Samsung UN60F8000 60 inch LED HDTV
Oct 15th, 2013 | 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.
I’ve done this test enough times in my past reviews that I’ll jump to the conclusion. Based on the settings of X-Rite, my room conditions were very good – both color and illuminance where in the middle of the range at 45.
Below, the image to the left is un-calibrated and the image to the right is calibrated.
If you look very closely the difference is really in the white balance. There’s no major change in the colors other than the whole things looks a touch whiter. When I tried to capture the difference in a TV show or movie, it was very hard to do. This just speaks to the quality of the image.
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 UN60F8000 I will consider the case of the TV watching a movie. I also checked the power draws while watching TV and in the different display modes.
Here is the power draw:
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a 60″ screen whereas most of my reviews have had TVs in the 55″ size. The 124W draw is not very excessive in my mind as the TV was set to 12 point backlight with 100 point contrast. It’s higher than the UN60F7100 but for good reason, the UN60F8000 has Clear Motion Rate 1200 as well has Micro Dimming Ultimate which will draw more processing power. The 124W average draw will go down significantly if you change the picture mode to ECO, decrease the brightness (as a comparison when I watched a horror movie taking place primarily at night the power draw was closer to 60W!).