Eating Your Own 46″ Television Dogfood
Monday, September 25th, 2006So I recommended it and now I’m here to tell you all about it: the Samsung HL-S4666W 46″ DLP HDTV.
As I had mentioned previously, I was in the market for a new TV, I came across this one. I avoided the impulse buy. Then I completely rationalized my purchase. Soooooooo, how does it look? Great! How does it work? Great! Now what?
Thankfully, this TV works as a TV should: there’s no complicated menus, no great big initial set up, no mastering of an amazingly complicated remote control, and no series of general pain-in-the-ass minutae to deal with. So here it is:
I’m certainly enough of a dork that I haven’t removed the stickers nor the styrofoam, it just lets me hold on to the new TV happiness a little longer.
I’ve been able to test the TV with only a few moments in HD @ 720p, ranging from an XBOX game or two to streaming HD content coming from my laptop through an HDMI cord. It’s impressive and the TV delivers. As a standard screen using standard component video, the TV renders all of the faults of that video. In other words, regular TV looks like regular TV - just bigger and not better. For those who love to compare and nitpick, I can say that the image is great but I did notice that the Panasonic models I previewed at Best Buy had less visual noise, and thus looked smoother and slightly sharper. But the pricepoint was vastly different.
I managed to luck out with shipping. Initially the TV was $1400 + $150 of shipping, then the price dropped to $1300, then Amazon included it under their free shipping service. So after watching the TV price drop, and staring at my old 15″ tube TV for too long I took the plunge and waited 2-1/2 weeks for the TV to arrive. Apparently a lot of users have had problems with delivery and the TV being D.O.A on arrival. Thankfully, the shipping company I dealt with was very professional and even offered to unpack the whole thing.
The bulb associated with DLP TVs is easy to access in a back panel that unscrews. Every couple of years or 6,000 hours the bulb does need to be changed, this obviously varies on your usage of the TV.
All in all, I stand by the recommendation of the TV and if anyone has questions, feel free to ask as I would love to learn and experiment more with the TV myself.