Product Listing

Samsung LED C7000 - A New 3D Frontier

By Andy Sim - 18 Aug 2010
Launch SRP: S$4999

3D And Beyond

3D And Beyond

Before we kick start our 3D fest, let's run through the basics first. As mentioned, Samsung will be bundling a 3D Blu-ray player and a starter kit with the C7000. Available only for a limited period of time, the kit consists of two pairs of active-shutter glasses and a 3D "Monsters vs Aliens" Blu-ray disc, credit to Samsung's collaboration with Dreamworks Animation. Flat-cell batteries are included for the glasses, of course.

Now, let's look at the C7000 itself. Based on the menu, there are various 2D to 3D modes this TV supports:- 2D to 3D, Side by Side, Top & Bottom, Line By Line and so forth. The C7000's 2D to 3D conversion also comes with an allowance for depth adjustments. For direct 3D sources, the C7000 is friendly with formats as follows: 1920x1080p@24Hz x 2, 1280x720p@60Hz x 2 and 1280x720p@50Hz x 2, aside from standard HDMI 1.4 3D specifications.

The Starter Pack includes two pairs of active shutter glasses and a 3D "Monster vs Aliens" Blu-ray disc. By the way, Samsung is planning to distribute limited copies worldwide, 550,000 copies to be exact.

Samsung's shutter glasses are one of the lightest we have tried on by far. Its exact model number is tagged as SSG-2100AB, and you might want to know that Samsung does not guarantee its compatibility with TVs from other manufacturers.
 

The 3D Experience

There are a few aspects we'd like to highlight with 3D content. Of which crosstalk (when left and right eye images aren't ideally isolated), flicker, and sharpness are some of the visual aspects we'll be tackling. To begin with, a niggling degree of "flicker" appeared on the periphery of the lenses when the shutter glasses were powered on. Things improved drastically, fortunately, when the room lights were switched off. According to Samsung, such flickering occurrences may happen in the presence of 50-60Hz fluorescent lamps, so it's best for you to get your 3D kicks in the dark. Although if the area of use were wired for a three-phase lighting system, flicker from fluorescent lamps would have been greatly reduced. Alas, such lighting isn't a norm for homes.

As for the TV's settings, there isn't much we can do via the 3D menu, except fiddle with its 3D View Point values. After spending a few moments with the animated "Monsters vs Aliens" in stereoscopic form, we'd have to conclude, sadly, that its 3D experience wasn't as punchy as we'd like it to be. Let's start with the good tidings, shall we? There were a handful of scenes where images appeared crisp with little signs of crosstalk. For example, a 'researcher' was hitting a ball (strung to a bat) towards the camera in one of the early scenes. Sufficient depth was rendered with decent sharpness, and it did achieve that desired 'in your face' effect, which is the aim of 3D visuals after all. Now, for the bad news. Crosstalk or "ghosting" surfaced throughout a good length of the film. Take an instance where Susan Murphy (as a giantess) was on tour around the prison facility. The pillar on the right was supposed to be in the foreground, meaning that's where dual 3D images would be most prominent if you were to check them out without the glasses. However, due to a less than perfect crosstalk reduction, the ghosting effect persisted, and sharpness and fidelity around the edges were largely compromised. Based on what we've seen, there's still room for improvement with Samsung's M5 panel and 3D HyperReal Engine. Other observations include a notable decline in brightness levels, and you might need to re-sync the shutter glasses a few times for optimal results. Also as advised by Samsung, the TV puts out better 3D performance once the TV has been 'warmed up', which is about after 20 minutes. To add further, 3D only works with the C7000's Standard and Movie presets.

Thankfully, there isn't much to confuse a novice when it comes to the TV's 3D interface. The most critical setting here would have to be 3D View Point, which allows you to control the depth of the stereoscopic effect. Picture Correction toggles images for the left and right eye.

We converted this scene to 2D to illustrate our point, else everything would just appear fuzzy wuzzy. You might flinch if you happen to watch this in 3D, since this is one of the few instances where the 3D element worked really well on Monsters vs Aliens.
  

Here is a glimpse of a raw 3D shot without the shuttering effect. Susan (on the left), appeared relatively in sync with our glasses on, but apparent crosstalk issues was apparent with the tower on the right.

 

From 2D To 3D

For this test, we converted the contents of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" from a Blu-ray disc to 3D via a 1080p output. To achieve this on-the-fly conversion on their televisions, what Samsung did was to implement a "10-step 3D depth map" algorithm to make this possible. Fancy, yes, but we'll see if it checks out.

Here are some of the 2D to 3D conversion modes on the C7000. Note that the Side by Side and Top & Bottom options are only available with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p.

While there was an inkling of spatial depth in certain scenes, overall results were still relatively flat to our eyes. There was a scene where a gazillion Oompa-Loompas were dancing around rather disturbingly. The 3D conversion did help with the visual perspective, but we did not experience the desired 3D punch in effect. Results were subtle. Moving on, tweaking the TV's "depth" setting did help by a fair bit, where the degree of separation between the foreground subjects and background was improved and varied, but not by much. Well, unless this feature can be bested in the near future, we'd rather stick to old-school 2D on any given day with a popcorn in hand.

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7.5
  • Design 8.5
  • 3D Performance 7.5
  • HD Performance 8
  • SD Performance 7.5
  • Features 9
  • Value 7.5
The Good
Feature-packed
Crisp Visuals
Decent Blacks
The Bad
Expensive
Cranky 3D Delivery
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