Once you’ve followed the bits of set up advice noted on the previous page, it’s immediately obvious as you settle down to watch the UE32F6800 that it’s a truly serious bit of kit.

Right away, for instance, our attention was grabbed by its excellent black level response. Dark scenes and dark parts of otherwise bright scenes both look startlingly convincing and compelling, thanks to the way the UE32F6800 avoids the grey, milky misting that’s still a problem for many LCD TVs.

What’s more, since the UE32F6800 manages to achieve this excellent black level response without having to use a local dimming system, you don’t have to worry about seeing any distracting ‘blocks’ of light around bright objects.

Just as happily, the panel seems immune to the sort of backlight clouding hot spots still seen with some edge LED TVs, enabling dark scenes to look uniformly lit and thus more immersive.

Perhaps the ultimate sign of the UE32F6800’s innate panel quality, though, can be seen in the amount of shadow detail visible in dark scenes. This helps dark pictures avoid the hollow look that plagues to some extent the majority of LCD TVs, making them more consistent and thus immersive (that word again…).

Moving away from the Samsung UE32F6800’s potent contrast performance to other strengths, its HD pictures are startlingly sharp by 32-inch TV standards (so long as you turn off the noise reduction routines). Detail levels are extremely high yet the minutiae on show isn’t joined by the sort of dot crawl that would reveal the set to be forcing its sharpness.

The extreme clarity remains, moreover, during fast-moving action scenes, with the TV suffering practically no motion blur at all or exhibiting any significant unwanted motion processing side effects – so long, at any rate, as you follow the guidelines outlined in the set up section.
Finding such impressive motion handling on a 32-inch TV is rare indeed.

Arguably the UE32F6800’s coup de grace, though, is its colour handling. There’s a remarkable amount of subtlety in the way it portrays blends and skin tones, revealing it to have much more colour processing power and tonal range than your average small-screen TV. These qualities also enable it to deliver much more natural colour tones with a wider variety of source types than you’d generally expect to find at the 32-inch level of the market.

The UE32F6800’s evidently powerful video processing system pays dividends, too, on those increasingly rare occasions where you have to watch standard definition.

The processing is clever enough to add detail and sharpness to standard definition sources while at the same time taking out standard def ‘nasties’ like MPEG blocking noise and mosquito edging noise.

 Motion still bears up well in standard def too, and nor is there a significant drop off in colour accuracy of the sort seen with many LCD TVs when running standard def.

Viewing angles before the image starts to lose contrast are a bit limited, and as noted before you need to be careful with how you set images up if you want to get the best from them. But other than that the UE32F6800’s 2D pictures are pretty much exemplary.