Samsung PN51D6500 3D Plasma HDTV Review

Motion Performance

The Samsung PN51D6500's motion performance was strong in some ways, yet suffers from the same weaknesses that we see in most plasmas. Plasma TVs have a distinct mosquito pattern of noise that's inherent to the pixels. Sit back far enough and you'll never see it. Get up close and you can't miss it. But it becomes particularly noticeable when objects that contain fine detail, like faces and small text. They become a noisy mess.

We have to applaud the Samsung PN51D6500 for staving off all other types of motion artifacting, though. We saw none of the color trailing, strobing, or jagged lines that are so pervasive in LCD televisions. It's a good argument in favor of plasmas if you've got a sensitive eye to display aberrations. More on how we test motion performance.

3:2 Pulldown & 24fps

The Samsung PN51D6500 has some minor problems displaying native 24fps content, like you'd get from most Blu-Ray movies. In order to get the best performance, be sure to put the Film Mode in the "Auto2" rather than the default setting of "Auto1." However, we noticed that in slow panning shots, or slow horizontal movements, we noticed faint strobing between high contrast areas. Even if the area wasn't particularly high frequency (meaning there was a lot of room between the dark and light objects), the strobing was impossible to ignore. We're not sure if this is a result of bad or laggy processing, a function of the pixel refresh, or something else. Either way, it's not a problem that completely kills the viability of the Samsung PN51D6500. More on how we test 3:2 pulldown and 24fps.