Samsung LN55B650 55" 120Hz LCD HDTV: A Layman's Review

Picture Quality: Blu Ray

All subjective testing was done with the settings mentioned on the last page in addition to a Sony Playstation 3 being used as the primary Blu Ray player. In this example, the screen captures you see are from the IMAX scenes in Batman: The Dark Knight and Transformers.

Please remember that no digital camera (Digital SLR or otherwise) is capable of accurately reproducing an image from a HDTV as the human eye would see it. As such, the pictures below are for illustration purposes only.


Once the settings had been tweaked away from the over-saturated factory specifications, the overall picture quality of this Samsung TV was able to shine through. The color saturation and reproduction was spot on while the whites were never washed out. The IMAX scenes in The Dark Knight provide some truly stunning visuals and the LN55B650 was able to keep up without any perceptible problems.


The only real issue we found with the B650’s performance when displaying 1080/24 content was an almost imperceptible amount of motion blur in fast-moving scenes. Increasing the Blur Reduction setting alleviated it but you should remember that engaging any of the default Auto Motion Plus settings (Clear, Smooth, etc.) resulted in the hated “soap opera” effect where camera and character movements seem to be overly fast. In addition, the default AMP settings nearly always introduce slight artifacting in some scenes along with a slight halo around characters when they were interposed against a light background.


Black level performance is extremely impressive to the point where we can say that the LN55B650 displays some of the best contrast we have seen in a TV to date. Naturally, plasmas and CRT (if you can find one) units still boast better black levels, this set comes very close to matching them. While some people have reported blacks with a slightly blue hue to them on lower-end B-series sets, this one doesn’t seem to suffer from this problem at all.