- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 33 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"A great plasma - you can't go wrong"
Pros: Bright and sharp, deep blacks - no more burn in
Cons: ghosting during break in phase is never fun
Summary: This has to be the most overlooked TV in the HD market right now. The 5064 has a USB port and supposedly better glare reduction than the 5054, but did extensive comparisons and found them to be identical. I use an Xbox 360 to stream photos, so the USB slot was irrelevant to me. I got this TV on a well known website a-m-a-z-o-n for on twelve hundred sixty-eight bucks. It is an unbelieveable deal.
Burn-in. It is true, burn in is exaggerated. And now that I have owned this TV for a little while I am convinced that a lot of people are falsely reporting ghosting as burn-in. Ghosting is when you leave a static image on the screen, especially a brilliant color against a bright color (like blue against white) even for a short time (say 15-20 minutes) For a while afterwards you will see that ghost image against a bright screen. And yes, this will even happen with pixel shift active. This is okay though. It goes away after a while and if it is taking longer than you would like, just run the scrolling pattern for an hour or so, and voila, gone.
Also, and I mean no disrespect to Cnet or AVS forum gurus. Their settings are garbage. I adjusted my settings to Cnet's specs and to some on AVS forums and the TV looked absolutely HORRIBLE. Whites were non-existent and were totally yellowed out. Terrible. I prefer to put the TV in standard mode, put the contrast down to 45 and put the gamma down to -2. Then adjust the color temp to your liking. I like normal for movies and cool blue 1 for my xbox 360 and cool blue 2 for my Wii. And they also suggest that game mode always be off. Guess what? I played around with this setting with my 360 and my Wii and it looks better with game mode on for games. Too bad the Wii is not in high def though.
High def TV shows look really nice. I have DirecTV HD and some networks care a lot more about HD than others, and it shows. But to take full advantage of an HDTV, you really need am HD DVD or a Blu-ray player. These movies simply look phenomenal. I opted for an HD DVD player since they were around $180. I figured why justify the cost of an Oppo DVD player for $170 when I could get pretty good upscaling AND HD DVD support for only $10 more. I probably would have gotten blu-ray, if it was in the same price range (sub $200) So I guess for now I will enjoy my ten free movies and just rent from netflix. When blu-ray is cheap I will jump on.
This TV is absolute top notch quality and is going for great prices right now. I highly recommend it.
Samsung HP-T5054:
