In my last article I wrote that there’s never been a better time to buy an HDTV, and I had just pre-ordered the Samsung HLS-5087W 50-inch Rear Projection DLP Unit. The Samsung was delivered last Thursday and here is a summary of my initial reaction.
First let me give you some background on preparing for the new HD television. I am a satellite TV subscriber and needed to upgrade my DirecTV hardware to be HD compatible. So last month I went to http://www.directv.com and ordered the HD upgrade package. For $200 DirecTV came out and replaced my old satellite dish with a new 5 LNB oval HD dish. The HD package included leasing DirecTV’s new H20 HD receiver and also included installing a new UHF antenna on my roof to receive local HD over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts. The new dish and receiver were necessary for high-definition reception, as DirecTV is carrying high-definition local broadcasts in the new MPEG-4 compression format instead of the old MPEG-2 standard. Since HD material requires much more bandwidth than standard definition video, cable and satellite providers will migrate to the newer MPEG-4 standard over time, and DirecTV is leading the way for now.
I was now ready to receive HD programming as soon as the Samsung HLS-5087W arrived with one exception: an HDMI cable to send the digital audio/video signal from the H20 to the Samsung. I am a firm believer in investing in high quality cables for analog connections between audio/video components. But HDMI is a digital interface that carries a stream of 0’s and 1’s. So it either works or it doesn’t. So I bought a $20 HDMI cable on the Web instead of investing $90 or more in a Monster cable that I thought would produce exactly the same audio and video quality. One big advantage of HDMI is that it carries video and audio signals (in uncompressed digital form) so you can easily reduce cable clutter behind your home theater system.
Now everything was ready: I just needed the new Samsung to be delivered. I ordered the TV from Crutchfield, who has a great reputation for customer service, is an authorized Samsung online retailer, and offered the TV free of tax and shipping. The delivery guys brought the TV to my living room, unboxed it, and placed it on the stand in my home theater. I plugged in the power cord, plugged in the HDMI cable from the H20 to the Samsung, turned on the power, changed the TV screen type on the H20 from 4:3 to 16:9, and amazingly the new TV worked right out of the box. cash register!
I was quickly in HD nirvana: watching local broadcasts in full 1080i and Dolby Digital 5.1, as well as premium services like HBOHD and the various HD channels that are part of DirecTV’s HD package. But how would the 150 DVDs I have (most of which I trade through Peerflix) look on the new Samsung HD? First I had to open the menu on my Panasonic DVD recorder/player and enable 480p output via the component cables I connected to the Samsung. Most DVD players sold in the last three years can output a progressive signal (the “p” in 480p) over component cables instead of the normal interlaced image transmitted over composite and S-video connections. 480p is a huge visible improvement over 480i and you’ll want to make sure you’re watching all your DVDs on an HDTV using 480p.
I chose Shrek as the first DVD to show on Samsung. Dreamworks did an incredible job with the animation quality of Shrek and thought the DVD would be a good test of the picture quality of a standard definition DVD on an HD television. So what did it look like? One word sums it up: amazing! I don’t think I’ll be going to the movies much more, I’ll just wait for the DVD to come out.
On Saturday night I watched a broadcast of Steve Winwood in HD and Dolby Digital 5.1 on KQED, the local PBS affiliate. Being a huge Steve Winwood fan, and having seen Winwood on this tour at a local venue in 2005, I was eager to see what kind of audio/video experience the new HD unit could deliver via a local OTA HD stream. Once again, I was amazed at the picture quality and quickly went to the KQED website to see what future Soundstage broadcasts are scheduled. I am now eagerly awaiting the Garbage performance which will be released next month.
However, there was one more thing to do before I could experience the highest image quality of the new Samsung: I needed to calibrate the image for maximum video quality. Virtually all televisions sold today ship from the factory with video settings that are far from optimal. Colors are often oversaturated, too warm in tone, and controls for sharpness, brightness, and contrast that are also far from optimal. So I found my copy of the DVD “Video Essentials: Optimizing Your Audio/Video System” and spent half an hour adjusting the color, brightness, contrast, and sharpness controls. The HLS-5087W has a numeric display of each of these settings, which is a nice touch for those of us who go to the trouble of tweaking every possible setting for maximum image quality. It was hard to believe that I could improve Samsung’s picture quality right out of the box, but adjusting the picture settings resulted in a much more “movie-like” appearance to movies on both my DVD player and receiver. H20.
I’m looking forward to seeing the season premiere of HBO’s Entourage in its full glory tonight. It’s also going to be hard to delay buying an HD DVD source with HD-DVD and Blu-ray players and titles now starting to appear. But we’ll talk about that in our next Tech Talk post.