The Samsung LE 40 B 579 TV is a Full HD 40-inch LCD TV with a universal tuner. On the market since May 2009, this chic all-rounder currently sells for about 900 GBP online.

Reviewed by Florian Friedrich on February 1, 2010

Accurate 24p reproduction.
Contrast-rich, bright picture.
Universal tuner with CI+ support.

Awkward DVB-C installation.

An affordable TV with a top set of features, a high-contrast picture, and decent colours — the LE 40 B 579 definitely gets a thumbs-up from Televisions.com. The only clear weakness is the set’s tricky operation — in particular the DVB-C channel list and the automatic format switching for digital TV.

Most important connections:

4x  1x  2x  1x

Multimedia

The Samsung’s multimedia is about what you’d expect at this price — there’s a USB socket on the side of the TV, allowing playback of JPEG photos and MP3 music files, but that’s it.

Other Features

Incomplete: We searched in vain for an S-Video input. And what’s that headphone socket doing on the back of the TV?

A built-in universal tuner allows the Samsung to receive analogue cable TV as well as all digital TV transmissions — including the DVB-S and DVB-S2 satellite standards. The satellite tuner supports DiSEqC 1.0, DiSEqC 1.2, and USALS — this is useful if you want to receive broadcasts via several low-noise block converters (LNBs) and to control a rotatable satellite receiver remotely.

Calibration fans will love the numerous picture controls — these allow you to fine-tune the colour gamut and colour temperature, for example. There’s also a choice of seven gamma curves and an electronic blue filter that assists in colour-saturation adjustment.

Operation

The remote control offers a sensible button layout and easy-to-read labels, but the buttons for switching in and out of Teletext are placed too far apart.

Satellite reception benefits from excellently pre-sorted channel lists and favourites lists, but there’s no pre-sorting for radio stations. And unfortunately, the automatic aspect-ratio switching results in inaccurate geometry for both 4:3 and letterbox broadcasts from the DVB tuners. On top of that, it’s hard to track down the desired channel during digital cable reception for two reasons: Firstly, there’s no symbol to indicate which are pay-TV channels, and, secondly, the pre-sorting isn’t especially useful.

The clear menu interface, on the other hand, informs the user of details such as the current HDMI resolution and frame rate. The remote control’s back button helps with speedy navigation, but the on and off buttons for Teletext sit too far away from one another.

Picture Quality of Standard-Definition Signals

With optimal picture settings, the analogue tuner delivers an honest picture, but the slightly too coarse noise grates on the nerves. When viewed using the “Movie” preset, signals arriving via digital cable or satellite give an accurate TV picture with natural sharpness and balanced colours. All channels show fine detail and tidy scaling — with both SDTV and HDTV broadcasts. With HDTV, we recommend choosing the “Screen Fit” format, since this applies no picture-cropping (overscan).

Thanks to the high light output of the Samsung’s screen and its low power consumption (111 watts in the “Movie” preset), this TV suits bright rooms as well as it does dark. Via HDMI, even 576i signals produce a detail-rich picture with accurate de-interlacing. In a practical test, however, we noticed some teething problems with the operating software: As soon as you attach an input device to the Scart connection, the gamma for the Scart and HDMI inputs becomes too dark — a very strange effect!

Picture Quality of High-Definition Signals

This CIE diagram shows that the Samsung LE 40 B 579’s colour temperature is slightly too high.

Fine details in both the brightness and colour signals pose no problem for this Samsung — checkerboard patterns with one-pixel sized squares display cleanly and in full contrast, without any artificial sharpening. 24p signals show an accurate, regular judder.

The relatively high in-picture contrast of 2,700:1 lends films a good sense of depth, and you’ll get an even stronger picture if you leave some ambient light in the room — this way, viewers won’t notice the TV’s residual light as strongly. Unfortunately, however, the Samsung’s picture quality varies with viewing angle: If you watch from one side, the picture lightens significantly and loses differentiation.

The tested model showed no weaknesses in colour films such as “Kingdom of Heaven”— colours are rich, flesh tones and earthy colour shades reproduce accurately. Black and white films such as “Casablanca” told a different story, however: Here we noticed that greys looked too cool (with a colour temperature of 7,000 instead of 6,500 Kelvin) and that dark greyscales showed a greenish tint.

Sound Quality

Pretty poor: In fact, you’ll get better sound from a mini HiFi. The speakers sound off colour, despite assistance from the built-in graphic equalizer.

Mode: Movie

Contrast: 90

Brightness: 49

Sharpness: 0

Colour: 52

Tint (G/R): G50/R50

Black Tone: Off

Dynamic Contrast: Off

Gamma: 0

Colour Space: Auto

Flesh Tone: 0

Edge Enhancement: Off

xvYCC: Off

Colour Tone: Warm2

Size: Screen Fit

These settings apply to realistic playback of HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations may necessitate slight adjustment.