Samsung HL-T5087S

Summary: I bought from **********. The free delivery option was faster than advertised. Delivery company unpacks but does not include “setup” which was just fine with me since I prefer to do this myself anyway.

So far I’m very happy with the set. The prior generation of LED DLP (HL-S5679W) was critiqued for color evenness and background blackness issues. To my eye, this set is flawless in HD. The new 10,000:1 contrast ratio may have helped background black and I notice no brightness variance across the screen. (But I’ve not compared them side by side.)

The form factor was a major selling point for me. There seems to be much concern on LCD vs DLP in terms of depth, but width issues are overlooked. For those of us with cabinets built for tube/analog TV’s, depth is not an issue but width is a huge issue. The slim bezel of this TV allowed me to put the 50” in the space, where the Samsung LN-S4696D LCD would have fit maximum 46” screen size, and that’s a slim width LCD. Even for table-top installation, the slim depth profile of only 12.8” would fit most locations fine.

Other nice features: The QAM tuner picked up full 1080 HD and digital channels from my Time Warner basic cable (coax) with no digital or HD box installed. Cable companies won’t advertise this, but if you don’t need the program guide or cable DVR this works just fine and you can just pay your basic cable and get HD digital. Even so, I have FIOS TV on order to get the HD DVR since my Tivo series 2 is really “low def” at best.

The “plug and play” setup is nice. I plugged it in and turned it on. While getting the remote set up, the TV went through a full setup on its own and I really didn’t have to do anything except a channel scan. Oddly the default brightness and color settings are set to enhanced modes. I set them back to “standard” which appeared to be a truer picture and color to me.

Sound is just OK, and lacks ooph in my opinion. For movies, and special events, use the optical audio to an audio system. I was spoiled by my old RCA 36” which had very good built in speakers. One “wish” would be a sub-woofer output directly on the TV so I could hook a sub up to the TV and bypass a home-theater system. A sub woofer with std TV audio would be just fine for most viewing. But I don’t know that any TVs offer this. Aside from no sub woofer out, the connections are many and thorough.

So far, I’m thrilled. The picture is beautiful, it fits where others wouldn’t, and it’s meeting all my needs.