The winners in the 2009 HDTV wars were value-priced Vizio and stylish stalwart Samsung, according to research firm iSuppli. Vizio was the biggest shipper of LCD televisions last year, nearly doubling its units shipped from 2008, while Samsung took the top spot for overall HDTV shipments, thanks to both its LCD and plasma sets. Despite being the champ in 2008, Samsung still managed to increase shipments by more 22 percent last year.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in iSuppli’s findings was that Toshiba is making a major move up the sales charts. The company was tied for fourth with LG in LCD sales and also moved into the top six overall HDTV shippers, which iSuppli says is due to Toshiba’s aggressive pricing strategy. That’s also the theory behind Sony’s strong fourth-quarter sales, though the electronics giant’s market share declined for the whole year in both LCDs and the overall HDTV competition.
The biggest loser on the LCD side was Sharp, which saw a 29.1-percent decline in its share of the 2009 pie, including a 13.9-percent loss in share in the final quarter of the year. In 2008, Sharp had a sizeable 9.2 percent of the LCD market, but slipped to just a 5-percent market share last year. Perhaps it needs to take a page from Toshiba and Sony’s playbooks and start dropping its prices—sharply.
Leading TV reviews and feedback platform, Televisions.com has today published its review of the Samsung PS-58 P96 FD, a 58 inch Full HD Plasma TV available since late 2007. The website also features background articles, latest TV news and reviews from leading experts and user feedback.
February 23, 2010 The highly skilled team at Televisions.com used objective laboratory instruments and comprehensive subjective analysis to test the Samsung Full HD PS-58 P96 FD Plasma TV. Scoring 5.8 points on a scale of 10 in the Editors Rating, the Samsung 58 incher just about meets the editors expectations. The review praises the television set because of the duration it has existed and the comfortable price tag for the screen size it offers in addition to judder free 24p reproduction, impressively rich HD picture, and excellent TV tuner pictures. The review points out the areas which didnt let the TV gain fame in spite of its prolonged existence such as limited daylight suitability, perfect colours only for HDMI-RGB signals and grey sidebars on 4:3 aspect ratio pictures. Florian Friedrich, Televisions.coms editor in chief said: The Samsung PS-58 P96 FD has its limitations but at the price tag offered and the screen size, accurate 24p reproduction and other features it still has potential due to its fantastic price-performance ratio.
The review, in its later part, described the good features of the TV that have helped it hold its position in the market such as DVB-T (FreeView) and analogue TV receiver, multitude of connections for all peripherals like game consoles, Blu-Ray player, set-top box etc, side based VGA sockets to allow feeding of high definition signals from the PC and other devices. The testing warns against leaving static images on the screen for too long as being a plasma screen would lead to burn in. The reviewers were happy with the swivel stand that was provided with the TV that enabled easy change of viewing angles. Wall mounting though was a different story altogether. The test team recommends buying a separately available wall bracket and employing helpers to balance the weight of the 64 kg TV set.
The reviewers were happy with the comfortable and well laid out feel of the menu but the low response time let them down. A set of neat controls on the side of the TV made the test team happy as it allowed easy accessibility in situations where the remote wasnt available near by. The volume & programme controls light up to enable easy accessibility in the dark but the remote control otherwise is a bit overcrowded at the bottom end. The Samsung PS-58 P96 FD lives up to its tag of being a plasma TV by consuming power befitting its kind and provides satisfactory brightness levels when the ambient light is reduced. The test team found the built-in tuners supplying an attractive picture with the YUV and the S-video inputs providing a better picture then the Scart inputs.
The Grey bars to prevent non-uniform ageing were found by the testing team to be disturbing to the eye. The Movie Plus was highly recommended by the test team for excellent movie viewing. The review states that the TV falls short of expectations on the contrast front producing below par blacks. The later part of the review includes a list of ideal settings that the test team has derived for the Samsung PS-58 P96 FD by testing it in Televisions.coms test theatre that provide optimum picture quality in darkened environments for HDTV/Blu-ray signals thorough an HDMI interface.
Florian Friedrich said: For buyers the Samsung PS-58 P96 FD is still a good buy considering its huge screen size and other various features and its economical price tag.
Samsung has already announced that it will be launching a trio of new 3D LED-backlit television sets in March 2010 in the UK and it has also confirmed that Plasma sets will follow soon.
One technology that will not apparently make it to the UK though is DLP (Digital Light Processing), a technology used in rear projection televisions and which proved to be popular in the US because of its low prices combined with very large screen diagonals (routinely above 50-inch).
Samsung actually released 3D-ready DLP HDTVs back in January 2007, three years before LED-backlit LCD TVs with the series 7 LED DLP HDTV model being the latest model which was not only power efficient (consuming half the power of a similar size plasma screen) but also removed much of the issues associated with DLP HDTVs until now.
More importantly, Samsung produced DLP TVs that went all the way up to 72-inch, you are not likely to find anything similar in the foreseeable future and was available from Amazon for around $2800. The new C7000 model goes to 55-inch only with the entry level model being 40-inch.
