I own a Samsung LA40C630, brought recently from Chroma, Bangalore during the Diwali offers, and i must say i got a good deal. The original price of this LCD was 64K, they were offering me a free 14Inch videocon LCD free with it and also a Free Airtel HD DTH setbox free from samsung. I have returned the Videocon LCD for a discount on the 40 inch LCD, and i was given a straight 6k discount, which brought down the price of the LCD to 58, which i think was a good deal. Then i opted for Chroma extended warranty by paying an additional rs 2,700, so the Total price of LA40C630 comes to 60,700 with 3 year warrenty (1st yr warrenty from Samsung).
What made me select this LCD?
Well i have been doing some research on LCD/LED/Plasma from a long time, and this is what i have learnt.
Plasma: There are still some issues with burn out on Plasma panels, One of my friend who owns a plasma TV has this problem from a long time, so i learnt this from him and the other factor is that the power consumption on Plasma TVs is way too high. This is some of the reasons why plasma TVs are not doing that great in the market. The only advantage with plasma is with the picture clarity and viewing angle, you will get the same picture quality from any angle.
LED: Something new and i was very excited buying one, especially after seeing some Demo's of the TVs at various electronic stores. The picture quality is amazing and also drains less on the power. Only problem is that the life of an LED TV is less than that of LCD/Plasma. The only point why i dropped this from my plan was because i have been hearing a lot issues with LED Panels from owners of LED TVs. It fails within 6 months of use, specially in cities/towns where its hot and humid. The problem is that the LED Panels are very sensitive to changes in room temperature, and it is failing big time in India. One of the electronic store engineer even suggested not to opt for LED if i plan to use it in cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai or any place that is hot and humid.
LCD: After seeing a lot of Demo TVs at the stores, i felt that Sony, Samsung, LG, panasonic were the best in terms of picture quality and features. I had only 3 conditions, it has to be 40inch, Full HD & a minimum of 100mhz motion flow. I desperately wanted the motion flow, because i have seen my friends LCD without the motion flow, and there was way too much noise in the picture, especially with the blurs on fast moving pictures and when i compared it with the Demo at the store that had motion flow, i could see a big difference. Now i started comparing it between sony, samsung, LG and panasonic. The picture quality on Samsung and LG was better when compared to Sony and panasonic. I was surprised to see that Sony being famous for its quality products (i own a Sony digicam and a Sony full HD handycam so i know the quality) was not that great when compared to samsung and LG, it was way too soft on picture sharpness and dynamic brightness. Now to finalize on the brand, i noticed that the features on samsung LCDs were better to LG, and i finalized on Samsung LA40C630.
My review on LA40C630:
I got the LCD delivered the very next day from Chroma. Although i was promised, that an engineer will visit my place for installation and demo, i didnt wait for them to be at my house, as i knew it is going to take couple of days for that.
I opened the pack and did the installation myself, with some help from Wife & Mom. This was a straight table top installation vs wall mount. After some initial setup on the LCD, i connected my local cable setup box to the LCD and found the picture quality to be really great. There was some noise on certain channels, and since it was a normal digital set top box, i wasnt expecting picture quality to be as good as Tatasky/Airtel. After some tweeking on the settings i managed to get the best picture quality. I wanted to test the built in media player, so i downloaded the move 2012 from the internet (via torrent) in DIVX format, copied it to my pendrive and plugged into one of the USB ports of the LCD and then when i played the movie, i was blown away with the picture quality, it was just amazing to watch the movie, and i watched the whole move right away with family.
Over all the LCD is great, i really feel i made the best choice in selecting this LCD, the only negative about this LCD is on the audio quality, it isnt that great when compared to other LCDs, but hey, you can improve that by connecting to some external speakers.
I hope i havnt missed any point here, if you guys have any query then do let me know.