Opinions Needed on a Samsung 5063 DLP TV

[Philip]

Hi

I am looking at buying the Samsung 5063 DLP TV and would like anyone’s opinions on it. Good or Bad?

It is on sale at Future Shop (Canada) for $3499.99 (CDN) until Dec. 16

The other model I was look at is the Panasonic PT50DL54. The Panasonic is not on sale at Future Shop and is $4199.99 (CDN).

I am leaning towards to Samsung due to aesthetics and the fact it is on sale. Are either TV a good buy?

 

[Pete Dzwonkas]

I have the 43 inch in my TV niche above my fireplace. It is very nice, takes a few minutes to warm up, very good picture on HD satellite. I had problems feeding it component signals from 2 different Sony dvd players, so I switched to the S Video and have not had any problems. Not too concerned about picture being in the family room and all. Biggest quirk, which is nit picking, is that changing from one output to another takes a very cumbersome press of the remote for each of the inputs until you arrive at the one you seek. This can take 2 or 3 seconds per button press, so it's not a speedy change (like just finish a movie on S video and now want to use DVI for satellite). And the satellite is conected thru DVI and works great.

I could have gotten the 46 in the same form factor, but the WAF voted against the additional black trim on that model. Gave up 3 inches, but very visually appealing. And lightweight too. Only 68 pounds!

 

[nick_danger]

I owned the HLP-5063 for about a month before returning it. The screen had few defects which I found out were inherent to every DLP they make (blemishes minor enough to escape QA, I guess), the rainbow-effect disturbed my viewing pleasure, and the upconverting of SDTV was terrible. It was big, it was colorful, but I'm not sure it was worth the price. I exchanged it for the 46" model, hoping to escape the flaws, but it still did no good. My friend bought the 61" and returned it for the same reasons. I'm much more happy with my Zenith plasma now. DLP has potential, I'm just not so sure that any DLP under $4,000 is worth buying right now. Give 'em another year to iron out problems and bring costs down more.

My $.02.

 

[Philip]

I went with the Panasonic PT50DL54. I was able to get it from A&B Sound (CDN retailer) for $3198.00.

Does anyone know if it is possible to get a shelf for above the TV for the ceneter channel speaker?

 

[soundjunkie]

Phillip,
Give us some feedback on how you like the Panasonic. I too have been leaning toward the Samsung, but I've been reading a lot of reviews and opinion forums lately about the Panny's improved set. Two major complaints from them is the fan noise, and some issues with inputs. It seems to do a better job with SDTV though. With everything I 've been seeing lately, the transition to HD Standard may now be as far as 2009 now.

Let us know how things go!

 

[Philip]

The TV looks good. I don’t notice the fan noise, but my wife can sometimes hear it.

The picture quality watching standard Cable is not as good as my pervious 35" CRT. I am thinking of switching to Digital Cable because I can’t get satellite (Strata wont allow them). Does anyone know if I would see any improvement over standard cable?

 

[docferdie]

Have the HLN507W and am happy with it. I wish it had a real shelf for the center channel but I'm dealing with it. I thought I wasted my money until I hooked something up to DVI. Images at native 1280x720 are truly breathtaking. For the longest time, could not get image in DVI to match the color of the same image in component input. Finally became adventurous and looked at the service menu settings; the redness I noticed in the component inputs was indeed due to R_Gain being higher in component as opposed to DVI--in addtion to other service menu settings being different. Don't you wish they just exposed these controls to begin with so that we could tweak our property as we wanted too--but I guess that would be too easy. After implementing most of the DVI service menu settings to the component setting--to my eye I needed to use a different G_Gain setting for the Component input for the colors to really match--the Comcast HDTV box now has images of very similar color and tint whether viewing through Component or DVI. DVI is still sharper but that input is really reserved for the HTPC. As a side benefit, the tweak has also made it acceptable to watch from a standalone DVD player hooked up through the component input instead of always watching through the HTPC. Sometimes I wonder if I received a unit with screwed up service menu settings or if I really received it with default values.