Gadgetory

hi I'm David Katz Mike from cnet and this is the UN f8000 from Samsung it's a 55 inch LED based LCD this video review will apply from 46 all the way up to 75 inches in the series this is Samsung's best led-based LCD for 2013 and basically the best I've ever tested from the company it's superb in a bunch of different ways including significant feature improvements as well as really slick design and the capper is excellent picture quality again the best I've seen from Samsung in a number of years will start off with the design though this TV is beautiful on the exterior it's got a really really thin bezel you can barely notice anything around the edge what makes it look even thinner is that it's black right adjacent to the screen it's a little bit of silver underneath and the stand virtually disappears behind it it's kind of an arc-shaped one of the downsides however is that the stand is wide enough that you really need to encompass the entire width of the TV with your table top so if you have a slightly narrower table top it will tip over that actually happened to me so trust me you really want a nice wide at least the width of the television tabletop with this TV of course you can always wall-mounted and get that super minimalist look from the side the TVs as thin as anybody to expect from an LED TV it's got this little bulge on the bottom here but really all told it's again extremely thin and light another nice faster the TV's design is the Samsung logo is incredibly small you can even turn off the illumination so again one of the nicest looking TVs I've ever reviewed Samsung's 2013 smart TV suite is among the best in the business it does have the ability to control your cable box via this on TV selection there's also recommendations that the system will use to recognize and recommend shows it thinks you'll like really not big not a big fan of that but I do like the fact that the TV can control your remote so potentially it can replace your cable boxes interface in practice however if you use a lot of DVR commands like play fast forward you'll find that your DVR remote is a lot more convenient that's because Samsung's remote really doesn't have that many buttons a lot of the stuff is stashed on a virtual remote here so you actually have to summon the virtual remote drive to the command you want for example play or pause and that's the only way to control the DVR so if you're a heavy DVR person it's really not the best system but if really like to watch TV live it really might be a nice thing to have those recommendations going the rest of smart TV suite is a little more standard it includes a social aspect there's also a whole bunch of different apps Samsung has more apps than anybody I really like the new design it's very clean and you can navigate very quickly a lot of that is thanks to the quad core processor on this TV there's also the ability of course to access video on demand and you have a search Samsung includes its voice search as well as just your command so you can press a little button on the remote and summon up the voice search and it worked relatively well limited testing also appreciate it again that you can make limited gestures but again with this TV it's not nearly as good as having that remote control but of course we do misplace the remote you can always control your TV by waving at it new for this year Samsung has a little pop-up camera so it's not always staring at you so you can hide it if you're not a big fan of that camera you just want to maintain as much privacy as possible other notable features on the f8000 include four pairs of included active 3d glasses they're about twenty bucks apiece so that's a pretty good deal there's also a plenty of inputs on the back of this TV including 4 HDMI there's three USB and a couple of analog ports so really nothing goes missing in the connectivity department as I mentioned the top what really sets this TV apart from other LED TVs we tested is the picture quality Samsung includes a micro dimming scheme on this television that's different from it's less expensive model that allows the TV to control different aspects of the screen increase or decrease the brightness that's known as local dimming on some other televisions and it works very well in this case it produces really nice deep black levels plenty of contrast and there's very little blooming or loss of shadow detail compared to some of the other local communities you tested color accuracy is also excellent as is the video processing picture uniformity which on previous Samsung's was an issue is excellent on this TV as long as you maintain the correct local dimming settings and you can't see any of those blotches at the dimming is working properly so I'll told the UN f8000 is pretty expensive but if you're in the high end of the TV market and you're allergic to plasma which offers even better picture quality it's an excellent alternative that's a quick look at Samsung's best LED TV the year the UNF 8000 series I'm David Katz meijer from cnet you