Topic: Samsung UE46D5000

[martins]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum. Please be gentle with me.

We bought a Samsung LED TV UE46D5000 at Christmas and it seems to suffer from 4 or 5 thick vertical bands which run down the screen. Most of the time they're invisible and if the screen is mostly white or mostly black you can't usually see it but the closer the screen gets to grey or midtones the more obvious and distracting they become.

I assume it's something to do with the backlighting and I can fiddle with the settings enough to make them slightly less obvious but only at the expensive of the picture as a whole - so the black areas become MUCH too dark and I loose detail.

It's very frustrating in such an expensive TV. Weird thing is, I don't actually remember it when we originally got it in mid-December. Either a) now I've seen 'em I can't unsee them, or b) they've got worse - which suggests it's faulty. Our old TV, an eight year old Sharp flatscreen didn't ever have this problem.

I rang Samsung and they were no help at all - just asked me to rest the TV but that didn't help a jot.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks very much,

Martin

[David Mackenzie]

Hi Martin,

This is more or less standard for slim LED side-lit LCDs.

The light sources are at the sides (and sometimes the top and bottom) of the screen, and light is scattered across the panel by light guide plates. Apparently, this process hasn't been perfected. We've seen similar uniformity problems on nearly every LED LCD TV we've reviewed, and like you say, we think it's a pretty glaring problem on expensive panels. It's one of the main reasons I usually recommend Plasma displays instead, although they're not without their faults either.

[martins]

Thanks for the reply David.

Well that's kind of annoying. On one hand I'm glad it's not just my set but on the other hand it's pretty poor show of the manufacturers not to solve this. Now I'm wondering if I should try and return it - but I guess it's not technically 'faulty' so they probably won't accept it back. Grrrr.

Oh well, thanks again for the info!

m