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By Andy Sim & Tony Fernandez l HWM September 2007 views : 955

Just two years ago, the term HD-ready was thrown about quite frequently to signify the compatibility of a television with high definition signals. With the proliferation of HD players and gaming consoles which support the much hallowed 1080p signal, HD-ready wouldn’t suffice, and LCD manufacturers started rolling out sets that were Full-HD capable. The Samsung LA40M81BX LCD television isn’t a first in this arena, but it follows in the stylish footsteps of its predecessors and is no slouch in terms of features either.

As a high-end HDTV, the M8 is built to be as aesthetically pleasing as the rest of Samsung’s current LCDTV lineup. Fans of the Bordeaux Plus that we reviewed a few months ago will be glad to know that the M8 is similarly designed, minus the champagne flute styling. A distinctive faux-metallic strip runs along the bottom, making it quite easily distinguishable from the R8 models. Another visible difference between the two series is the M8’s glossy screen which is a rarity among LCD televisions. An angle of 20 degrees can be achieved both ways if you require swiveling the TV to cater to your guests in living spaces.

In terms of controls, the M8 has a few notable differences from the Bordeaux Plus or R8. Touch sensitive controls have been abandoned for regular ones and as such, are discretely placed at the side. Harkening back to their older LCD models, Samsung has opted to revive the centrally placed power button yet again, which we found much easier to operate than the R8’s touch sensitive one. Not forgetting consumers who love to hookup their AV equipment on the fly, Samsung have incorporated a side panel with various ports solely for this purpose; a similar feature found in their later range of digital TVs. As usual, Samsung’s Anynet Plus is included in this setup.

Notably, the M8 has a given dynamic contrast ratio of 15,000 to 1 which is an impressive number three times that of the Bordeaux Plus. This value was heightened when Blu-ray content (“Superman Returns’’) was played back on the TV. Brightness levels were excellent and the images appeared vividly crisp ands harp. Darker scenes appeared slightly grainy, but we have attributed this to the disc’s encoding and not a fault of the TV. One minor gripe would be its skin tone rendition appeared slightly off. On the contrary, its Wide Color Enhancer properties managed to give the images better luminance while the Digital Noise Reduction option managed to reduce the overall noise levels of broadcast feeds. Black levels were highly commendable even under ambient fluorescent lighting. However, we have set the HDMI Black Level settings in the M8 to “normal” instead of “low” to obtain a fair result across our visual tests.

Looking at Display Mate, the color compositions where nothing less of exemplary. The M8 demonstrated good brightness uniformity across the screen without much hint of an imbalance from its panel’s back lamps. While the intensity color ramp tests showed us that the TV is able to produce strong colors, we did notice that the colors faded too quickly to black in some instances and slight banding occurred towards the darker hues. Audibly, we preferred to engage its SRS TruSurround for TV programmes as well as HD movies since its audio sounded flat and unimpressive without the virtual surround option.

In its own skin, the Samsung M8 certainly stands in the upper echelon of the current available crop of LCD TV products when it comes to feature set and performance, although its IDTV cousin would give consumers more bait to bite on. Still, the Samsung Full HD LA40M81BX is quite a defining moment in the high definition field with its color enhancing qualities and admirable contrast elements.