Samsung UN55ES6500 55 inch LED HDTV
Oct 24th, 2012 | By SimonA more technical way to analyze picture quality, but not as fun as sitting in front of the TV for hours upon hours to come up with a qualitative value is to use a quantitative program to judge against a benchmark. In this instance I used X-Rite: iDisplay 2. Originally designed for monitors (CRT and LCD), I’m using it configured for LCD displays. I’ve configured the TV to take the input signal from my HTPC and will adjust the backlight, contrast and brightness on the TV to see how far off the TV settings are away from the iDisplay 2 ideals. The software takes about 10 minutes to run and I was amazed how little modifications were required to meet what iDisplay 2 says is calibrated.
Setting up X-Rite
Based on the settings of X-Rite, I had to make a few changes. The standard contrast ratio is set at 95 and I had it increased to 100 but also lowered the back light to 12. Depending on how much light you have in the room, you may need to increase the backlight a tough. There was no change required to the brightness.
The before and after photos don’t show too much of a difference – it’s hard to see in the pictures below.
Below, the image to the left is un-calibrated and the image to the right is calibrated.
Power consumption is something I consider when purchasing any new consumer electronics. The last thing I really want is to purchase a TV that continually drains my wallet with a power guzzling 600W usage. I want my TV’s to be reasonable with power draw, the lower the better but I won’t sacrifice picture quality to reduce power consumption. To test the power draw on the UN55ES6500 I will consider the case of the TV being powered off to monitor the phantom load and watching a movie in the Standard setting.
Here is the power draw:
It took me a while to believe the power draw that I was seeing. The 20 watt power consumption drop is pretty significant and to make sure it was correct I double checked with a few different TV experiences. While showing my desktop the TV drew 93 watts and when watching TV it averaged 75 watts.