With the DTH catching up and CAS becoming necessary, it was a hard choice to decide between the two, coupled with the need to replace my old tv.
I checked out LCD tv models with Philips, LG, Onida and others. The choice became a bit easier with me tipping towards DTH and matters made easy when I noticed that Samsung was giving away TataSky free with its LCD tv. Also most other brands were either too costly or have a minimum 44’ LCD tv. Philips ambilight would have a fabulous choice but for the price and the size.
The TV lives upto its reputation, Value For Money. For people like myself who dont have a big room for a theatre experience but still want to enjoy the quality, the much lower priced 26’ LCD was just fine.
Picture quality is amazing even on the analog cable signal, and it contains several pre modes for picture settings or these can be set manually also. Modes like Dynamic, Standard, Movie etc are available.
Max numbers of channels that can be stored is limited to 100, which is rather odd, but then with DTH or CAS you wont be using the TV tuner any more.
The sound is what leaves much to desire. It has a SRS TruSurround builtin to produce surround sound for 2 front speakers from a 5.1 channel input. But then I didnt experience any such thing. The sound is like a Mono transistor blaring on a tea shop. Very tacky work in otherwise feature rich model.
The looks are amazing and the remote is very handy with braille points for Power, Vol and Channels.
The tv can be in Shop Mode when you first Power it on. This is demo mode and you should press any button on the side console for 30 seconds to start using it normally. By pressing info on the remote you can see the present mode.
The service is nice as I got a response for Samsung within a day for a minor glitch I had with some connections.
The tv is ideal for a digital signal input. So, if you plan to shift to DTH or watch a lot of DVDs from an attached player or play lots of XBOX, this is ideal as an economical option.