Read the full review here – UN46C6300 Review

Review 3

We did weeks of research to inform our jump to a 21st-century TV (we were still on a boxy CRT before!), and Amazon reviews were key for us - so we wanted to provide one of our own now that we're a couple of weeks into our purchase.

This TV is amazing. First of all, the Amazon process could not have been better - the TV was shipped in flawless condition, the delivery company showed up within 20 minutes of the beginning of our selected window, and they put the TV on its stand and placed it for us. No muss, no fuss. Amazon's price gave us about $600 in savings compared with the local Best Buys and Belmont TV stores. We were initially nervous about buying such an important (and large) item online, but kudos to Amazon on this one.

Now, the TV itself - the picture quality is jaw-dropping unbelievable. And the color, contrast, and brightness balances were spectacular right out of the box - we have yet to make a single adjustment to those settings, and yet we find that golf, football, TV dramas, and movies are all amazingly lifelike (perfect skin tones, natural colors, etc.). It feels exactly like having a "magic window" that can produce any view as if it's really right there in front of you. We watched "Witness" - a 1985 classic that takes place in Amish country - and the severe black wardrobe of the Amish made me feel satisfied that this TV can reproduce pleasing blacks that help the other colors displayed to "pop" appropriately.

Speaking of black, I was initially worried after reading about light-leaking at the corners (common to virtually all side-lit LED models), and I'm relieved to see that it's not an issue for us. It is detectable if you really hunt for it, but I watched "Contact" (where Jodi Foster zooms off through space in her little capsule) and did not even notice any light-leak in the stunning space vistas that movie offers. Again, if I decided to watch only the extreme bottom-left or bottom-right corner of the screen for the entire film, I might have gone "ooh - there it is!" but come on, who does that?

People may not think of what a TV looks like when it's not on, but TVs are important focal points (especially as they get to today's sizes), and this model is a beauty. Rather than be boxy in shiny plastic, the edges are translucent glass which give the TV a very refined feel. We saw other Samsung models that were more expensive and supposedly offer greater features, but their chrome spider-leg stands are hideous - this model, thankfully, offers a pleasingly simple and stable flat foot with a very useful cylindrical swivel that moves efficiently but stays firmly put when you have the TV at the proper angle.

Finally, the Samsung menu design is surprisingly intuitive and benefits from extraordinarily helpful descriptions if each selection that display on the bottom of the TV as you scroll through the menu options. The menus are organized in columns that build out from the left with very attractive icons; it overlays the image in a very tasteful way instead of displaying some ugly blue background or anything like that. One issue that may cause you to work these menus immediately is that the TV defaults to using MotionPlus in an attempt to combat motion-blur and provide crisp movement. Somewhat annoyingly, it defaults to MotionPlus separately for every connection you'll make to the TV (such as DVD player, Wii, etc.) - but at least you can turn it off. Like other reviewers, we did not like the "soap opera" quality - and furthermore, once we turned it off, we were impressed that the LED technology handles HD motion extremely well. We do not see any blur even in fast-moving sports scenes. We had some standard-def content on our Tivo that did, in truth, look worse on this new TV than it used to on the CRT - but the MotionPlus feature gave us an unacceptable trade-off by turning the motion-blur into really artificial "pan-and-scan" or soap opera video-camera movements. We simply accepted that standard-def content on new HD TVs will never look as good as either HD content or the way standard-def displays on old CRT technology - it's simply a trade-off the entire industry and consumer base must make. By the way, that doesn't mean your DVD library is in trouble - I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and my DVDs look spectacular on this new television (even when they were coming over 480i a/v from our older DVD player - we just upgraded to a new Panasonic blu-ray player which is upscanning and sending the DVD content over HDMI, and HOLY GOOD GANDALF it's amazing).

Also important - you can easily deactivate the ambient light sensor that automatically changes TV brightness, another feature we did not find a good use for.

Short version of this review: this TV is a huge winner, offers amazing quality for this price, and we hope you'll be as happy with it as we are!