The Samsung PS64F8500 may seem like just another TV, but Stephen Dawson says, it’s the best TV he has ever reviewed.

Even though LCD TVs now seemingly dominate the consumer electronics stores, there remains an important place for plasma TV, especially when it comes to large screen sizes.

Here we’re looking at Samsung’s latest and largest plasma display, the PS64F8500. By way of comparison, for roughly the same price you can get Samsung’s latest Series 8 LED/LCD TVs, with a virtually identical feature set, but at a considerable cost in size. You’ll only get 55-inches rather than the 64-inches of the plasma. In terms of screen area, that’s only three quarters of the size.

LCD vs Plasma
Plasma TVs really are fundamentally different to LCDs. The latter work by means of Liquid Crystal pixels switching between transparency and various levels of opacity. There’s a light behind them (usually generated by LEDs in higher-end TVs) so when a pixel is more opaque, it is darker.

However, the eye’s response to light is more or less logarithmic: one hundredth of the amount of light looks closer to one tenth as bright, not one hundredth. No LCD pixel can go 100% opaque, so there’s always a little light leakage and the eye is quite sensitive to it. LED TVs adopt strategies of varying the backlight brightness to make blacks seem blacker, and often do this to great effect, but backlight control can only ever approximate the bright areas of the picture, not precisely match them.

Plasma pixels, though, generate their own light. Application of a little electricity to a gas inside a tiny glass sells tickles it into producing ultraviolet light, which in turn provokes some phosphors painted on the end of the cell into generating light.

So, in some kind of naïve theory, each pixel should be able to go perfectly black. All you need to do is switch it off. And indeed, each can. But there’s a problem. While a pixel can be perfectly black, it cannot be nearly perfectly black. It’s like making a sticky object move over a surface: you’ve got to give it a significant shove to get it started; there’s no smooth ramp up from zero.

Plasma TV makers deal with this by rapidly flickering each pixel on and off, at least potentially. The proportion of the time that the pixel is switched on determines its brightness. If you look very closely at some near-black on a plasma you will see random dots from the three cells (one each for RGB) flicker on occasionally to generate the illusion of not-quite-black. Don’t worry, you can’t see these from your seat.

Nevertheless blacks remain a problem for plasma as well.

Why dwell on this tech stuff? Well, we’ll get to how well – startlingly well – this TV does near blacks shortly. But first, let’s outline what the TV is about.

Size and features

Sixty-four inches is one enormous TV. That’s 162.5cm in proper Australian talk. The Full HD panel provides a very wide field of view if you want to sit reasonably close to the TV.

The panel is reasonably slim: around 55mm at the maximum, and the picture border is 33mm at the top and sides. It comes with an unusual smoothly flowing stand that is both stable and good looking. It does not allow swivelling.

Of course it has a HD digital TV tuner. There are also four HDMI inputs, three USB sockets and networking via both Ethernet and WiFi.

This is a ‘Smart TV’. When you switch it on it displays the ‘Smart Hub’, or one of the panels therein. This particular one shows the current TV station or input in a window in the corner, along with a bunch of large thumbnail images showing viewing alternatives. It’s a bit like a graphical EPG, except that it is a smart one. If you use the TV to watch actual TV stations, it will build up a sense of your preferences over time and populate this screen with suggestions it figures that are most likely to interest you. To take advantage of that, you will need to use the TV’s own tuner to watch TV rather than some PVR, otherwise the TV won’t be able to gather the necessary information. The thumbnails and program information presented on this page are drawn from Samsung’s own internet server, not from the TV stations’ EPGs.

You scroll through four pages within the Smart Hub. The next one provides network media features, such as playing content served up in DLNA format from devices on your network – including audio, video and images – and even playing/displaying content from the ‘cloud’. Dropbox, SugarSync and Microsoft’s SkyDrive are supported with this. I used both Dropbox and SkyDrive, and it worked well with both, although you’re likely to get faster performance if you just share the relevant sync folder on your computer so that the TV can access them directly.

The third Smart Hub panel provides access to social media, with facilities to share via Facebook and Twitter what you’re watching with friends, get their updates and so forth. This is kind of usable with the TV’s touchpad remote control, but for text heavy comms it’s best to plug a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle into one of the TV’s USB sockets and use those devices to interact with the TV. These are also useful for the web browser. Skype is also accessible. The TV has a pop-up camera on the top, so it’s all ready for video calling.

The final page lists all the immediately available apps and a link to many more apps. Here you get YouTube, QuickFlix, various TV catch-up services, games and Foxtel on Internet. This last allows you to use a subset of the full Foxtel service, paying only on a month by month basis. Even if you don’t sign up you can still watch Sky News.

The TV can be controlled by more than the RF touchpad remote and the IR regular remote. Apple and Android apps can be installed as well, plus there’s voice control and motion control. Both of these are considerably improved over last year’s models, and the voice control function can actually speak back to you in Australian.

Nonetheless, I found them poor options compared to data entry by means of keyboard and touchpad remote, and they had the alarming tendency to unexpectedly invoke themselves due to something happening in the room. The voice recognition function appeared on the screen far too often when I was merely playing loud music from the home entertainment system. As always, separating wheat from chaff is hard for computers. I switched them off.

Connections and picture
Let me be blunt: while I like Samsung LED/LCD TVs, and I like some of those and some plasmas from other brands. But this TV is the best TV I’ve yet reviewed.

Brightness can be a problem with some plasma TVs, especially in 3D mode. This TV was plenty bright, including in 3D. The 3D was pretty good quality as well, although there was some crosstalk of each eye’s content to the other when white 3D objects appeared before dark backgrounds.

The colour was excellent, and with a sufficient range of adjustment to satisfy any consumer tastes. The default picture setting has the ‘Sharpness’ control set way too high. This should be wound down to zero, or close thereto. The one real weakness in the picture was that even with the ‘Contrast’ control (which sets the upper white level) maxed out, white was a little duller than the ‘whiter than white’ setting on test patterns.

But blacks, oh the blacks! All that I wrote above about plasma blacks applies, but Samsung has done some extraordinary tuning. In my white-dots-on-a-black-background test patterns it seemed that the TV switched off the pixels entirely, or very close to entirely, in the black parts of the picture. This resulted in sharp full contrast edges on my white dots, with far more precision than ever achieved by an LCD/LED TV.

Furthermore, Samsung seems to have developed a system of ramping from dark to fully off and back again in plasma in such a way that that the final switch is unnoticeable.

Conclusion
Pile all that into an enormously large screen – but one that can be usefully watched from as close as the 2.5m I set it at in my office – and you’re set for a great viewing experience.

The trade-off is a one star energy rating (on the new system) compared to the 5.5 stars of Samsung’s top of the line LED/LCD, and a hefty power consumption of 1,083kWh per year (on the energy rating standards assumptions).