Samsung LE52F96 review

Freeview on a 52-inch TV is sub-optimal. If you're buying a large screen and want to watch Eastenders on it, you'll have to sit a long way away from it to be able to stand the compression artefacts and soft, mushy picture. This isn't especially the fault of the set, however, but we are aware that much of what people use TVs for is, well, watching TV. We've also seen large plasma TVs do a more convincing job with Freeview than this set manages.

The Samsung has a great range of rear inputs and plenty of them

One of the gripes we have about the 52F96 is the abysmal remote control response. We had a particular problem on Freeview where we pressed the 'next channel' button, but the TV did nothing. The light on the screen that indicates a received signal flashed away, but it seemed like the TV just ignored it.

During our testing we found that the TV has a reasonably small viewing angle, far more so than other LCD televisions we've tested. The LED backlight clearly affects the viewable angle to some extent. We were able to reduce this problem by turning down the brightness of the backlight. Samsung defaults to quite a bright light by default. We knocked it down to the minimum possible setting and were easily able to see the picture detail.

Conclusion
For high definition material we found the 52F96 to be a solid performer. Motion was smooth and the picture quality was excellent. Upscaled DVDs looked great, too, which is encouraging for people with large movie collections. Freeview picture quality was distinctly lacking. We accept that standard definition doesn't scale well to 52-inch screens, but we've seen decent performance from Samsung's own 50-inch plasma.

If Freeview is important, you may need to look at the Samsung PS50 or one of Panasonic's excellent plasma TVs as a strong alternative.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Jon Squire