MANILA, Philippines - I fell out of love with television some time ago. Perhaps I got traumatized by a brief period of unemployment during which I would watch hours upon hours of stultifying reality shows while mindlessly finishing bags of Ruffles potato chips. I knew My Super Sweet Sixteen was horrible trash, but I couldn’t tear myself away, rationalizing that there must be some redeeming value to the series, like a social commentary on the excessiveness of American culture and the total breakdown of modern parenting. Then I realized, while condescending to being passively entertained by the biggest losers, wannabe supermodels and color blind fashion designers, that I was merely a reflection of them. I am what I watch.
But the fact was, television shows of the fictional kind were actually getting better. 30 Rock, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Gossip Girl were just some of the shows that heralded a new era of intelligent writing and impeccable casting. They created subcultures within subcultures with references and in-jokes that eventually enter the mainstream, and if you don’t know what they’re talking about, you never will (ref. the journey of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing in television and para-television culture; also, the return of the vampire).
Fortunately, the television itself got with the program. A lot more shows were being shot in HD, and you were literally missing out on a lot if you were viewing them from your bulky old cathode ray set. Screens got wider, flatter, slimmer. More technology was packed into a smaller frame, and suddenly the TV became a piece of high-tech art, something you could show off in your living room instead of cleverly hiding behind faux-wooden panels.
For a while there, we were watching downloaded shows and movies on our computer screens. We compromised a lot of our viewing integrity by playing things at low-res, on YouTube, and at slow speeds. We learned to live, albeit painfully, with the word “buffering,” with the compromise that we were watching shows in real time, season-wise.
But humans are not meant to watch TV that way. The medium is the message, and a small compressed format does no justice to the fanged fineness that is Eric Northman in True Blood. Samsung understands this, and that’s possibly the reason why it’s the leader of the global LED TV market, selling one million units of its first full line of advanced LED FULL HDTVS in just six months of their launch in March. The company understands that a revolution is going on in the way we consume visual culture, and has accordingly redefined our viewing experience so that everything counts.
The Revolution Will Be Televised, Again
Samsung’s range of LED TVs go way beyond the flat screen. With an innovation dubbed Media 2.0, they’re the first ever to have Internet TV — via TV widgets, you can access sites like accuweather, YouTube and USA Today straight from your TV. The split-screen display means you can surf the Internet without missing a beat of the show you are watching. This can come in real handy when you want to check the current weather conditions in Rio de Janeiro while watching a travel show on Brazil, or read the opinion pages while watching the breaking news.
Another component is the Content Library, which has pre-loaded, updatable digital content like art, games and recipes. Since when did your TV ever provide you with pre-packaged entertainment? It’s almost like getting a game console, with a bowling game and fitness routines that include stretches and light workouts. You can add to the database by downloading new content from the Web.
Connectivity and compatibility are other outstanding features of the Samsung LED TVs. With USB 2.0, you can turn the TV into a multimedia center, easily connecting cameras and flash drives so you can watch movies or view images directly from the devices. These TVs certainly know how to play well with others. With its DNLA wireless capability, you can even stream videos and tunes from other DNLA capable electronics like your laptop or mobile phone, wirelessly or via an Ethernet connection. So if you did download the last few episodes of Glee onto your computer, you can watch it from your crystal-clear TV screen instead.
There is no more reason to strain your eyes watching anything on any other kind of screen again. The picture has never been as perfect — Samsung’s picture technology gives its picture quality a whole new dimension. The Ultra Clear Panel allows more light to pass through the screen and reduces reflections from ambient light, so you are guaranteed crisp color no matter what your lighting conditions are. Older TVs have problems with their bright and dark areas, so watching a dark movie like Batman Begins will lose a lot of detail. Samsung’s mega- contrast technology backlighting technology enables a true-to-life range of picture brightness and color authenticity, from pure blacks to pristine whites. Also, the 240Hz Motion Plus technology delivers smooth motion images, rendering even the fastest moves with clarity, perfect for watching sports games where a lot of quick motion is involved. Now you will be able to call all those fouls correctly, making for a more satisfying game night with your buds.
The Thin Line
Though all this technology is neatly hidden in technical terms and processes beyond my understanding, what one can immediately see is that the Samsung LED TV takes design to another level, being both stylish and thin. The liquid crystal-like bezel transitions from black to transparent and illuminates with a warm hue. At 29.9mm, it’s one of the thinnest, and yet it produces quite a deep viewing experience.
And being lightweight, you can actually hang the screen up on the wall — again, a piece of art. Using just two wall screws instead of the usual nine and a hanging wire made out of bulletproof fiber, the wall mounting feature lets the TV hang 0.6” away from the wall, so your whole LED TV sticks out unobtrusively — only a little less than 2 inches from the wall — so that it actually looks like a painting from the side.
In these times, it’s perhaps most important to know that the high-end, high-tech television sets are actually the most environmentally friendly. Samsung’s LED TVs use 40 percent less power than conventional LCDs, which use CCFL bulbs. They are also free from toxic materials, being mercury-free, again, due to the light-emitting diodes. Because they are slim, they require less materials and packaging, which also leads to using less transportation resources.
Watching television has become a pleasure again, because I’m experiencing all these new sensations my laptop or old TV was never able to give me: pure immersion, intense and euphoric. My vampires, though pale, do not look pasty. The darkness is not just a black mass, but a shroud of creepy things. I am in love all over again.