Introduction

This is our very first television review here on ActiveWin, so I apologise now if anyone thinks that this review goes on too long, but believe me I love new Television technology and I’ve had 5 TV’s in the space of a year so it’s about time I started to talk a bit about them here on the site, especially now a lot of people are making use of computers in their living rooms.

Now let us move on to the design of the set. The LE40M87BDX is another strong design from Samsung, firstly it is one of the few televisions that I’ve bought that I’m pleased to say had the stand already attached to it. The next thing that I’ll comment on is how reflective the new screen was, the screen is called a “Super Clear Panel”, but it isn’t only the screen that is reflective, the whole set is glossy, from the front of the panel to the back is in a cool black finish. The only downside to this is how often you need to polish it as it grabs fingerprints and dust like nobody’s business. I’m glad that Samsung decided to include a lint-free cloth in the box to take care of both the screen and the casing. Still, it looks damn smart in my living room.

The design of the screen itself is curved, gone are the straight edges of some previous Samsung televisions, we now have curves all over it and although when I first saw the set I wasn’t too taken with its appearance, I’m now very pleased with the way it looks, it looks great on my glass stand and matches my speakers!

So onto the setup, as I stated a little while ago, the television comes with the stand already attached to it so there is no hard work to be done other than taking the set out of the box it came in, while the instructions on the box state two people should lift it, I managed to do it myself with little trouble as it only weighed a bit over 21kg’s. Once you have placed it on your television stand it is time to start the setup, so over to the manual we go...well we don’t really need the manual to setup the TV. Firstly I connected the Scart connection for my Sky box, next I attached the Xbox 360 via VGA to the TV, and finally I put the Playstation 3 into the first of the three HDMI ports. Once this was done I plugged in the power cable. Once you have done this the screen lights up and shows the “Plug and Play” function that does the scanning for analogue and digital television, it found my stations fine...but we’ll talk about freeview later in the review.

The connections for the TV are on the back and the side of the set. There are three HDMI 1.3 inputs all of which take 1080p signals. There are two of these HDMI ports on the back and one on the side. The go alongside the HDMI’s on the back of the set we have two scart ports (one is RGB), the component connections, VGA and I’m glad to say they have also got a digital optical port nearby too which is what I tend to use for my scart connected Sky box. There is also a service port on the back as well, but I’ll talk in more detail about that later.

On the left side of the TV you will find the last of the three HDMI 1.3 ports and a Common Interface slot next to S-Video and composite connections, it also has a 3.5mm headphone socket as well which is a nice touch if you have a lead long enough to reach the TV from your sofa.

Finally on the right hand side of the screen you have the buttons for Source, Menu Sound Volume and channels so that ends the connection section. All in all you can’t say many bad things about the variety that is here, but it would have been nice to have had two RGB scart sockets if I am going to moan about anything at all.

Once the TV is up and running I checked out the on-screen menus, the design of them hasn’t changed much for a couple of years, so they are still easy to read, understanding some of the features is another thing altogether though as it would have been nice to have a little side menu or help button explaining what all the features do.

Once again Samsung has filled the menu with settings that you can fiddle with from  backlight brightness to HDMI Black levels, there is loads you can play around with and I’m pleased to note that not only does it allow you to save different settings on every source input, it also lets you customise the main settings “Dynamic”, “Standard” and “Movie” for each input as well so you can change brightness, contrast, colour etc .

There are problems with the menu though; it would have been nice to have made it look a little better in the age of 1920x1080p resolutions, it is also a pain to have it take up a large chunk of the screen when fiddling with settings like colour changes etc as there isn’t enough transparency to it to see through and judge if the changes you have made are what you want to keep.

The default settings out of the box are pretty good for the M8 series too which is a good thing for those of us who don’t have fancy light monitors or calibration tools, but there are some major features in the set that have caused people problems, but I will talk about those later.

So let us start out our main part of the review talking about Picture quality, first we’ll mention the black levels. As previous talked about, we have a “Super Clear Panel” on the Samsung for the first time and I have to say it makes blacks look fantastic, it has the lowest black levels on any TV I have seen so far, even competing with high end plasmas. There is also a backlight option built into the menu which lets you set the level of backlight you want from 10 down to 1. I tend to have mine set at 8/9 as  I felt that any lower than that tended to wash out shadow detail, but the black level is one of the major high points of the M8 series. The menu also has an option for “Energy Saving” which lets you tweak the backlight a little more as well. Just play around with these settings as they can always be returned to the default. The contrast on the M8 series has also seen an increase thanks to the “Super Clear Panel”.

Colour and detail are the next specifics I will talk about here, once again out of the box I felt that the colours on the M87 were pretty good and balanced, but spending some time changing the colours and tints and I could get levels to exactly how I felt was right, yes there are some minor inaccuracies but most people really won’t notice them and I haven’t seen any 1080p TV that can compete with the Samsung here either.

