My Samsung LCD HD Television: A Review from a New HD Buyer

I made this tv my replacement for my former bedroom television, moving from the Advent 13" CRT television to this Samsung 26" LCD HD television which doubles my screen size and gives me wide screen viewing. Please note this is my first ever High-Definition television purchase so you are getting this review from a perspective of a new user entering the HD world! I chose to not replace my crt tv in the living room since the prices of the 40" and larger HD tv's are still in the $2,000 range (The good name brand ones) which are way above my spending limit.

After some research time, I realized several things that a newbie like me would not know until owning an HD LCD tv. And I will explain this to you now to hopefully help others in making their own decisions when choosing a new hd tv of their own. When buying an LCD HD tv, I realized it's not what I imagined it to be. I was expecting everything to be beautiful "eye candy" out of the box once I connect my cable to the back of the tv.

I am using time warner as my cable provider and when watching regular cable channels on this new tv, I was totally unimpressed with the picture quality The images came out blurry, the picture was stretched and the overall detail was just terrible. Ok, I see one reason is the tv defaults viewing to wide screen 16:9 mode, so I made a simple full screen 4:3 normal mode to make that correction and things looked a little better. There are other screen viewing options such as zoom1 and zoom2 modes but since this enlarges the screen picture, I didn't see it very useful because a lot of the overall picture cannot be seen while watching a movie. Adjusting the contrast, sharpness and brightness also helped improve the picture, but it was still worse than the picture coming from my normal crt television. Granted, I was only using component cables, but that is the second best cable for picture quality and yet I could not make the picture of the regular cable channels look real good.