First of all I would like to thank all of you fellow forum members for the great help & support provided. I have been following this forum for a while now and have been posting information too. It has been a good discussion medium with so many diverse thoughts & ideas.
Finally made our choice:
We purchased the SAMSUNG 40B530 LCD from Reliance Digital.
To be honest, I was seriously considering the SONY 40 V series (70K) until the last minute, along with the SAMSUNG 40 5 series. My requirements were clear:
LCD
40 screen size
Full HD
High native Contrast Ratio
2 composite inputs + 2 component inputs + about 3 to 4 HDMI inputs
The only difference between the 40B550 & 40B530 is the Crystal Design and an extra HDMI port on the 40B550.
Both, the SONY 40V550 & the SAMSUNG 40B530 met all my needs. LG was not an option since, our TV wall unit is tailor made for a 40 incher and 42 LG would be slightly oversize for my requirements.
I debated a lot about the 100 Hz Motion Flow (Sony 40W550) / Motion Plus (Samsung 40B650). Sometimes I wanted to go in for it, while others times the cost : feature factor was questionable.
For a while, the SONY 40V550 (50Hz), looked perfect and it met all my requirements. I did not mind paying a premium for the SONY. I knew SONY charges brand premium and also passes on the custom duty (since they are made in Thailand / Malaysia) to customers on its fully imported LCDs. It was fine with me.
On further pricing discussions with the Reliance staff, they finally agreed to give me a good pricing on SAMSUNGs & LGs. They could not do anything on the SONY in terms of festive season pricing. Hence, I took a re-look at the SAMSUNG 5 series again and did a side-by-side comparison with the SONY 40V550. On my request, they played TS channels for me. Though the BE3 on the SONY is supposed to do a slightly better up scaling, I really did not find too much difference in PQ between the SONYs BE3 and SAMSUNGs DNIE+ processor. In fact they were very closely matched. The DNIE+ was doing a good job on optimizing the Contrast, Motion & Color. The contrast on the SAMSUNG 5 series showed good black levels with natural skin tones..and for the festive price being offered (almost 20K+ lesser than the SONY) coupled with a free up scaling SAMSUNG DVD player with a USB (to play DivX etc.) drive, free HDMI cable etc., it was hard to re-look back at the SONY V series.
Our Samsung 40B530 arrived the next day. The sticker said, month / year of manufacture as, October 2009. The carton seal was intact. After opening it, the LCD appeared to be, fresh out of the oven with all the seals & plastics wrappings in place and without any creases.
Have hooked it to my Pioneer 1000 watts HTS. The PQ (Tata Sky & SONY Progressive Scan DVD Player) on this SAMSUNG 5 series is incredible and the contrast is just superb! It has a wide viewing angle. The picture does not appear to be washed out even when viewing from wide angles. The 50 Hz is perfect for our viewing habits and there is hardly any blur / judder thats been noticed by us, even in fast action scenes. Tested it with some fast action James Bond movie DVDs and the motion was as smooth as ever. Skin tones and colors are very nice too!! In all, we are happy with the PQ on our SAMSUNG 5 series LCD.
