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In some ways the Samsung UE40D5520's user interface is ground-breakingly good. Particularly ingenious – and something already being 'borrowed' by most other brands – is Samsung's Smart Hub. This cleverly places pretty much all of your sources, from your normal TV channels to the Smart TV stuff and multimedia files contained on a DLNA PC or USB drive, on a single 'jumping off' screen.
And by clever use of well-spaced and neatly designed icons, it achieves this feat without the screen looking overly cluttered or complicated.
Soon, we suspect, all TV interfaces will look more or less like Samsung's Smart Hub.
Another great touch on the Samsung UE40D5520 is its interactive on-screen instructions manual. Select an option in the TV's set-up menus and you get a brief but usually effective explanation of what that feature does next to it on the screen. There's no need to faff about trying to cross-reference what you're seeing on the screen with a paper manual.
There are a few issues with the Samsung UE40D5520's menu options, though. First, the Game mode you need to activate if you want to enjoy the most lag-free gaming experience is obscurely tucked away in a System menu, rather than just being placed alongside the other picture presets.
A few too many of the processing options can actually harm rather than improve pictures, meanwhile, making some parts of the picture menus feel unnecessarily cluttered and over-complicated.
While the on-screen instructions mentioned earlier are mostly decent enough, they do get a little too short for comfort in places when talking about the set's more complex features.