Good news again is that the Samsung M87 allows you 1:1 mapping though both HDMI and VGA. This means the Samsung can fit the 1080 image onto every pixel on the screen so there is no stretching or reduction of quality. When you feed through a 1080i or 1080p signal you choose the “Just Scan” option on the Samsung menu and it makes sure that every pixel is used. With VGA you don’t get the Just Scan option as it should (in theory) auto adjust the resolution to fit on the screen...It worked perfectly for both my PC and Xbox 360 in VGA although when I did a firmware update recently I had to manually adjust the VGA position myself to get it perfect.

Now onto motion handling, and video processing and this is a quite a bad one here for the Samsung M87 series...although it could get better if Samsung sort out some of their problems...anyway. The TV has a response time of 8ms and the Samsung M87 tends to handle most motion as well as you would expect from an LCD with that response time.

Now the video processing side of a TV is a massive part of what makes or sometimes breaks a TV and Samsung have made a bad decision here. For some reason Samsung have decided to ruin 3:2 cadence detection for film mode deinterlacing. They have added something called “Movie Plus”  which when disabled doesn’t let the TV detect 3:2 cadence and thus it doesn’t apply film mode deinterlacing to NTSC, HD DVD or blu-ray. Some people might ask why disable “Movie Plus” if Samsung have made it to smooth out judder, well let’s just say that while it was intended for that purpose it only manages to speed up motion and make lip-sync dire, in layman’s terms it looks bloody awful when enabled.

To make matters worse if you have an early firmware version on the TV then you will struggled to disable it as after you do so, changing the input on the TV just enables it back on again. I can confirm that this has been fixed on the latest firmware (Version 2000) which Samsung sent me but for the thousands of buyers out there of this TV in Europe and the UK, Samsung have yet to offer out any kind of firmware upgrade kit so users are either stuck with the problem for the foreseeable future or as the case is from reading and commenting on forums, returning their TV’s and getting new ones in the hope that they get a later firmware.

Anyway I have asked Samsung when users might get a firmware update, but my message has gone unanswered so far. Back to the motion – the Samsung M87 does motion-adaptive video deinterlacing and directional filtering so you still see some scan lines and jaggies on video especially on SD content. Finally we have “Digital NR”, Samsung’s digital noise reduction – it’s not actually a bad feature for SD content and for Sky I tend to have this set to high for the best picture.

Now let us talk about the Freeview decoder that is built into the Samsung LE40M87BDX. The setup of freeview was done when the TV was first turned on, so it was already to go right away. The episode guide is excellent and Samsung have done a really great job of making it both easy to use and detailed enough for those of us who don’t need to learn too much.

Picture quality from the Samsung’s freeview decoder is pretty good, especially on channels that have a high bit rate like Channel 4, but as always the larger a LCD TV gets the worse a 576 signal on a 1080p screen gets, that’s not to say it’s bad at all, it’s better than Sky is through Scart that is for sure.  Now I mentioned the reflective screen earlier on but it is good news, during the day I didn’t notice any reflections on the screen as long as you don’t have sunlight hitting it directly then you shouldn’t notice any problems. In fact I would go so far as to say that watching TV during the day actually showed off the TV better than night viewing as it showed off the fantastic black levels that this TV can produce.

But it is not all good news on the freeview front, while I am one of the lucky ones to have a near perfect set, a lot of users who have bought the Television around or before the time I did are suffering badly in many ways. I’ll mention the first problem here and that is freeview, there are some very poor juddering effects being shown on a host of Samsung M8 series TV’s, newer models of the TV have this problem fixed, but it isn’t a simple case of updating the firmware, it seems that you will have to get an engineer out to rectify the problem. Samsung UK haven’t acknowledged this so far, but other Samsung branches have stated the fault and are asking for users to contact them directly.

With Sky connected through Scart I was a little disappointed, more with the Sky quality than anything to do with the TV, running Sky through scart really shows up the low bitrate of the channels and reminds me why Sky HD looked so good when I had it last year for review. There is another problem here though with the Scart connection – myself and a number of other users have interference over both Scart ports, scrolling lines in the backgrounds of dark pictures, it seems to me that Samsung has used some poor shielding around these ports which are so close to the power supply socket.

Now let’s talk about high definition as this is where the Samsung M8 series really shines. First let’s talk about the Playstation 3 connected by HDMI, picture quality is excellent the colours look fantastic when playing games, viewing pictures and even on the XMB menus, recently Sony added a HDMI Full RGB option which means you get the perfect setting for this TV, where blacks really are blacks instead of gray. Gaming on the M87 is also excellent; I have played Motorstorm, Virtua Tennis 3 and Resistance as well as many other demos on the PS3 that show off just how good this TV can look when fed excellent signals. Motion was smooth in each title I played, especially when “Game Mode” was turned on in the menu.

Talking of “Game Mode” for the first time on a Samsung TV I have actually made use of this feature as I felt it really did smooth out games as well as making motion better as well as colours being more representative of the game itself.

The next feature I tried out was Blu-Ray, I have a load of blu-ray films so I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t disappointed again, films like “A Scanner Darkly”, “Ice Age 2, “Pirates of the Caribbean 1 & 2” look fantastic on the screen with perfect blacks, but then I noticed some judder in films, this is because of the motion problems I mentioned earlier on. It isn’t always noticeable but once you do see it, you do tend to notice it more and more.

