Picture quality

Last year I complained that Samsung's then-flagship LED TV, the UND8000 series, failed to live up to its flagship TV picture quality promise, and that's again largely the case with the UNES8000.

The new ES actually delivers slightly worse black levels than its predecessor (I'll chalk that up to its new nondimming Micro Dimming scheme) but outdoes its color and screen uniformity. Despite its strengths the UNES8000 was outperformed not only by less expensive plasmas, but also by the similarly priced Sony HX850 and the much cheaper Sharp LC-LE640U LED sets.