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Samsung Series 8 UE46B8000 - 46in LCD TV Review

Author	John Archer
Published	4th May 2009
Manufacturer	Samsung
Price	£1,521.76 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed	£1,750.02 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price	Click here

Design
Features
Image Quality
Sound Quality
Value
Overall

Samsung Series 8 UE46B8000 - 46in LCD TV

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First impressions of the B8000's picture quality with two of our favourite HD sources of the moment (Dead Space on the Xbox 360 and the Blu-ray of Quantum of Solace) were almost unbelievably disappointing. Both suffered from black levels that looked unexpectedly washed out and - shudder - deeply uneven across the screen, with the edges of the picture tending to look much brighter than the middle. Yikes. Suddenly Samsung's extravagant claims for its edge-based LED lighting were starting to look very stretched indeed.

Thankfully, though, it quickly occurred to me that Samsung has a nasty habit of shipping its TVs using the most rubbish presets imaginable. And this proved to be the case with the UE46B8000 - with knobs on. Though, just to keep me on my toes, the solution to each source's black level problems was quite different.

With Dead Space, the single most important change was to adjust the screen's ‘HDMI Black Level' setting from Normal to Low. With the greyness clouding, the nightmarishly dark corridors of the infested space ship suddenly turned into something you could genuinely called black, while the uneven backlight became all but non-existent. Now, at last, I was wrestling with the monstrous alien mutations and my own nerves rather than murkiness caused by the TV's initial backlight flaws.

Also helpful in turning the set from zero to hero in the gaming black level department are the Backlight level adjustment (I personally would leave it set no higher than four for HD gaming) and the Black Tone adjustment (which I set to Dark).

You also need to adjust the TV's image preset option from the horrifically over-aggressive Dynamic factory preset the TV ships with to a Game preset (weirdly tucked inside the TV's Setup sub-menu rather than the main picture one!), before tweaking the game settings for better black levels in the ways discussed a moment ago.

You can, if you wish, achieve many of the same picture characteristics found with the Game setting if you just use the picture's main Standard preset. However, the game mode crucially also takes much-needed measures - including deactivating the 200Hz engine - to reduce lag between a source signal arriving at the TV's inputs and it then appearing on-screen. Fail to use the Game mode while gaming and your performance will very likely diminish. You have been warned!

Turning to the TV's HD movie black level problems, the first thing to say is that oddly the option to adjust the HDMI Black Level is greyed out and can't be used while watching a Blu-ray. Thankfully the black level problems aren't nearly so bad to start with as they were with our Xbox 360, so pulling down the backlight (I personally went as low as its ‘2' setting!), setting the Black Tone to Dark, keeping brightness to below 50 and reducing the contrast to below 85 got black levels looking pretty much as good as I might have hoped for and certainly way better than anything you'd get from the vast majority of standard LCD TVs.

In fact, pictures really do look as dynamic in contrast on the UE46B8000 as they do on the best backlit LED TVs. What's more, the edge-based LED system seems to have largely eradicated the haloing around bright objects noted with last year's Samsung LED models - or most other ‘direct' LED models, come to that.

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Valsam said on 12th June 2009

Sorry My Mistake.
The Local Dimming ability will be introduced on the B9000 model, not the B8000

Conor said on 26th June 2009

Hi John, i'm sure you are a very busy man. I would greatly appreciate if you could post a comprehensive listings of the calibrated settings you used during your review for the... more

guruofsex said on 30th July 2009

I am very thankful to the site for this review. I do have a question though, as I live in netherlands and I do not currently own a mansion, ue46b8000 is a bit too big for my livng ... more

Afterglow said on 19th November 2009

My parents have had the Pioneer Kuro 5080 (I think it’s that model, it was the top of the range one - not the 508 which was a lot cheaper - sorry off hand I’m not 100% which was the top model) for about 2-3 years, before that a Toshiba 55” rear projection, I still have my Sony 41” rear projection which was one of the first large screen rear projection tv’s and was tv of the year and scooped many awards a long time ago.

I advised my parents to purchase the Kuro 5080 after carefully checking out reviews etc at the time, it was classed as the best plasma tv made at the time, I was a little disappointed with the quality of non HD sources compared to the Toshiba 55” rear projection - to be honest I preferred the Toshiba, HD sources were of course brought the Kuro into it’s own, I did find large areas of the sets plasma screen shifting/moving sideways which happened now and again - not sure if this is normal for a plasma tv?

Anyway I’ve always kept an eye the new tv technology over the years and could not be tempted or saw the point of HD 720p tv’s - basically obsolete before HD has even been readily available.

A few months ago I saw Samsungs LED tv’s on demo in the shops and in my personal opinion and experience - I have not seen a tv like it! The quality of the picture is in a league of it’s own - a much higher level than any other tv format ever, I’ve been a professional photographer since the mid-nineties and only compare other tv’s similar to film (there was some exceptional sharp film made) but nothing compared to the clarity and vibrance of transparency film which is what the Samsung LED tv’s look like.

One shop demos still images on two Samsung LED’s in their window and it is like looking at high quality prints, not like any tv image I’ve ever seen before.

It’s taken a long time for myself to be tempted by a tv other than my beloved Sony 41” but the Samsung UE46B8000 is the tv to do it.

All tv’s need tweaking once set up at home to your own personal requirements, factory presets mean nothing to me, digital cameras have presets and are nothing until you tweak them yourself, I think buyers look too much into what the full spec of how much a product offers, yes there’s a key list we need to check but let’s face it, most features are never used a lot of the time.

Phantoma - I’ve been admiring Yamaha’s soundbars / built in surround sound from one trendy looking box - these look a fantastic and I bet sound it too, I have the old analogue yamaha surround amp 7 speaker set up in my room and just could not fit those speakers in my new living room, so these new Yamaha’s would definitely do the job!

My parents have had the Pioneer Kuro 5080 (I think it’s that model, it was the top of the range one - not the 508 which was a lot cheaper - sorry off hand I’m not 100% which was th... more

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