Nice

I bought this TV on sale for $1650. For an extra $200 I could have gone up to the LN-T4665F and it's sexy 15,000:1 contrast ratio but decided not to. The ultimate reason is that I was putting the TV in a room with many windows. The LN-T4665F has a glossy screen that would have caused annoying glares. The LN-T4661F has a matte screen which was perfect for this room. Side-by-side the LN-T4665F has a notably better picture, but I'm pleased with the LN-T4661F. I use it with both an Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii. The game mode is great and hardly any delay is perceptible. For the price I believe the picture is about as good as it gets.

I wanted an LCD TV because Plasma is still unacceptable for gaming due to burn-in issues. Many gamers prefer DLP but I do not. I just don't trust that I'll get a long life out of any product that utilizes millions of tiny moving parts. Eventually they will start to break, that's just basic engineering principles. Not that LCD isn't without it's problems. I just felt it was the lesser of the two evils.

I don't know why another reviewer said this TV has no speakers, because it does. However, the built-in speakers are rear facing. This does make voices difficult to hear. If you are hooking up to a system with a center channel then you won't care about that though.

Yet another review complained about the menu navigation. In my opinion Samsung has by far the best menus for navigation of any TV manufacturer that I've seen. That was a large part of the decision to buy this TV.

The inputs are decent though I would have like to have a DVI-D input instead of a VGA input. A 3rd HDMI on the back would have been nice also. It does have 3 HDMI, but the 3rd is on the side of the TV.

One thing that has annoyed me about the TV concerns the syncing of HD input signals on the component inputs. I have an older Xbox360 that doesn't support HDMI. It does support 1080p over component cables however. If I play a DVD in the Xbox360 it switches that output down to 480p. The TV can display this fine but if I exit the DVD and return to the Xbox Dashboard at 1080p then the TV can't sync with the input signal. I have to switch to a different input then back to the Xbox component input to sync up with the 1080p signal again. It seems like this could be fixed with a firmware update, but there are no firmware updates for this TV posted on the Samsung website.

This TV does a good enough job upconverting lower resolutions. Upconversion is a nasty process by nature and will never achieve stunning results. It's even more difficult when the signal has already been through D/A conversion such as 480p input through component when I play DVDs on my Xbox. However, the result on this set is acceptable.