maxflinn:
had an interesting demo again today , checked out the c6900 sammy and a vt20 , i was surprised , the samsung was very good with 3d , i got the salesman to play the pana 3d demo disc on a pana player with the sammy , it looked as good as it did on the vt20 , very impressive , there were no dark scenes though , so i couldnt really check out the blacks or shadow detail ..
but i did get a look at a 2d bluray on the sammy , national treasures , at the very start there are a few murky nightime scenes , this is where the good news ended for the samsung ,
set to movie mode , terrible black crush , no detail whatsoever , like a poor lcd . and the blacks were poor too overall , worse than many lcd tvs of late ? didnt have the time to test the same movie on the pana as the store was closing ..
ill go back on monday and try the same movie on the v20/vt20 , im pretty sure that unless the black crush seen on the sammy is a characteristic of the blu-ray transfer , i will see much more detail and much deeper blacks , which will totally rule out a sammy plasma for me , if im ever in the market for a tv this year
Max, I have been doing some more reading on the Samsung P50C7000, and it seems like Samsung have some software issues with the movie mode. I found a picture illustrating the problem, but I am having some technical problems posting it here...
Anyway, it seems like the black level is seriously compromised when the movie mode is on, and turning this off will improve the image significantly.
It should have something to do with the refresh rate:
24, 30 and 60 Hz shows good blacks
25 and 50 Hz shows poor blacks
Apparently this problem was already there on last years models. A bit embarrassing for Samsung it hasn't been fixed yet!
But set up appropriately the black level should be somewhere between 0.03 and 0.05 cd/m2, which is not bad at all!