Great All Around TV

When our large screen projection TV died a few months ago, we began investigating large screen HD televisions. Our first purchase (an LG 50PC5D) turned out to be a bad decision, so we returned that, did some more research, and finally settled on the Samsung HPT5054 50" television.

I'll be upfront right now -- I'm not a pro when it comes TVs. Just a regular consumer, but hopefully some of the information here will be of use to you.

Size, Weight, and Color

Amazon lists it as 3.7 x 48.5 x 31.1 inches, so I'll trust their dimensions. The color of the board around the screen is a nice rich black, rather like shiny piano material. It weighs approximately 100 pounds -- not something you should move by yourself!

We have our TV on a stand, although it can be wall mounted. It comes with a small TV swivel stand, which to be honest, makes me a little nervous -- it doesn't look like it can be holding up that much weight. So far it has, so we'll keep crossing our fingers.

The Remote

The remote is one of my least favorite parts of the TV. It's long, and not very ergonomic. It's also got way too much stuff on it, that is hard to find. I try to use it as little as possible, and use my Tivo remote instead.

Technical Specs

It's a 720p plasma television with 15,000:1 contrast ratio. There are 3 HDMI connections (1 on the side, two on the back). It has two back component video A/V inputs, 3 S-video inputs (1 on the side, two on the back), and 2 RF inputs (back).

It also comes with picture-in-picture, but you would need dual tuners for it to work. At best, you can watch your DVD player and TV at the same time.

Sound

The sound isn't the greatest, to be honest. If you can get surround sound, I would highly recommend it. We don't have it, and we've managed to make do. The speakers are a little weak, and I find I often have to turn the sound up quite high to hear things.

Picture Quality

I don't know what your cable company is like, but we only have about 10 HD channels -- everything else is still SD video. For that reason, it was important to us to find a TV that could display SD in at least decent quality. The Samsung HPT5054 does that quite well. Yes, SD video is slightly blurry, but it's still much better quality than some of the other TVs we looked at. You sort of learn to deal with not so great SD tv when you have an HD tv.

HD TV is absolutely gorgeous. There isn't much to be said about it -- images are crystal clear, and very bright.

DVDs are also quite stunning. One of the reasons we got rid of the LG 50PC5D that we had originally purchased was that all of the DVDs we purchased looked like fuzzy watercolors. It was very disappointing, since we had heard so much about how great our DVDs would look. If you buy this TV, you'll be very happy with how your standard DVDs look. I don't own a blu-ray or HD-DVD player, but I hazard a guess that they would look awesome.

I see other people mentioning "viewing angles" in their reviews of plasma tvs. I guess this is a problem in other tvs. I've never noticed anything like that with this tv -- you can see everything fine from all side angles on this tv.

Playing Games on This TV

We own a Wii, PS2, and Xbox 360, so it was important to us that we have a TV that would work well for all three of them. This tv has handled them all with flying colors. It works well for the older PS2 games, and the newer Xbox 360 games are stunningly beautiful in it. What's even better is that while many other HDTV owners have reported lag issues on games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, we have noticed no lag issues at all. My understanding is that that's because it has a built in "game mode" that speeds up the image processing -- it's one of the main reasons we bought this specific TV.

Other Considerations

The TV puts out quite a lot of heat, so just be prepared for that. If we've been watching TV for a while, and I go up near it, it's noticeably hot.

You also need to be aware of the issue of "burn in", where pixels in the screen can be burnt in a certain image on the screen is left on there too long. We baby our tv a lot. We "broke it in" by running DVDs continuously for about 100 hours before playing any video games (games usually have a static part on the screen, like a health monitor), and we try not to pause our Tivo for more than a minute. If we play games, we always run the tv for about 10 minutes after a while to let any static parts of the screen from the game get lit up by the TV. We're probably being overly anal-retentive, but we're trying to get as much life out of the tv as possible.

The only other downside to buying this is that once you do, you'll want to buy other stuff! We went out and bought a better DVD player, and an HD Tivo. So just be warned!