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Key Features: 40-inch LCD TV with LED lighting; Full HD resolution; Smart TV services; Wi-Fi

Manufacturer: Samsung

 

What is the Samsung UE40H5500?

This is a 40-inch Samsung LCD TV that manages to deliver the brand’s latest Smart TV services despite costing less than £350 from some online shops. Surely it's too good to be true, right?

Samsung UE40H5500 – Design and Features

We quite like the look of the UE40H5500. The main TV bezel is fairly samey, perhaps, with its super-slim glossy black bezel. But the way the Samsung logo drops from the bottom edge of the TV in a crisp silvery bar, and the surprisingly well-finished angular black lines of the desktop stand, help the set look posher than the budget TV norm.

Connectivity is perfectly acceptable for such a seriously cheap TV. Three HDMIs lead the way where video playback is concerned, but there’s also good multimedia support from both LAN and integrated Wi-Fi network options, plus two USBs through which you can play video, music or photo files. It’s worth adding, too, that the tuner input feeds a Freeview HD tuner.



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The network options support streaming of multimedia files from USB ports as well as – impressively for such a cheap TV – giving access to Samsung’s 2014 Smart TV engine. We’ve covered this before in an in-depth review, so there’s no need to say more here than that it’s a superbly content-rich system for such a cheap TV, including catch-up apps for all the key UK TV channels, plus Netflix and Amazon’s subscription streaming services.

Another welcome surprise is that the Smart features and the set’s picture processing are driven by a quad-core processor. This helps keep the menus moving along briskly and smoothly, and should also contribute to better picture quality from the edge-lit Full HD LCD panel.

That said, the UE40H5500 predictably isn’t heavily burdened with picture-processing tools. All you get that’s really worth mentioning is a 100Hz engine, noise reduction, a dynamic contrast system and a couple of fairly avoidable backlight-based motion adjustments. You do get more picture setup options than you might expect, though, which we'll cover later.

We should wrap up this section of the review with a feature the UE40H5500 doesn't offer: 3D playback. Don’t all start crying at once, now.

Samsung UE40H5500 – Setup

The UE40H5500 is surprisingly well stocked with picture-calibration features. Highlights you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find on such a cheap TV include adjustments for white balance, colour space and flesh tone, as well as Gamma, ‘Black Tone’ and Dynamic Contrast settings.


As usual, you’ll need to tweak things a bit from Samsung’s picture presets to get anything like the optimum performance from the screen. In particular, if you’re watching a film in a fairly dark room we’d suggest pushing the backlight as low as its 7 setting – even though it removes quite a bit of brightness – as dark scenes are otherwise affected by some backlight clouding.

We’d also recommend knocking the contrast setting down to around its 80-83 level, and making sure that sharpness doesn’t sit any higher than 40 at most, as anything higher can cause HD pictures to become noisy.

Setting the dynamic contrast system to Low is worthwhile, too, as it boosts both black-level response and overall dynamism without leading to excessive instability. If you love deep blacks as much as we do, you could also consider setting the Black Tone to Dark – though be warned that this does crush out a bit more shadow detail than we'd ideally like.

Finally we’d recommend turning off noise reduction while watching anything HD, as it tends to do more harm than good.

Samsung UE40H5500 – Picture Quality

Properly set up, the UE40H5500 delivers pictures that are stupidly good for such a cheap TV.

The most startling thing about them is their contrast. Using the out-of-the-box settings, dark areas can look a bit grey – though nowhere near as bad as the greyness you get with TVs that use IPS-type panels, rather than the VA one inside the UE40H5500. But after just a little tweaking the set produces black colours so deep and convincing they wouldn’t disgrace a TV costing at least twice as much.

By the time you’ve adjusted to the backlight level that delivers the best balance between deep blacks and decent shadow detailing, the screen is also almost completely free of backlight clouding and inconsistencies of the sort that are common among budget TVs.


There really is no overstating how important to a TV’s picture quality it is being able to reproduce a believable blacks. So it’s a huge relief to find a TV so affordable able to handle dark scenes so credibly – especially in a year where poor contrast has been a troublingly common phenomenon with affordable (and a few not so affordable!) TVs.


It must be said that you do have to take quite a lot of brightness out of pictures to get the sort of black levels that suit a typical high-contrast film. But this isn’t a serious issue in a fairly dark room, and if you’ve got a lot of ambient light to contend with, just reintroduce more backlight, as the chances are that the brightness of your surroundings will mean you won’t be able to see any backlight clouding that may start to sneak through.

The key point about the UE40H5500, in other words, is that it’s flexible enough to cope with both bright and dark/casual and serious viewing conditions – a multi-tasking talent seldom seen at the sub-£400 price level.

TVs with strong black-level performances usually also enjoy natural, rich colours, and so it proves with the UE40H5500. Its palette is reasonably dynamic and expressive, and best of all colour tones nearly always manage to look balanced and natural, even during dark scenes. This is another key way in which the UE40H5500 humbles most budget competition.

Its pictures are sharper than those of most budget TVs, too. HD pictures look extremely detailed and crisp, and the set is an above-average upscaler of standard definition. Actually, as noted earlier, you have to calm the set’s sharpness down a bit from its preset values to stop images looking so sharp that they tip over into noise.

Inevitably the UE40H5500 can’t totally dodge its budget nature. As well as the shortage of shadow detail you sometimes see when the black levels are calibrated, you can also clearly see a reduction in the picture’s sharpness when showing motion. It's not as bad as it often is on budget TVs, though. Plus, in a common Samsung failing, areas of very fine detail can shimmer and glimmer slightly, especially if they’re moving.

Finally, the UE40H5500’s VA panel delivers a slightly more limited viewing angle than rival IPS-type panels. But the difference is much smaller than it used to be, and so feels like a small price to pay for VA's far better contrast.