Samsung LE46F86 review

Performance
HD picture, as we have come to expect, is excellent on this TV. Our usual collection of test discs, including Serenity and Happy Gilmore, looked stunning and we saw plenty of detail in King Kong's fur, too.

Freeview wasn't too disappointing either, although expecting anything brilliant from the relatively low bitrate service is always a waste of time. The Samsung, for its size, does a reasonable job with digital TV, but the picture does look a little soft most of the time, with compression artefacts being quite noticeable. We didn't notice any significant problems with de-interlacing though, which is good news.

Upscaled DVD looked good, too. We fed the TV with a 1080i picture from our DVD player over HDMI. Some compression artefacts were present, but not enough to ruin the viewing experience. Of course, the volume and severity of these picture problems will depend on the quality of the DVD, which can vary wildly.

The Motion Plus system in the LE46F86 works a treat, making film material look smoother with less motion judder. The thing we like most is the fact that there are three settings for it -- low, medium and high. On low, we found movies looked smoother, without looking too artificial. On the medium and high settings, we noticed some considerable distortion around moving objects.

Sound was pretty reasonable. We found we had to crank the volume up to around 50 per cent before we got a level where we could hear everything clearly. But the sound wasn't distorted or overly muffled. There was a passable amount of bass, although as usual we don't think anyone should rely on built-in TV speakers for their home cinema experience.

But, as sure as a Samsung TV will look good, you can be certain the remote control will be about as much use as a chocolate teapot. We can't work out why the controllers are so sluggish on these TVs, but it can be fairly frustrating.

Conclusion
The LE46F86 is a sturdy performer and anyone taking delivery of one will be thrilled once they've got it out the box and spent some time setting it up. There is pretty much nothing on the market at this price range that beats the styling of the Samsung. We just wish they'd spend some time sorting out their remote controls.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday