Samsung LN52A750 Well worth the investment!

After owning the LN52A750 for almost 2 weeks, I thought I'd come back to Amazon to post my review.

To begin, my shipping wasn't as good as some folks, it wasn't as bad as some others, but overall was okay. Amazon shipped the TV on March 24th and estimated that it would be delivered by April 10th. I was quite excited when I got a call to schedule the delivery on March 27th. At that point the TV was ready for delivery, but since I live in a rural area, Pilot handed the TV off to Cardinal Freight. Cardinal only delivers to my area on Fridays, so I had to wait a full extra week to get the TV. It arrived on April 3rd, so it was still a week earlier then the estimated delivery date. The delivery guys were in and out of the house, and pulling out of the driveway in probably less than 10 minutes. "White glove"? Not sure about that, but at least I got to plug the TV in before they were gone.

As far as the TV goes, I'll just address various points one at a time:

Firmware - I noticed that a lot of people gave reviews that included issues with repeated power cycling. I made sure to double check my firmware version pretty soon after giving the TV a once over. My TV shipped with version 1013.0 which is newer than the currently available version on the Samsung website, 1012.2.

Gloss Screen - yeah, I would probably prefer a mat screen, but overall the picture quality of the TV outweighs any complaint I may have with screen reflections. I have felt the need once or twice to turn off a light or two on the opposite side of the room while watching TV. Not too big of a deal though. One nitpick... I can see the gray levels creep up a bit when viewing from an off angle of about 45 degrees or so. The picture is still great, but the blacks aren't quite so black. A mat screen would probably make this issue even a bit more pronounced, so pick your poison.

Halo Effect - very, VERY minor. I can see it, but it's certainly not a distraction. I really need to consciously look for it.

The Bezel - beautiful. I really like this bezel. It's one of the reasons I chose this TV over the 650. So far I haven't seen any issues with the Touch of Color separating. Fingers crossed! We purchased a new entertainment center that has an opening that appears as if it were custom made for this bezel. The edges of the bezel overlap the opening in our entertainment center hutch by about an eighth of an inch all the way around. It looks great!

Info Link - It was a snap to get the TV set up to my home network. I set the network settings manually at first, and everything was fine. I also tried the automatic settings and that works just fine as well. We like the ability to check the weather at the click of a button. News is nice, but we don't really use it much. This functionality certainly wasn't a deal breaker in the TV selection, but it's pretty nice.

DLNA - When I bought this TV I bought it along with a Playstation 3 to use as a Blu-Ray player. The Playstation 3 can also be used in conjunction with various DLNA server programs that are freely available on the web. For this reason, the DLNA functionality of the LN52A750 isn't really worth much to me. Compared to the Playstation interface, the Samsung interface can't really compare. I haven't even bothered to install the Samsung server software on my PC. I'm using TVersity for serving music, photos, and video to the TV through the Playstation. Supposedly some people have had luck getting TVersity to work with the 750, but I haven't been able to. No matter... as I said, the Samsung interface is pretty poor anyway. Since all photos, music, and video are getting transferred over the home network via the Playstation, I haven't tested the Wiselink, so I can't comment that.

Extra Content - Pretty worthless. It would be SO much nicer if the 1Gig of space could be modified to hold personal videos, pictures, etc. I'll probably never use this functionality.

Sound - Really quite good, and another reason I purchase this TV over the 650. We watch a lot of TV without the surround sound system, so I wanted decent sound from the TV speakers. Out of the box, I was pretty disappointed with the sound and thought I may have wasted my money, but after digging through the sound menu, I realized that there is quite a bit of flexibility. Along with a few preset sound modes, there is also a custom setting in which you can adjust the 5 band equalize to suit your tastes. You can also tweak any of the preset sound modes as well, if you don't like the defaults. In case you change your mind, going back to the defaults is a click away.

Standard Def TV - We currently have a standard def Directv Tivo so we watch a LOT of SD content. I'd love to change to a newer HD Directv DVR, but I don't want to give up the Tivo interface, and the Directv DVRs get a lot of poor reviews. As such, I really searched for a new TV that would do a decent job with SDTV. When shopping around, I read a lot of reviews, and almost hands down, the Samsung TVs get the best reviews for playing standard def format. In short, my results were quite good!

At first, I was a bit discouraged, but after tweaking a few settings, I've been very pleased. I had to turn OFF the 120Hz function, turn ON Film Mode (for 2:3 pull down), and turned Digital Noise Reduction up to High (fortunately, even on High, the DNR doesn't make things look that hazy). Then I changed the default color settings considerably. The defaults were great for HD sources like the blu-ray, but not for SDTV. Fortunately, the TV has separate color settings for each input, so no fiddling with color settings each time the input is changed

Interestingly enough, I think the 52" Samsung has a better SD picture then my 22" Visio. Also, my old 32" Sony Trinitron (which the 750 replaced) always seemed to show a good bit of digital "blockiness" in the directv signal, especially in dark areas of the screen (probably from the video compression of the satellite signal). I don't see ANY of that anymore. There is a bit of small pixelization, but a certain amount of that is to be expected considering the source. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not HDTV or Blu-Ray quality, but overall, I'm quite pleased.

One thing I wish the TV had was a Panoramic View for 4:3 TV. It can only stretch the 4:3 image to fit the 16:9 screen. My 22" Visio had a Panoramic Mode that stretches the outsides of the screen more than the center of the screen. That way the center (where your eye is typically concentrating) looks less distorted. Oh well, the screen is so large that viewing SDTV in 4:3 is still plenty big. I was just hoping to get rid of the vertical black bars.

Blu-Ray - I can't comment on HDTV since I'm not currently an HD subscriber, but the Blu-Ray is FANTASTIC! Obviously, this is where this TV really shines. There's not really much to say here that hasn't already been said. Although one of the other reasons why I bought this TV over the 650 is the fact that this TV has 16bit color while the 650 only has 12bit color. Wow! Is it great! I did purchase a Digital Video Essentials blue ray disc with the TV. It was a good help in getting the color set right. I didn't have to change the "out of the box" settings by much, but I did change them enough to make a noticeable improvement (to me).

One note... when using the Video Essentials disc, I noticed that there was a good bit of overscan on all of the patterns the disc was using. I finally realized that by setting the viewing mode of the TV from 16:9 to "Just Scan", it displays the full image with zero overscan. Pretty nice.

Remote - I thought is was nicer then most people give it credit for. The click wheel is a bit odd, but the rotating functionality can be avoided. It also allows for simple up, down, left, and right clicking which is seems to work quite well. The back light is a nice feature. At this point though the remote is just sitting in a drawer. I've recently purchased a Logitec Harmony One remote to combine the TV, Tivo, Playstation, and Receiver. Still learning how to use it, but so far it's great.

The Perfect Compliment - I mentioned previously I purchased the LN52A750 along with a Playstation 3. The added media functionality of the Playstation really makes the slight price increase over other decent Blu-Ray players very worthwhile. The Playstation really opens this TV up to all sorts of other activities. I've never in my life been a gamer, but they are quite fun on the 52" screen, and the video quality is great. I have yet to notice any lag, and I have yet to use the Game mode on the 750 which is supposed to reduce any lag. Streaming video is great. I've got a good portion of my DVD collection ripped to my home PC. The Playstation allows for easy access. TVersity can upconvert to 1080p, but I haven't tried that yet since I need to first hardwire the PC to the Playstation to accommodate the bandwidth. Pictures are easy to share with visitors, and accessing my rather large mp3 collection has become easier than ever. Supposedly a number of online radio web sites work on the Playstation, but I haven't tried any of them yet.

If anyone is still reading at this point, I can easily say that this is one outstanding TV. I got it for around 2050 bucks here on Amazon. I know it can be had periodically for about 100 less, but I couldn't wait. It was still, far and away, less than any local retailer, and it's been worth every penny so far.

I'm giving the TV 4 out of 5 stars, because of the reflective screen, worthless extra content, missing panoramic view for 4:3 TV, poor DLNA interface, and slight issue with black levels at off angles.