Verdict

Pros

• Good picture quality for the small-screen market
• Impressive feature count
• Fast running operating system

Cons

• A touch expensive
• 3D support is of debatable worth
• Minor motion blur

What is the Samsung UE32H6200?

The UE32H6200 is a relatively high-end 32-inch TV sporting a Freeview HD tuner, Samsung’s latest Smart TV engine, Quad Core processing and even 3D playback.

At £530 it’s relatively expensive for a modern 32-inch TV, but if it delivers the sort of picture quality we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s 6 series TVs then it’s got a great chance of justifying its price.

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Samsung UE32H6200: Design and Features

The UE32H6200 doesn’t look spectacularly original with its all-black frame and shiny silver cross-form desktop mount, and nor is its build quality anything to write home about. But it’s still attractive enough for its money, especially thanks to the startling slimness of its bezel.  

Connectivity is strong, too. Network support comes courtesy of both integrated Wi-Fi and LAN options, supporting both DLNA playback and access to Samsung’s online content servers. There’s also full screen mirroring of smartphones and tablets and you can stream video from the TV tuners to your smart devices just like you can on Samsung’s top-end TVs.

Three USBs, meanwhile, provide playback of photo, music and video sources or allow you to record to USB drives from the TV’s tuner.

Given that small LCD TVs find it notoriously difficult to produce half decent audio, you may also want to note that the UE32H6200 supports Samsung’s new SoundConnect technology, which lets you synchronise it wirelessly to Samsung’s latest range of sound bar and audio dock products.

The UE32H6200 sports a full version of Samsung’s latest smart TV engine. We’ve covered this at length in a separate dedicated feature, so we won’t go in depth again here. Highlights worth a quick recap, though, are Samsung’s impressive S-Recommendations system for tracking your viewing history and using it to pick out upcoming programmes it thinks you’ll enjoy; and a multi-hub system dividing your different content sources – live TV, recorded TV, on Demand TV, social networking/own media and games apps – into five separate screens to streamline the content-finding process.

Samsung also used to be unique in the TV world for providing all of the UK’s main catch-up TV platforms – Demand 5, 4oD, the BBC iPlayer and the ITV Player, alongside such pay per view/subscription big hitters as Netflix, Amazon Instant, KnowHow TV and Blinkbox. However, at the time of writing the BBC iPlayer has mysteriously gone AWOL from Samsung’s servers. And while Samsung assures us the app will be returning, it won’t currently be drawn on an exact date.

One other notable thing about the smart services on the UE32H6200 is how quickly they run. Many mid-range and budget TVs with smart services tend to run sluggishly, but the UE32H6200’s Quad Core processing engine ensures that it doesn’t join the slow throng. Hopefully this processing power will also help the TV deliver a superior picture performance.

The screen is a full HD one, as we’d hope of a relatively high-end 32-inch model, with an edge LED array providing the illumination and a dynamic contrast system on hand to boost black level response. Plus there’s a ‘200Hz’ system for improving motion reproduction, and the set’s onscreen menus contain a long list of calibration tools that include colour management and white balance controls.

The most surprising – and possibly pointless – feature of the UE32H6200 is its support for 3D playback. The latest research suggests that 3D is now a low priority to most consumers, and we’ve long maintained that 3D on a screen as small as 32 inches tends to be pretty ineffective.

Samsung itself doesn’t seem convinced that anyone will use the
UE32H8000’s 3D talents as it hasn’t included any 3D glasses in the box.
But we guess there are people out there – especially gamers, potentially
– who might still fancy the occasional 32-inch 3D evening. So rest
assured we’ll be testing the 3D performance despite any philosophical
objections we might have to it.

READ MORE: Sony TV Reviews

Samsung UE32H6200: Set Up

The UE32H6200 does a fair job of guiding you through initial installation, and it’s good to see that Samsung now provides more tools – tutorials and an onscreen instructions manual with plenty of illustrative graphics – to help you figure your way through the TV’s smart features.

However, the smart features are still more inscrutable in places than they ideally ought to be, and there remain a few quirks in the main picture set up menus too. Not least the use of two separate advanced picture control menus when one would have done, and the hiding of the set’s Game preset in the General sub-menu of the Systems menu rather than just including it with the rest of the Picture presets.

When it comes to optimising the UE32H6200’s picture quality, there are a few basic rules. One is to turn off the noise reduction tools when watching HD. Another is to switch the screen format from 16:9 to Screen Fit to turn off overscanning when watching HD (something we really wish Samsung did automatically). The dynamic contrast system should be either turned off or only left on its low setting too, as anything more can lead to distracting shifts in the image’s overall brightness level.

Finally, we’d suggest choosing the Custom setting for the Motion Plus processing and setting both judder and blur to their ‘3’ levels, and, if you’re watching in a dark room, you should reduce the backlight setting to around eight or nine to get the deepest, most uniform black levels the set can deliver.