Samsung Booth – CES 2012
After sitting through Samsung’s CES press conference and seeing their newest displays I was expecting great things when we finally made it to the booth. Unfortunately, it was all about Smart TVs at Samsung; which is not to say that connected platforms aren’t important, just in my opinion less so than picture quality. While it’s impossible to really judge the quality of an HDTV under the lights of CES, and Samsung had them turned to “11”, so it made getting anything besides a tan quite difficult. It wasn’t all regret however as the new ES8000 were very impressive, with an incredible 75″ spin of the sexy, thin bezelled LED LCDs being available later this year. Complaints aside Samsung’s focus on their apps platform continues to provide them with leadership in this area, especially with the dual-core CPU giving a responsive experience and providing a solid upgrade path to current models as well as the future revs via a PCMIA-esqe expansion slot.
When their 55″ OLED was paraded on stage during the press conference, it’s vibrant colors and deep blacks were apparent even from distance. Unfortunately, I found it fell eagerly in the “good from a far, but far from good” when inspected from a more reasonable distance. Without proper time with the display and more control over the test material it is difficult to determine the root cause, but from my vantage point I’d have to guess that slow pixel response was the primary culprit with significant color retention/bleed and very poor video processing as the picture changed.
Samsung was primary focused on their LED LCDs, but plasma display panel (PDP) fans were not entirely left out of the party; just buyers south of the 6500 series because that is the cut-off for their new “Real Black Pro” filter which significantly enhances blacks. They chose to demo the 6500 (see the gallery) against last year’s display, but the more significant difference was observed between it, and the 4500 series immediately to the left (shown in the PDP power consumption picture) which was obviously grey in comparison.