What do you do if you already make what are regarded as the prettiest LCD TVs in the business?
You just make your next ones even nicer, of course. Cue Samsung's haute couture LE40A656.
Samsung's distinctive design
Samsung is marketing its new A656 TVs as the 'touch of colour' range, for, subtly injected into the familiar glossy black bezel, is a deep red tone that becomes more visible the further out the bezel extends. This makes the set look completely distinctive.
What's more, the set's chassis is constructed without any adhesive or screws, which is an industry first. You'll find plenty of stuff to make you happy among its connections, too.
For instance, you get a generous four HDMI sockets, all built to the v1.3 specification for Deep Color compatibility and all capable of receiving 1080p/24fps sources of the sort output by most Blu-ray players.
Other connection highlights include a D-Sub PC input, an optical digital audio output and a USB 2.0 port for playing JPEG or MP3 files.
Picture technology
In terms of key specifications, the 40A656's screen incorporates a 1,920 x 1,080-pixel resolution and promises a supremely high contrast ratio of 20,000:1, delivered with the assistance of the inevitable dynamic backlight system and clever filtering technology that screens out onscreen reflections.
Another key feature is 100Hz processing, which doubles the normal PAL refresh rate in a bid to reduce LCD's traditional problems with blur and resolution loss when portraying motion.
Other points of interest are a 120MHz mode for purer playback of 24fps sources, three levels of black level boosting, gamma controls, colour space and flesh tone adjustments, edge enhancement, noise reduction and picture-in-picture features.
Improved motion handling
Despite having a fearsome array of features, the 40A656's pretty, easily navigable onscreen menus and excellently laid out, backlit remote control ensure that you never get frustrated with exploring everything on offer. In an ideal world, the instruction manual could have gone into slightly more detail in one or two areas, but it's otherwise good.
Some of Samsung's previous attempts to improve its LCD motion handling - such as its Movie Plus mode - haven't entirely blown us away. But, thankfully, the 100Hz engine here is right on the money.
Even made to work extremely hard with a few sporting events, for instance, it goes about its business impeccably, massively reducing the usual blurring effect as well as making movement more fluid.
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