Samsung has continued its tradition for design excellence into 2011 with the UE55D8000. The impossibly slim HDTV is an engineering marvel, and the new thin bezel looks stunning. The extensive calibration menus allow for Greyscale, Gamma and Colour to be tweaked to near perfection, which can result in lifelike, accurate video. Contrast is also much improved on last year’s ultra-slim LED edge-lit models, closing the performance gap that previously gave chunkier backlit CCFL LCDs an advantage in this area.
There are some other issues that videophiles should keep in mind though: brightness uniformity is inconsistent across the screen (as is often the case with large-sized LCD TVs), and there is some mild motion judder to contend with when watching 24p film material. Lastly, we had to enable “Game Mode” to avoid the natural film grain of some Blu-ray Disc movies being removed by the UE55D8000′s video processing (which, again, we really do think Samsung should give the user full control over).
For 3D, things are much improved on last year’s C8000 model. Crosstalk has been reduced from a major point of contention to a mild annoyance. Greyscale tracking is also considerably improved, meaning that 3D images no longer suffer from obvious unwanted colour tints. Critically for side-by-side broadcasts, the D8000 LED LCD TV no longer exhibits defective scaling for 3D content delivered in this way – something Samsung should be commended for rectifying.
Although its screen uniformity suffers due to the ultra-slim design, and the forced noise reduction in non-game modes might turn away video enthusiasts, we feel that the Samsung UE55D8000 gets enough right for it to warrant a recommendation to users who will appreciate its stunning design. Its excellent contrast performance, reference-level greyscale and colour reproduction (after calibration), superb standard-definition video processing, convincing 3D capabilities, and its Smart TV functions will also find fans.
