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

Picture Quality

Right before the time of writing, my Blu Ray player went to AV heaven courtesy of my girlfriend’s rabbit chewing through the power cord. Unfortunately, the little critter didn’t fry itself and it left me with only my trusty Bell HD PVR 9242 to run HD signals to this TV. That means every picture you see here is an of a TV image which has its quality constrained to the best definition of The Movie Network HD running through the 1080i interface from the 9242. This isn’t the best situation to display what the LN52A850 can really do but it will give you a pretty good idea.

In addition, since this is the first installment of this “Living” review the images show what I was able to do with a mere 30 minutes of tweaking the settings in Standard mode on the 1000.3 firmware. I haven’t had time to mess around with the Movie or Dynamic modes yet and I am sure they will open up a whole new realm of possibilities. Granted, many more adjustments will be made but before I wrap this article up in a few weeks (stay tuned for the updates every Thursday) I will post the best settings I found on the newest 1004.0 firmware. So all in all it should be an interesting progression of picture tweaking over the next little while.

All of these pictures were taken with a Canon S3IS camera and are of the TV in operation. Just remember, these are photos so don't show the true picture quality.

Let’s start with…Mr. Bean’s Holiday!!


I will be perfectly honest with you, when I first saw the picture quality it was love at first sight even though there were a few adjustments to make. First of all, the backlight was far too high which resulted in a washed out image but turning the backlight down to 3 solved that problem. There were a few other things I changed but there was nothing major in this first round of viewing.

I also looked for the telltale signs clouding (lighter areas of the panel which look like faint, multicolored “clouds”) and couldn’t find any traces of it. The dreaded halo effect that some people reported on the 750 series of TVs has also been eliminated with the 850 series.


Even after only minor tweaks, there are literally no words to describe how good the picture is; from contrast to color depth, this TV seems to have it all. You can see from the picture above that even a 1080i signal from a set top box can show some stunning quality and detail.