Just a quick review for now. As you may remember, our TV developed a weird display issue some time ago. The issue was covered under our Best Buy extended warranty, so they offered to replace the TV for a TV of the same or lower price as the first one. After a little bit of waiting, mostly because we were away for the holidays, our replacement TV was delivered early yesterday morning. We ended up replacing our old Samsung LN-S4095D with the Samsung LNT4071F 40″ 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV. The Amazon page goes through most of the features, so I won’t rehash them here. Let’s just say that the TV has everything I’d want and then some. I still go back and forth on whether a slightly larger set would be better in our living room, but the 40″ TV does look great.

So far, after a weekend spent on or around the couch cleaning and coding, I can say that the TV looks awesome. Better than awesome, actually. We watched Planet Earth on HD-DVD which I gave to Heidi for Christmas on this set and it looked phenomenal. There’s a certain clarity to the picture that makes it seem like you’re either actually there or looking at an unprocessed copy of the video (almost like a soap opera or camcorder picture).

I’m now a believer in contrast ratios, by the way. Samsung claims a 25,000:1 ratio for this set, and it really makes a BIG difference compared to our old TV (6000:1). We’ve got great, rich colors with beautiful depth, great blacks, and smooth gradients. Everything I’m reading says that those areas are where the contrast ratio really makes a difference.

If you’re looking for a new TV you won’t be able to beat this one by much. The latest Sony’s are supposed to be roughly the same or slightly better, and the new LED lit Samsungs offer some tradeoffs worth considering. In the end, since I liked my old LCD TV, I decided to stick with that technology for now.

One minor complaint, which is that I don’t like the sound of the new TV. They’ve done some stuff to boost the bass, but it ends up making things sound unnaturally deep. I think in part I’m picky about this because I listen to my music on better than average headphones that have an even frequency response. You can modify the EQ settings, though, so a little time in the menus and I got the sound back where I like it.

Bottom line: Love it, happily recommend it.

On a random topic, this is the first Sunday where I’ve watched football at home in a while. Sunday Ticket is pretty nice, especially since we get many of the games in HD. DirecTV has done a good job with the package, including the enhanced menus and scoreboards in the package. Didn’t know the set top box had the ability to do enhanced menus and on-screen widgets.

Update: Forgot to post this little tidbit: The biggest complaint about the TV is something people are calling the “triple ball effect” where the Auto Motion Plus function creates ghost images for small, fast moving objects (e.g. balls when watching sports). Samsung has a new firmware update out for the TV that helps mitigate the problem when Motion Plus is set to low (the default) or medium.

I’m home today sitting in front of the newest addition to the toy family, a 40″ Samsung LCD HDTV that does 1080p. Now, I still haven’t found a source that can push the TV at 1080p, but this TV is as future-proof as I can get right now. Even though this TV isn’t a 50+ inch behemoth like my mom’s TV, it still commands the room it’s in.

I haven’t really used the TV enough to do a full review, but so far it’s been great. The TV is hooked up via a set-top box to Comcast’s HD Cable service, an XBox 360, and my old Series2 Tivo. So far, I’m impressed with the HD sources and the Tivo looks as you might expect an SD source to look on a TV like this.

The XBox 360 is a surprisingly good upconverting DVD player. I thought it played HD-DVD disks, but that was a mistake (btw, anyone want an HD-DVD copy of Sky Captain?). HD-DVD capability is coming this year, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try it out. I’m watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith which looks really good.

A quick note on the XBox 360: I think Microsoft may have actually built a good product here. This might be the first one since they rolled out Windows 95. I’ve played Madden in HD on this TV at 1080i and it looks gorgeous. The online play looks pretty cool, and the always on nature of XBox Live seems like a really good idea.

I’ll write more about these things later, but I need to get back to work now. The bottom line right now is that I’m really happy, especially considering that I got the TV, XBox 360, Madden 07, and extra controller from Best Buy for right about $3100 and zero interest financing for 24 months. The price on the TV was $2559 after the discounts for the XBox 360 bundle deal, Comcast HD discount, and the discount I found on BestBuy.com. Not a bad deal all around.

• Samsung’s site for the LN-S4095D.

Recently, my mom purchased a Samsung HL-R5067W. Over the past few months, she was able to get a new Samsung progressive scan DVD player for free or low cost, and this past weekend, I helped her get the unit set up with her TV using the HDMI connection. For some reason, I didn’t notice the included HDMI cable, so we went off to Best Buy to pick up a cable.

Holy freaking expensive… we found the cheapest Monster cable at around $95. The cheapest HDMI cable was $63 for a 4′ cable. That’s over $15 a foot. How crazy is that? These cables cost as much as many DVD players out there. It’s unbelievable.