Sony introduced full 24hz support for Blu-Ray playback into their last update for the Playstation 3 a couple of weeks ago and the internet was buzzing with this news as it meant that judder would be eliminated on televisions that can play back 1080p@24hz – Now while the M87 series in the United Kingdom hasn’t advertised 24hz support – the TV can actually do it. Users in Germany and Italy and a couple now from the UK have it working both on the Playstation 3 aswell as on their PC’s, heck it is even advertised as a feature in Germany.

So of course I loaded up the Playstation 3 and set 24hz to automatic in the PS3 menu and waited to see how much it would reduce judder, well I waited and waited – until I realised that the Samung was still displaying a 60hz picture. It turns out that while TV’s made before June can run 24hz if it is forced into the TV, because of another bug in the set (probably in the fact that the EDID part of the TV on older sets isn’t up to date, I say this as newer sets have a different EDID than older ones) you can’t display it on the Playstation 3. To say I was disappointed was an understatement. After talking with Samsung about the problem it seems that M87’s made after June with firmware 1013 upwards on them and the updated EDID will worth perfectly with 24hz on the Playstation 3, but those of us who don’t have it working may well have to have the TV serviced to get this feature as the firmware update isn’t updating the EDID right now.

Overall though, Blu-Ray at 1080p does look superb, even better than HD-DVD through the Xbox 360 on VGA I’d happily say, it just the judder on both that let them down right now.

Now the Xbox 360 via VGA – I have set the TV to 1920x1080 and it looks superb with the Xbox 360 from games to HD-DVD’s. Watching recorded video back through the Media Center Extender is also pretty good quality as is viewing photos. I haven’t tried Game Mode on the 360 at all as the settings on VGA have felt perfect from the word go. Once again playing games on the 360 is an excellent experience, colours are spot on and the black levels are once again superb, especially if you set the 360 to output extended settings for display in the dashboard. Gears of War looks wonderful and playing games like Fifa 07 are as smooth as a hot knife through butter.  Other games which can really show off the colour range and black levels of the Samsung M87 are old ones like Hexic and Geometry wars.

But once more after talking about all the great stuff here through VGA another bad part rears its head, it again works perfectly for me, but hundreds and I mean hundreds of users on the forums can’t get 1920x1080p through VGA on this set...Samsung support tell them that it doesn’t support the 360 through VGA, yet an advertising campaign states the 360 makes the perfect match for this TV! Also it seems funny that those who have newer sets can once again user VGA at 1920x1080 without problems. Again this isn’t something firmware will fix, those who have had the problem have managed to either replace their TV or through repair they have had their entire mainboards replaced on the TV.

Samsung gave me this response for the VGA problems with no mention of a fix for them:

This issue is identified as entering DPMS Mode when connected to PC /1920*1080 60Hz

In case of some PC’s (according to graphic card), the input signal for H-sync in Sub-micom is low. So, TV goes to DPMS mode as it regards that there is no H-sync. Generally PC has 4.8V of Sync voltage but the PC with this problem has 3.3V for Sync.

Some people in forums have been asking me what my favourite settings are for the Samsung M8 series, while I love fiddling with every bit of my TV, I have to say that I feel it is better for the purchaser to play around with settings and come to their own conclusions about what they feel are the right colour, brightness, contrast and feature settings they like to use with any television, I have used calibrations sites have said are the best possible before, yet when I have tried them I have found them to be washed out and poor compared to what I personally like. So all I will say about calibration is that the Samsung TV is excellent for you to play around with and you can get some truly fantastic results even with Standard Definition content, just make sure you turn Movie Plus off as soon as you get your TV!

Sound on the Samsung M87 is decent at best, it certainly isn’t as good as I would have hoped but most people who buy this TV will probably output their sound to a decent AV system like I have and use the internal mute option on the TV. The Samsung M87 suffers with some backlight buzzing too, though for some strange reason I only notice it when connected by Scart, not by VGA or HDMI and it has varied pitch throughout the time I’ve had it.

Now I have to sum everything up and this is probably the hardest review I’ve had to do. Why? Well despite the mass of problems I love the set;

But it is those bugs that keep coming to the forefront of my mind, there were a lot of early Samsung fans buying this set and they feel let down when their calls to support get them nowhere and they are told there is no new firmware out for users to install to fix some of their problems.

Heck even some of the problems like VGA@1920x1080 can’t be fixed by a simple firmware update so not telling customers that those who don’t have VGA working at that resolution will need to return their set or get it repaired by the Samsung service team is very bad PR in my book. There really are customers who believe their sets can be fixed by firmware when they can’t.

But I’ll end the review on a high note: the picture quality is superb when it is fed a high definition signal from VGA or HDMI and the colour and black levels are excellent. The screen while reflective is also great to look at and the look of the set is superb. VGA with the Xbox 360 and HDMI with the Playstation 3 for gaming is top notch with some of the best picture quality I have seen from any Television. Let’s just hope Samsung support their customers and help them get the Television they want.

Feel free to comment on the review here.