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Samsung PN50A760

Television Review

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January 29, 2009 By Alfredo Padilla
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Samsung PN50A760
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The Samsung PN50A760's viewing angle is the best we've seen thus far, this is a good television to pick for a large room where people will be viewing it from a wide variety of angles. We did find the glossy screen reflected light a bit too much, however. Most of the testing in this section was done with DisplayMate, which you can read more about in our Performance: Summary section.

Viewing Angle (12.33)
In this test we look at what happens to the contrast ratio of the Samsung PN50A760's display from a range of different viewing angles. This is important if you put your HDTV in a large room where people will be viewing it from a wide variety of angles. Every televisions should look good from straight on, what happens when you're at 45 or 60 degrees is something different. Below you can see the contrast ratio of the Samsung PN50A760's graphed against viewing angle.

Let's start with the positive, the Samsung PN50A760's contrast ratio stayed above 50% across almost every viewing angle, only falling below it when you get out to 85 degrees from the center. This is an excellent result, in fact the only other television to even come close to the Samsung PN50A760 on this test was another plasma the Panasonic Viera TH-46PZ8OU. Generally speaking plasmas have better viewing angles than LCD displays, where we've seen viewing angles ranging from as little as 15 degrees to as much as 55 degrees. Another positive is that colors ont he Samsung PN50A760's display held up well across viewing angles as well.

That's not to say that the scene you see from 60 degrees on the Samsung PN50A760 is exactly the same as what you see from straight on. If you look at our graph you'll see that the contrast ratio does vary quite a bit even as it sits above 50%. What we saw is that the maximum brightness on the display falls relatively steadily across viewing angles, but so does the deepest black. They don't fall at the same rate, however, which is why you see those fluctations. The take away here is that although the viewing angle on the Samsung PN50A760 is excellent, you can expect the screen to get slightly dimmer as you view at wider angles.

Reflectance (5.0)
We found that the Samsung PN50A760's glossy screen did not do a good job of diffusing light, we were easily able to make out the discrete lights of an LED array when shone on it, even when we varied the angle of the light. When we were viewing real content on the display the reflection of the light was still noticeable enough to annoy you. The bottom line is that you'll want to be careful whan positioning the PN50A760 in your home in relation to lights and windows because glare could be a significant problem. Video Processing (2.0)
As with most HDTVs the Samsung PN50A760 offers a variety of different options that are supposed to improve picture quality in various settings.
Processing Type What They Claim What We Saw
Black Adjust
 Enhances the picture depth by adjusting the black color density
 This option offers three levels and we didn't see a significant difference at any of the three.
Dynamic Contrast
 Automatically controls the contrast level to avoid excessive level differences while maintaining the optimal picture contrast
 Saw a discernible difference in contrast when turned on to one of the three levels available.
Digital NR
 Reduces the noise of the picture to avoid distracting flickering
 Did not see a significant difference

As you can see above the only place we saw an obvious change was with Dynamic Contrast and we would avoid that control as it can have a significant impact on the quality of your color accuracy. That's not to say that these options won't help you out in specific situations but we recommend leaving them off most of the time and perhaps playing with them if you have a particularly poor picture.

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Samsung PN50A760
Television Review
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Previous: Page 5

Performance: Motion

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Remote Control