As HD becomes more popular and HD-DVD or BluRay roll out, the prices will come down, but right now it’s a big disincentive to having HDMI components. Anyone have any ideas on why these cables are so expensive? No computer cable is so costly and I can’t imagine that the home theater equipment needs higher tolerances than a data interconnect.

My mom just bought a Samsung HL-R5067W 50″ DLP HD-Ready Projection TV this past week and I got a chance to go down and set it up for her this past weekend. I’ve been slow on the HDTV bandwagon… I’ve been waiting for the new HD media to come out (either Blu-Ray or HD DVD) before really investing in an HDTV because I figure I should get it all sorted out at once.

After playing with this TV, I might go ahead and change my mind. The 50″ Samsung has the following basic specifications:

• 720p resolution
• Dual HD tuners for PiP (though you need two sources, more on this in a sec)
• All the inputs you desire including “3 composite, 3 S-Video, 2 component, 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 PC (D-Sub), 2 Firewire, 1 Monitor, and 2 RF inputs” plus some proprietary ones
• DLP technology

There are other odds and ends that you’d expect (stereo speakers, digital audio out, remote, etc.). The TV is extraordinarily light (under 80 lbs.) which makes it easy to find a stand that you like that can hold the TV. It’s lighter than my 220 lbs. 32″ Sony Wega (at least 4 years old). The picture quality is excellent and because the tuner is built in, over-the-air HD programming is a snap. Just plug in an antenna and go.

My folks have a rooftop antenna that worked right out of the box. I had to re-aim it a slight bit to pick up all of the HDTV channels offered by the major networks in Philly, but once that was done I had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, and a lot of random local channels in digital and analog format. I don’t think we were able to tune in Fox DTV, just analog, but I’m going down there later this week to set up their DSL service, so I’ll work on that next.

The Samsung looks like a single-chip DLP solution, but I saw none of the problems that people indicate with single-chip solutions. Don’t even know, quite honestly, whether 3-chip DLP Cinema TVs exist in a similar price range, but regardless, I didn’t see any picture quality issues typical of early single chip solutions.

The main complaint I had centered on usability and on DVD picture quality. The DVD issue I think is actually related to the source, the DVD player, and not the TV. DVDs are only 480i at best coming into the TV as an analog signal. Even with component inputs, the image was a bit blurry if you were closer than 8 ft. to the TV (not a recommended distance, to be sure, but that’s how close I was when I was working on the wiring). They make upconversion DVD players that will play a DVD and output a digital signal (say over HDMI) to the TV at 720p, improving the image quality. That might be something to try, but it’s not important to my parents. It is important to me and if I get a TV like this, I’ll be investigating DVD players that have this feature.

As for usability, I found the menus a bit annoying, especially when it came to adding or deleting channels into the programmed channel list. For example, when I first set the TV up and told it to auto-program the channel list, it didn’t find the NBC and CBS DTV channels. I knew they existed and checked the stations’ web sites to confirm that they were indeed broadcasting. The TV offers this nice signal strength meter to help you fine tune the antenna position, in fact. The problem was that I couldn’t get the TV to tune into that channel so I could mess with the antenna to find it. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how to tune into a channel that didn’t exist in the list so I could add it without going into the auto-program feature. It was the most agonizing part of the setup and something that shouldn’t be so hard to figure out. If I tune into 3-1 and it doesn’t exist, just tune me in and tell me that it doesn’t exist. I suspect that there’s some reason related to way these signals are broadcast that makes this kind of interface better, but damn it stinks.

I also thought that the PiP feature was a bit lame. There are dual tuners, but they have two different input sources on the back. Which is fine when you have two sources, but sucks when you only have the antenna. There was also some restriction on which coax source I could hook the antenna to, which is why I couldn’t just split the antenna source into both inputs. I was also worried about confusion for my folks. The TV autodetects sources with connect devices and would then show both Cable/Ant and Ant in the source list which would be odd. The PiP feature is nice, though, for checking on the game while watching a DVD. Any of the input sources can be used for the PiP feature. Switching between sources for the PiP view was cumbersome. I didn’t find a convenient button on the remote that would do it, so I had to go into a menu two choices deep to switch sources.

Overall, though, I really loved this TV. So much so that I’m considering breaking my HDTV plan and getting one sooner rather than later. Perhaps as a Christmas gift for me. Heidi will kill me, though, especially considering the cost of our upcoming wedding, so I’ll probably wait. But, if I were getting a TV now, this 50″ TV is nearly perfect for a casual home theater buff like me.