Samsung 8000 55in Smart 3D LED TV review

With an incredibly thin silver metallic bezel and chrome-effect stand, Samsung’s 8000 55in Smart 3D LED TV is a stunning looking piece of kit – we couldn’t wait to find out if the 55in LED-backlit set would have picture quality to match its looks.

The sense of immersion when watching 3D movies seemed heightened thanks to the ultra-thin bezel; on-screen effects seemed to have a much greater sense of depth than on other TVs. Using the supplied active shutter 3D glasses, there was very little cross-talk – where the TV can’t switch between the two images quickly enough, leaving a ghostly outline. We only noticed it in certain scenes where the 3D effects had been over-accentuated, but this is still impressive for an LCD panel. 3D up-scaling of 2D content was underwhelming, with little discernable difference in depth.

Despite its high price, the 8000 ships with just one pair of active shutter glasses.

The glasses themselves are one of the better-looking bundled pairs we’ve seen and were surprisingly comfortable to wear, even over prescription glasses. There was very little discernable screen flicker while watching 3D content and the colour quality was surprisingly vivid. However, taking them off to watch 2D content revealed some problems with image quality.

Massive screen, teeny-weeny bezel

At its default settings, brightness was much too high and images lacked contrast. As the panel is edge-lit, there was also quite noticeable backlight bleed at either side of the screen. After exploring the rather comprehensive settings menus, we managed to adjust the contrast and brightness to much more acceptable levels, but couldn’t completely eliminate bleed from the backlight, which is disappointing given the TV’s price. It was particularly prominent in darker images, even after we’d adjusted the backlight brightness to compensate.