What I want to complement is Amazon’s delivery. As Amazon is an authorized distributor, their price is limited to the $2,465 that all other authorized distributors are priced at. Many other etailers sell around $2,090 but are not authorized, so I was very wary of them.

Then Amazon comes along with a $400 promotional discount (unfortunately expired on 6/1) and basically unadvertised on their site. I found it through bloggers. So I was able to buy at a price matched to the other guys.

Delivery estimate was 6/4 for me, but I got a call saying it was ready for delivery on 6/1. Three days early, yeah!

Now for the best part, it was delivered white glove. The guys brought it into my house, powered it up and worked with me to verify all was operational before they left.

So for $2,065 bottom line, I received this TV white glove delivered shipping included. No one, not even the non-authorized dealers, could touch that.

Cons: While reading the user manual I found the electronics design engineer part of me saying “that is just stupid” several times. Some of its intentionally built-in limitations just amazed me, but I find that is somewhat true of all electronics, so I didn’t degrade my star rating any.

The most bizarre case, the 5.1 channel sound is only available if the source is the built-in tuner. Any source sound from HDMI inputs (such as a BD Player) is downgraded to 2 channel for passing through to the HDMI output. Per the user manual, the only way to get 5.1 sound from all your devices is to have them each send their audio via optical straight to the audio receiver. This just defeats the whole advantage of HDMI doing combined audio/video in one cable.

Design wise, this should be a simple HDMI pass-through. I am always amazed when companies spend manpower to delete naturally occurring functionality, especially when that deletion make otherwise great features useless. Four HDMI inputs yet you can’t use them because surround sound is stripped. Is this a case of the consumer getting screwed by movie industry driven DRM (in the guise of HDCP) once again?

I am hoping this is a simple Korean/English Technical Writer translation error. It would make more sense if they said that only component and conventional audio/video inputs are limited to 2 channel when passed through to the HDMI outputs, because that would have cost design effort to convert analog surround to digital surround.

- Buzzing. My number one fear was the buzzing that people have noted as an issue. There is absolutely none, even when I turn the volume down to extremely low levels, and I’m hypersensitive to this kind of thing.

- Glare. I was also a little worried about the glare factor that some reviewers have mentioned. I haven’t had any issues at all. The TV is in a room with medium-sized windows facing northeast, so there isn’t a problem with direct sunlight but it’s still fairly bright during the day. I haven’t needed to adjust any picture settings to compensate and there hasn’t been any annoying reflection. And I should add that the picture is amazingly crisp and vivid.

- Sound. Some people have reported the sound as being less than stellar. My previous main TV, a Sony Wega, has very rich sound so based on the reviews I expected to hear something pretty tinny with this model. It actually turned out to be much better than I had anticipated. I don’t feel the need to use my external audio system except when watching a movie, and that’s just to get the full surround-sound experience.

- Touch of color. The red is slightly more vivid than I expected, but not overly so. I tend to be a neutral color person when it comes to electronics, but the color on this is still subtle and not overdone. And the overall styling of this model is gorgeous. It’s beautiful to look at and people drool when they come over to visit.

- Connections. I wasn’t quite sure what exactly would be available despite looking at the photos and documentation online. I didn’t have HDMI on my old TV and I used S-video for a couple of things so I thought I might run out of open ports. I bought some HDMI cables for the cable box and DVD player, and I had no problem also hooking up my DVD recorder and stereo using conventional component cables. I did retire my old VCR but I could easily have kept it as there are several remaining open connections, even for composite cables. And I can still add a Blu-Ray DVD player if I decide to get one.

- Burn in. I’ve experienced none. I was kind of worried when I ran the auto-channel programming feature because it has a very static screen and took quite awhile to process. It added every scrambled channel on the cable network and then spent a long time removing them. Happily, there were no unwanted effects.

- Network connectivity. I got the wireless USB device and it works great. I can access music and photos on my computer as well as use the Yahoo widgets that are programmed into the TV. I don’t use it a lot but it’s a fun feature.

I know it can be a little difficult deciding on a major purchase like this. I can say that after several weeks there is nothing that has disappointed me with this model so far and I’d highly recommend the Samsung PN50B650 if you’re looking for a new TV.