Samsung SP42W4HB > Reviews (3)

With our old 32" TV on its way out we decided to go for a bigger screen. The main reason being that our younger son has poor eye sight and the bigger the screen the more he could see. We also needed the 100mz frequency as he has photosensitive epilepsy.

The only question was should we go for plasma or rear projection??? Well the plasma was out of our price range, and when Argos had this TV on offer at £850 we jumped at the chance. So we ordered and waited the 3weeks for delivery.

The TV arrived in 2 boxes, one extremely large containly the TV itself and the other containing the flat packed stand.

As the TV is pretty heavy I would suggest that 2 pretty strong people put it together. The actual stand was easy to assemble, took me about 10minutes to screw together, but the TV was very heavy and difficult to maneovre on to the base.

Now to the conections, there are 3 scart connectection and one componant on the back as well as the usual arial, but as a bonus there is an extra component on the side, so in theory you could have 5 pieces of equipment connected, however there is barely enough room on the stand for a Sky+ box and Toshiba hard drive DVDrecorder.

So we have all the equipment connected and the TV plugged in so we're ready to go.

When you turn the TV on for the first time it auto-installs, not much help when like me you do not actually have an aerial, means you through the installation procedure even though you know it won't find any channels.

After the auto-install you're ready to watch TV, or you would be but I found the picture took a bit of adjustment to get the best quality including a feature called perfect focus, which improved the picture tenfold.

While actually watching TV you have 7 picture size settings which are
Normal - shows a standard 4:3 picture with gray lines down the side
Cinema - Wide screen shows some black lines
AutoWide - The most useful as it will switch between wide/cinema/panorama
Wide - Normal widescreen, will often be quite large black stripes top and bottom
Panorama - Another widescreen
Zoom 1 - Zooms to fill more of screen used for some widescreen dvds
Zoom 2 - Zooms even more, for those films with very large black stripes.

Now it's important to choose the right setting, because in common with plasma screens if part of the picture remains stationary for a long time it can cause image burn, there was actually a seperate instruction sheet warning about this.

The remote control seems well thought out, and is able to control a number of different devices, ie, vcr, cable, dvd.

All in a good buy.