Samsung LE46B750

While we wait to get our hands on its latests LED-backlit TVs, we've had a chance to test one of Samsung's more traditional models, lit by fluorescent tubes.  The LE46B750 is nevertheless a very well-equipped television, with Full HD, a built-in digital tuner and an excellent list of technical features including DLNA compatibility, Movie Plus interpolation at 200 Hz and a backlit remote.  On paper, at least--where Samsung also claims it delivers excellent contrast--it's an impressive piece of hardware.

Build Quality and Design


The LE46B750 has almost everything you'd expect on a high-end modern television and no doubt actually has more than a lot of people would ask for.

Image Quality
As is so often the case when testing TVs, our first measurements, based on the default settings, showed a heavy bias in favour of increasing the contrast at the expense of ruining the gamma curve.  The division of different shades of grey from black through to white is not at all even, meaning some dark areas of the frame end up appearing completely black, while lighter areas fade to a pure white.  To talk numbers, we measured blacks between 0.08 and 0.24 cd/m².

To avoid these problems, it's usually best to activate 'Cinema', 'Film' or 'Expert' mode, depending on the model in question, turning off dynamic contrast and backlighting along the way.  Here, though, the backlighting continued to change from one scene to the next, blacks varying from 0.05-0.13 cd/m², while whites bounced around between 82 cd/m² … and 195 cd/m²!  At just 82 cd/m², the greyish colour you see on screen is hardly worthy of the name white.  These fluctuations in brightness are very noticeable to the naked eye, and last tenths of a second as you move from one scene to another.

Excellent average DeltaE scores mean this TV produces accurate, faithful colours

It is a real shame that you can't actually deactivate this feature, as the other measurements we took all stood up rather well.  Colour handling is perfect with no clouding, meaning an entirely black screen is even.  When you move away from looking straight at the screen, though, the level of black falls away and dips to a grey-blue.  The DeltaE score, which measures the discrepancy between the 'real' colours and those actually shown falls from a very good 2.5 when looking directly at the screen to 6.9 at 45°.

Ghosting is almost entirely absent thanks to the 200 Hz Motion Plus feature, which also works with films.  It's not without its faults, though, as it sometimes creates artefacts behind moving objects.  This does happen relatively rarely, but as it's there even when Motion Plus is at its lowest setting it can't be ignored.

In practice, when it comes to watching TV shows or movies, the picture is very good and HD content doesn't suffer any major drawbacks.  Standard definition is a little worse off thanks to rather weak upscaling.  This TV also works perfectly when connected to a computer, with the only problem being an input lag of 4 fps which might put avid gamers off.

Sound Quality

Energy Consumption
Using just 0.1 W when on standby and averaging out at 238 W/m² while switched on, the LE46B750 is one of the most energy-efficient TVs we've ever tested.  The use of dynamic backlighting contributes to that, meaning it's unfair to compare it with other TVs which allow this feature to be deactivated.  They, on the other hand, manage to produce better quality images.