Its image quality and motion smoothing could be better, but it's packed full of great online services and smart features
Written By
Published on 27 May 2012
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1 / 4
Our rating
Reviewed price £1700 inc VAT
The E8000 is Samsungs flagship plasma TV and it comes in 51in and 64in models. It also has all the extras you expect from a Samsung smart TV, such as a host of internet services accessed via the Smart Hub, an integrated media player, 3D, and many control methods. Theres even a second remote control with a touchpad, and an IR blaster that lets you use one Samsung remote for all your devices.Plasma panels are known for their high contrast, but the E8000s image quality never felt quite right to us. Colours and contrast are far better than those of LCD TVs, but we found the image too dark. You can use the separate Dynamic Contrast and Black Tone options to increase contrast to taste. We also advise setting the Colour Tone to a warmer temperature than the default.Even so, we found that light or dark areas were saturated, with little middle ground. In Casino Royales night-time airport scene, for example, the wet tarmac shone brilliantly, but the detailing on the bad guys black leather boots was missing. In the Casino scenes, all detail in Le Chiffres black velvet dinner jacket was missing.
The E8000s Smart Hub is jam-packed with apps and features. It has a good selection of well-known internet services and tons of apps and tools. Sadly, the quality is inconsistent, with poor translations evident in lots of apps. Some apps are obviously aimed at a foreign audience (theres one for monitoring your bills with a Dubai utilities company, for example), but there some gems too, such as the 3D sections documentaries.
Samsungs AllShare app lets you access photos, videos and music on connected USB drives, as well as your home network and the SugarSync cloud-based storage service. Its nice to have all this integrated in one interface. Conveniently, it remembers your recently used items. You can also use a USB drive to record TV. You need to format it first, but you can use drives as small as 2GB.
Theres also 3D support, but unlike Samsungs LCD TVs, the E8000 uses active-shutter glasses that are dark and suffer from flicker. We found the image way too dark, but the 3D effect was convincing.Voice and gesture control are neat features, but it takes a while to get used to them. The hand gestures require a Korean wave to initiate (its a bit like a royal wave) and it has to be done in a certain area in front of the TV. You can select actions by grabbing, but these actions are currently limited to changing volume and channel. Voice commands are initiated by saying Hi TV. There are more commands at your disposal with voice control than gesture control, but we did feel a bit self-conscious as we barked commands at the TV.
The E8000s image quality is good, but not as good as that of Panasonics plasma TVs, and its motion-smoothing doesnt seem to work very well. Despite that, we were mightily impressed by its smart features and media playback. We prefer the Panasonic Viera TX-P42ST50B or the high-end Panasonic Viera TX-P50VT50.
Written by
Barry de la Rosa
Barry de la Rosa has written various articles on a range of topics covering everything from TVs to mobile phones.
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