Julie: Hi. I'm Julie

Steve: And I'm Steve.

Julie: And we're here today in the Crutchfield studio to talk about Samsung's top lines of HDTV. Now what we have behind us is the 46" UNB7000, but we're also going to be discussing the 6000 line and the 8000 line. These TVs have a truly stupendous picture and a lot of features that make that possible. So what we're going to do is we're going to sum up everything they have in common and then we're going to get into the things that set each line apart.

Steve: Well the first thing you notice is that all three have a super-thin panel. It's like, just a little over an inch thick.

Julie: Right. We knew it was going to be super thin but still when we took it out of the box we all went, "Wow!"

Steve: It's pretty amazing. And Samsung also has what they call a Touch of Color™ cabinet, and on this model it's an accent of red that goes all the way around the bezel.

Julie: Right. You can even see it in the stand a little bit.

Steve: Yep. And they all have four HDMI inputs so you have plenty of inputs for all your HD sources. And also, of course, they all have 1080p picture resolution.

Julie: Right. Now there's a feature that they all share that I think is a huge part of their great picture and that is LED backlighting. Now not every LCD TV has LED backlighting.

Steve: Right. Typical LCD TVs use a fluorescent backlight to save money.

Julie: Exactly. With LED backlighting you get a picture that's brighter. It's more realistic than you're going to get with fluorescent. You're going to have better shadow detail. You're also going to have better contrast. Contrast is the brightness and darkness that a screen can show at the same time.

Steve: Right.

Julie: And the reason that LED does a better job than fluorescent is pretty complicated and gets into things like color temperatures and tweaky stuff like that, but the way I like to think about it is LED backlighting is kind of like natural light. You're outside, everything looks great and real and vibrant.

Steve: Realistic.

Julie: Yeah exactly. And then fluorescent light is like the lighting I used to have in my old elementary school classrooms: those buzzing fluorescent tubes in the ceiling that made everything kind of grainy and yellow grainy.

Steve: And washed out, yeah.

Julie: So it's not surprising when you think about it like that that LED backlighting makes such a difference to picture quality.

Steve: Another big benefit that LED gives you is LEDs use a lot less power than fluorescent backlights. Every watt of power that you feed to the TV an LED gives you more light than a fluorescent. And in fact, these models are actually 40% more efficient than last year's models.

Julie: Right. And power efficiency isn't the only thing that's, you know, a bit greener about these TVs than previous years. Samsung's gone ahead and they've taken the lead and the mercury out of the panel construction, and so that's much better, long term.

Steve: Yep.

Julie: And you also get more recyclable materials both in the packaging that the TV comes in but also in the build of the TV itself.

Steve: The 6000 TVs are the entry level models in Samsung's LED illuminated HDTVs, but really they're only entry level compared to the 7000 and the 8000 models.

Julie: That's right.

Steve: Actually these are very high-end TVs.

Julie: Yeah. They have all the features we just talked about, and they also have something I really like to see in an LCD TV — it's 120Hz refresh rate. Now if you've looked at an LCD TV in the last year or two and watched something that was really high-speed action, you may have noticed that it's not very easy to follow that action onscreen.

Steve: There can be some blur and smearing.

Julie: That's right. With 120Hz refresh rate it does a much better job of following that motion so you don't get that kind of blurring.

Steve: These sets also have a USB input, which is really handy, if you know, you have a thumb drive you just want to plug it in and view some digital photos.

Julie: And you can also plug in like a hard drive camcorder — one of the camcorders that uses USB to connect — and you'll be able to watch home movies pretty easily.

Steve: Samsung's 7000 series TVs have all of the great picture quality that we've just been talking about and then they also add some really cool web capabilities. Now I've seen web capable TVs before and they never quite integrated the TV watching and web surfing all that well. It was usually either one or the other. But Samsung has something kind of cool called Internet@TV Widgets from Yahoo!, and it's different and it's really better.

Julie: Yeah. One of the first things we noticed when we started playing around with it today was that instead of the widgets being available on some alternate menu, they all show up in a dock at the bottom of the screen so you get to keep watching whatever you're watching and get access to your widgets. You just take the remote and hit the Internet button and you're all set.

The other thing that we saw right away was, you know, say you dive into the news widget in order to check some game scores, something like that. Well, even then that widget doesn't overtake the entire screen. You still get to have your program keep playing, and you just take a look at the information you want and then get back out of it without stopping the experience. That's really important if you expect to be watching television with somebody who doesn't want their favorite program to disappear while you check the weather for the next day or something like that.

But separately, I just think that's it's really cool that you're not going to need a laptop on your knee while you're watching television in order to just keep up-to-date on a couple little things. It's all kind of in one here and they did it really nicely.

We also saw when we checked out the back of this set that there was a second USB input, and that's nice because you can plug in this optional Samsung accessory for these TVs and get wireless connectivity to your network. That means no running an Ethernet cable all the way from wherever your router is to your television.

Steve: Man, that really opens things up. There's one last kind of minor difference on these TVs. The 7000s have a cabinet that's slightly more understated than the 6000.

Julie: Yeah the 6000 actually has a little bit of a curve down here that picks up a little bit more of the Touch of Color red.

Steve: The 8000 is one of the best LED TVs you can find. They've got everything that we've been talking about as far as fantastic picture quality. And then cosmetically, the difference is there's a simple glass accent that runs around the frame, and it's still a Touch of Color design, but the color is gray. So the overall effect is a little more subtle, a little more elegant.

Julie: In terms of performance features that make it look better, I think the big story is that they've taken that 120Hz refresh rate we talked about before and they've double it to 240Hz.

Steve: That's really rare.

Julie: It is rare. And what it amounts to is that with 120Hz you're going to get a smoother, less smeary, less blurry picture. With 240Hz that blur is virtually eliminated for really smooth, crisp action.

Steve: And another factor that really helps out on motion blur is these TVs have a really fast pixel response time. Now the average for LCD TVs these days is about 8 milliseconds. Now the 6000 and 7000 series that we were talking about drop that down to 4 milliseconds.

Julie: Which is really impressive.

Steve: Yep. Now the 8000s drop that further to 2 milliseconds.

Julie: Which is basically stupendous.

Steve: That's as fast as I've seen, and if you're at all sensitive to motion blur these 8000s are some of the very best TVs you can find.

Julie: That's right. So, to sum up, the 6000 series TVs are great if you want that high-end Samsung picture quality we've been talking about, but you don't need the other bells and whistles.

Steve: And the 7000s are for folks who want that same great picture quality, but also want the convenience of cool web widgets built-in.

Julie: Right. And the 8000 takes all those things — great picture quality, cool web capabilities, and adds that 240Hz refresh rate and that slightly more subtle, more elegant cosmetic look for a pretty stupendous TV. We're really very impressed with it.

Steve: And of course you can always get more information by calling us at 1-800-555-9408.