back to article Samsung UE55D8000 55in net-connected LED TV

Samsung’s D8000 is as stylish as it is advanced. Barely contained by the tiny 5mm brushed-metal bezel, its images appear suspended in space. Only the brand’s familiar X-wing pedestal, with illuminated logo bulging from the bottom of the screen, keep them tethered to terra firma. Samsung UE55D8000 Samsung's 55in D8000: more …

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  1. Arctic fox
    Flame

    I had a fairly positive attitude to this telly........

    ...........as I read through your thorough review Steve until I came to the bit about it ships with ONE pair of the specs. ONE pair with a TV that costs over two and a half grand? Sammy are extracting a great deal of urea out of customers they expect to part with over 21/2K.

  2. CADmonkey
    FAIL

    Hmmm...

    "If you turn Motion Plus off entirely, the smudge-ring artefact disappears, but moving resolution drops to around 650 lines. There’s also some slight judder on pans."

    £2,600 telly : 0

    My 12 year old Philips 26" CRT : 1

  3. PushF12
    Go

    Samsung removed the Yahoo Widgets

    Since the previous model year, the screen shot shows that Samsung has removed the obnoxious "Yahoo!" button from the remote control. I guess that means Samsung has discontinued the Yahoo Widgets program.

    I wonder whether my old Samsung TV will still get app updates. The apps are weak and entirely worthless if you have a computer nearby, but I paid a premium for it, so I want the updates anyways.

    Can anybody suggest a good 3rd party firmware for the 2010 Samsung TVs?

    1. Chz

      Not yet....

      I don't believe the firmware's been completely reverse-engineered the way the A and B models have been. Yet. If you've got a 600-series, there is a hack to enable PVR functionality but that's about it thus far. That said, someone is working on it - it's only Linux, for heaven's sake!

      I only bought the app-enabled one for iPlayer, but with a little one in the house the Youtube app has proven pretty useful as well.

      For what it's worth, DNLA playback on my C650 has been great. It doesn't see embedded content in matroska containers (you need to rip out your subs to a .srt file), but it's been otherwise flawless over the network.

  4. Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

    I'm spied on by every little eye...

    Another piece of equipment in our lives gains the capability to report everything I do back to some faceless globocorp no doubt so that I can be better targetted with adverts. No thanks.

  5. Wind Farmer

    Unfair?

    It looks like the tv designers used AutoCAD, and the remote 'designers' blocked out their 'design' by colouring in cells in an Excel spreadsheet (I doubt it was crayons and graph paper, but who knows).

    How can such a good-looking tv have such a minging remote?

  6. DeepThought

    How do I get the English Version of El Reg?

    "although I was conflicted about just how much Motion Plus picture processing I could tolerate"

    Does he mean 'uncertain'?

  7. Complicated Disaster
    Thumb Down

    Yahoo

    I'll be reluctant to ever buy a Samsung TV again - less than 18 months after paying £1600 for a 2009 LED TV I was told that it is no longer being supported and there will be no new features or software updates. Rubbish.

    CD

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Ouch, but look on the bright side

      You could have bought a Sony. It's a little known feature that all Sony products are automatically discontinued the first time someone actually buys one.

  8. TheFirstChoice

    I would consider another Samsung, but...

    ...my current one has an annoying user interface where to go between sources I press "input" and it just cycles round, rather than bringing up a menu. The (slightly newer) one I recommended to my parents brings up a menu for this, and when I emailed Samsung to ask if they'd do a firmware update they emailed back and said they couldn't be arsed (in not quite the same words).

    I have no time for companies who just abandon customers with kit that isn't the very newest model. Hence why I'll also never get another Sony Ericsson phone. There are plenty of other manufacturers for me to work my way through!

  9. swisstoni
    Paris Hilton

    Unexpected Unveiling?

    So did ... "Incidentally, browsing the Smart Hub had unforeseen consequences during my time with the telly. A conflict in IR codes meant that some Smart Hub commands actually caused my IR controllable curtains to randomly open and close."... this happen during your redtube moment? Red faces all round I imagine.

  10. deshepherd

    @TheFirstChoice

    We used to have a Samsung as our main TV where you pressed the "input" button on the remote and it cycles through the different sources. We then got a newer one last year and on that when you press the "input" button you just get a menu and you have then got to select from that. (Worse, we've just acquired a VM TiVo box and its remote can control the TV - including the "input" button signal - but while this brings up the menu you can't actuallty select anything from the menu or even dismiss the menu without the Samsung controller)

    I wish Samsung would do a firmware update to bring back the "cycle through the inputs" behaviour!

    Moral of the story: you can't please all the people all the time!

    1. TheFirstChoice

      @deshepherd

      Maybe they should take a leaf out of LG's book (though hopefully not their Standard Def scaling book) and have it that pressing "input" brings up the input menu, but pressing it repeatedly moves the highlight on the menu down by one selection each time, and then not pressing anything for a few seconds activates that selection. Or you can use the up/down arrows and enter button on the remote for faster selection.

      And also LG seem to be the only manufacturer of consumer-level kit that still have an RS232 control port on the back, and still allow consumers to send commands to the set (the control codes are handily printed at the back of the manual) - which is amazing for automation systems that can use RS232 control.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    LED TV

    This is an LCD TV folks don't believe the marketing bollox....

    It uses LED BACKLIGHTING instead of COMPACT FLOURESCENT BACKLIGHTING

    do you see the difference? The screen is still a standard LCD with all the several ms delay switching problems causing the 3D ghosting...

    Proper OLED illuminating pixel TV's are not being made yet, they are on the business plan as future tech to ensure that the tv makers have a good business model.

    Don't let it be said that business stiffels inovation.. oh no... DO SAY IT DOES...

    1. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: LED TV

      I think your fellow readers are bright enough to know LED != OLED, and what LED means in this context, Anonymous.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      OLED's had a brief launch a year or so ago...

      I saw an OLED TV about 14months ago (in Currys) and they were awful.

      The OLED screens have trouble with brightness levels (basically on or off plus flickering) and as a result the pictue quality was like watching a TV on a EGA graphics PC.

      The colour pallet was so small there appeared to be on about 16 shades for RGB, and the sets didn't even do decent dithering effects. One picture showed a sky line, were the sky was clearly output in about 4 shades of blue with distinct bands from the deep blue at the top to pale blue near the horizon.

      About the same time I saw this TV, I used some portable devices with OLED screens at work. They were not intented for displaying photo's or video, just colour graphics, as those devices only claimed to have 64K colours.

  12. SOSAGES
    IT Angle

    firmware update?

    Update the firmware and review it again for the bits you didnt like (not the 3d)

    couple of other reviews had the same issues and new firmware fixed it.

    Also never use DLNA its a butchered protocol that should die if i had my way :)

  13. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    "This flagship screen is an exercise in economy"

    So says a man who spent good money on automatic mechanical curtains. Obviously you're using the word "economy" in the sense of "so beautiful that you don't care how much it costs".

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