thoughts: picture scaling on over-the-air HD channels is horrid. You have to go thru 4 submenus, and then your choices are, center smaller images in the middle of the TV, distort the hell out of them, or zoom to the point where much of the image is cropped out. Make your choice, change to channel a channel with different resolution, and you have to repeat these steps. How embarrassing! The UI for the rest of the functions on the remote is equally poor, and the scrollwheel is unusable (thankfully you can click through it as an alternative). Clearly they need to hire a usability nerd away from Sony or Apple.

The bezel (and the display) is so shiny it'll mirror any direct lighting in your room right back to you.

Save your money.

After much research, about 6 mos worth, this is the HDTV I selected for my anniversary gift. It is all and more of everything written about it! I am amazed at the picture, clarity AND it was pretty darn easy to set up!

The Samsung 850 series is my 2nd HDTV and it does not disappoint. At the time of its release around the fall last year it was the top of the line LCD on the market. Even today with the obnoxiously thin 7100 series LCD TVs Samsung has, this TV is quite impressive even today.

I'll just get into it with good and bad.

Good :
- 120Hz (or if you have the option of 240Hz TVs now) is a must. This is that feature that smooths action and makes stuff take on the appearance of a documentary film grain some people say. Like extremely clear motion and imagery, to the point it's lifelike. It makes movies (Blu-Ray in particular) look breathtaking and video games like a whole new system with the fluid motion. I can't speak enough about how much the 120 Hz feature improves things. It's like the Black and White to Color to Digital to HD to True 1080p HD to finally the 120Hz is the series of major television progression, it's that important.
- The 50,000:1 contrast ratio is incredible for an LCD TV and rivals some older Plasma TVs and with the exception of the top of the line LCD or Plasma TVs, this is an incredibly high contrast. Blacks look black and whites are clear whites. Try looking at a bargain LCD at Best Buy or something and you will see those with 5000:1 dynamic contrast ratios look like they are in a bright room and grey everything out.
- Like most current LCD TVs, the brightness of this TV is excellent and can be seen in a bright room with ease. The same goes for the 180 degree viewing angle.
- It comes with tons of ports (4 HDMI, 3 component, PC, DVI, and more).
- It's like 2 inches thick at most. Very convenient to hang on a wall or mount.
- For some reason it does not attract dust. I've had to dust it maybe once since I've owned it (over 6 months now).

Bad :
- The 120Hz set on high causes a weird blurring distortion in games (especially if the character is rotating or turning or moving fast in front of a rapidly changing background). Turn the feature to medium or lower it goes away though, and is not always present in every situation, just some.
- The speakers are decent, but like almost all TVs of this caliber, the audio does not match the visual qualities. I recommend a standalone stereo set.

We have had this TV for about a month now and really like it. The colors are amazing and the picture quality excellent. The only negative is that the speakers don't have much bass. We connected a set of speakers so it is not a huge deal. I would recommend this TV to anyone I have researched many TVs and was thinking between this and the Sony Bravia but the Samsung 850 series seems a little nicer. I'm waiting to get a bluray player to really enjoy some nice movies.

A lot of research went into the purchase of their product. So far it has more than met our expectations. The picture quality is the best I have ever seen. I originally targeted Sony HDTV units but direct comparison made it obvious to me that the Samsung unit was way ahead in picture quality.
The factory packing made handling the unit a pleasure. The TV set up is definately not a one person job. But with a little help, and the supplied instructions it went like clock work. Watching drag racing is an experience, almost like being at the track.

I bought the LN46A850 120Hz LCD TV for the networking capabilities. This included: Internet widgets (weather), news headlines, DLNA Digital media servers (DMS), Digital media players (DMP), Digital media controllers (DMC),Digital media renderers (DMR). The TV device is unique in that it plays (renders) VIDEO. Most of the more basic DLNA devices just do pictures (e.g. JPEG) and audio (e.g. MPEG). Other codecs are supported but I've not tried them all yet.

In retrospect the video capabilities are fairly limited in the codecs they support. I'm trying this with Windows 7 (Windows Media Player) and still doing some testing. Keep your expectations low with video and consider a PC-attached media server if you plan on actually using "slide show" photo control, but I understand a remote control (v. keyboard) is a very attractive option for technically challenged users.

The 120hz is a big win over older technology especially when viewing sports. I'm unaware of any significantly better performance using 240Hz. My older Samsung 32" HDTV has had some modulation processing errors on HD audio. On my older Samsung HDTV, I often had garbled sound when watching HD / QAM. On this HDTV we have not had this problem. The LN46A850 is fairly thin and wall mountable but IT's A TV! --- not a piece of art. A

I will Never buy another Samsung Product again. Why, you ask?

I purchased this TV (LN46A850) 10 months ago (Feb.'09). One of the main reasons I selected this TV was for its wireless LAN ability. I'm just now getting around to adding this function so I can connect the TV to my wireless network and I find that Samsung does not support this function even though its in the specifications and in the User's Manual. It requires a Samsung wireless LAN adapter (pt# WIS-08BG2X) that is only available from Samsung.

Problem: Samsung does not sell this item any longer and there is nowhere else to get one!

I attempted to do a warranty claim today and the customer service people tell me its too late, that I should have returned the TV within the first 30 days if I didn't like it. This TV is still under warranty and Samsung will provide no technical support, no firmware fix, no wireless adapter and no warranty exchange! I'm stuck with this TV that has no wireless capability and Samsung says, "Sorry, can't help you!" I just wanted to warn anyone what to expect from Samsung in case you are foolish enough to purchase one of their products. I learned the hard way. Samsung, never again!