Samsung LN52A850 52” 120Hz, 1080P LCD TV: The Living Review

Soundscape

I am well aware that many of you will be using this HDTV will a full high definition 5.1 or higher audio setup so this section may be just a bit pointless for you. However, for the time being I haven’t yet set up my 7.1 Denon receiver (come on, I just moved for crying out loud!) so I am stuck using the built in speakers on the LN52A850. I shouldn’t actually make it sound like a chore because truth be told; they are pretty damn good for day-to-day TV viewing. Granted, they can’t even begin to compare to a full surround sound speaker setup and need some serious tuning before you can begin to appreciate them but they still rank pretty high on my list of built-in speakers.

There are of course some caveats. First of all, Samsung claims that there is a built-in subwoofer somewhere on this TV but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find it and turning up the bass to max resulted in very little gain in the lower-end of the tonal range. Due to this, some explosions and other special effects really lack the necessary punch and even some voices sound a tad hollow. While this may seem like nit picking (and it really is) when you pay almost four grand for a TV with a “built in” subwoofer, you want it to sound like a million bucks.

Other than that, the two 10W speakers on the LN52A850 really hit above their weight class in nearly every other category. Like I already said; the sound settings require some serious tweaking to get the most out of your listening experience but once that is done, you may become a bit less rushed to buy that perfect surround sound system.

The Effect of Backlight on Power Consumption

I had been told time and again that the backlight setting on an LCD TV can have a significant impact on power consumption but what no one was able to tell me was just how much. So, in order to find out, I pulled out my trusty UPM power meter and Tripp Lite 1800W line conditioner. Basically, the line conditioner was plugged into the wall in ensure the input voltage to the TV was regulated at a constant 121V so any fluctuations would not impact the results. The UPM power meter was then plugged into the line conditioner and the TV was finally attached to the meter. In order to keep these results constant, the opening 15 minutes of I Am Legend were played to get a good cross-section of power consumption figures. Only the peak rates were recorded.

In addition, I measured the Standby and Absolute Max power consumption as well. The Standby value you see is a constant reading instead of a Peak as all of the others. On the other hand, the Absolute Max figure you see is the result of a weekend of regular TV and movie watching while the power meter logged the maximum power consumption. It represents the highest peak power consumption this HDTV pulled from the wall with the blacklight set to 10 after about 8 hours of viewing. For all these tests, the Energy Saver was disabled.


Before we begin analyzing this, let’s all hark back to what Samsung states power consumption to be: less than 1W standby and 390W under “operating conditions”. Well, we blew the 1W standby claim straight out of the water but since there is no indication of peak power consumption in Samsung’s specifications, we will have to say their estimate of 390W is pretty close since no sane person would (hopefully) watch this TV when its backlight is set to max.

Now that I have that off my back, I can say that there should be no doubt in your minds that the backlight setting has an immense impact on the overall power consumption of LCD TVs. That was pretty much a given but what shocked me the most was that between the lowest and highest backlight setting there was more than a 200W difference. This means that lowering the backlight can have a pretty significant impact on your electricity bill if you watch more than a few hours of TV every day.

For comparison’s sake, my parents’ 32” Toshiba CRT TV uses about 150W (4.7W per diagonal inch) whereas this TV uses up to 7W per diagonal inch and as little as 3W per diagonal inch.