Nothing beats the excitement of watching a movie on the silver screen but at R75 a ticket, it’s hardly the attraction it once was. Catching it on the home cinema certainly diminishes the scale but at least there’s never a queue for snacks, the toilets are clean, and the cinema doesn’t smell of foot. With that in mind, we planned a special evening.
If you’re familiar with Flight of the Conchords, you’ll know that Wednesday night is business time. But for Mission Samsung, we put our romantic interlude aside for a group activity. It’s not what you’re thinking, sies on you :p
Popcorn was popped, chips were dipped, and good friends got together to watch a movie on our new (and borrowed) 40-inch Smart LED TV.
Chances are you’re not all that interested in our movie night #welfie but we’re obliged to share one, so check it out below and then we’ll get onto our impressions of how the LED TV did in the first mission of Mission Samsung’s second blogger challenge.
We’ve had a plasma TV for about five years now and the transition to LED has certainly been an eye opener. Because we’re used to viewing content on a plasma TV, the images produced by the LED TV just felt “odd”. It’s what they call the “soap opera effect” – the sharper and crisper an image gets on LED, the more it starts looking like a soapie on TV and loses that cinematic feel (it starts becoming more pronounced in UHD TVs because the picture looks so life-like.). Here’s an example.
By adjusting the different settings, you can reduce this soap opera effect, and the TV does have a “movie mode” that adjusts a bunch of settings to produce a slightly softer image, for a movie-like experience. That’s what we used for movie night over the default “standard mode”.
The TV has other modes which you’ll recognize. On one end of the spectrum is “dynamic mode” which is useful if you’re going to watch a movie with the lights on. It makes the TV easier to see, the picture becomes sharper and colours are more vivid. The counter is “Natural mode” which helps reduce eyestrain by bumping the brightness and contrast down a couple of notches. Ultimately, it all comes down to what is most comfortable to you as the viewer.
Similar to the picture modes, you have some choice on the sources from which you can consume your content. We watched a blu-ray via the PS3, but a flash drive can be inserted into three of the available USB ports. Because the Wi-Fi- and LAN-enabled Smart TV can be made part of your home network, it will pick up computer applications like Windows Media Player or XBMC that may be sharing music, pictures and videos. Accessing shared content is easy enough but trying to find the right file to play is another story, thanks to Samsung’s UI. The media browser only shows files as icons so large that only eight of them can fit on the screen. If you have loads of content, it may take many taps of the navigation buttons to find what you’re looking for. There is no way to view a simple list or even order the content by name, or date modified. The media browser could do with a serious overhaul and is the weakest part of our experience with the TV thus far.
This concludes the first mission of Mission Samsung’s second blogger challenge. Keep in touch with further updates here and you can always track #MissionSamsung on Twitter.