Samsung PS51E8000GS Pro Reviews

The Samsung PS51E8000 is a great Plasma TV. It features good black levels, and since it’s a PDP, those blacks are consistently dark across the entire screen surface and viewing area – even although they’re not the absolute darkest out there. After only a basic setup, picture quality is good, with a calibrated E8000 producing some of the best images we’ve seen lately. However, if you’ve been reading this review and thinking that it lacks the sheer enthusiasm of our earlier review of the E6500 plasma, you’d be right. The PS51E8000 features almost no picture quality improvements over the midrange E6500 series, and more irritatingly still, the European version features a years-old Samsung misfeature where the noise reduction filter can’t be turned off. This means that even with high quality noise-free content, film grain (which isn’t the same as noise!) and other fine motion details can be blurred out – a difficult pill to swallow for video enthusiasts on a high-end display, and downright silly considering that the cheaper E6500 series is free of the issue. It also appears that the unlockable CAL-DAY and CAL-NIGHT calibration modes found on the US version have been left out of the European model, which is another missed opportunity to add more value to this top-end plasma.

The Samsung PS51E8000 looks every inch the Samsung top-tier product it is and the native gun-metal coloured bezel appears ever darker as the day wears on, eventually settling at deep graphite grey for night-time viewing. It’s a nice touch and our only gripe with the design sits below the panel, in the form of the chicken foot (quad) stand Samsung seem to be insisting is stylish. It’s not to our tastes but we are fans of the newly designed, sleeker remote control that comes in the box of the E8000 even if they have needlessly removed the Aspect Ratio button. This being 2012, it wouldn’t be a flagship product if it didn’t have at least one other controller to get to grips with and, sure enough, the 8000 ships with the new ‘Smart Touch Control’ which reminds us strongly of a Star Trek communicator, not least because it has a built-in microphone for voice control purposes. It also has a touch-pad – hence the name – which makes web browsing on the inbuilt browser much easier than it is using the standard controller. One thing that certainly didn’t shout ‘top tier product’ at us was the rather stingy 3 HDMI inputs located around the back of the TV – the box proclaims that these TVs are the ‘future now’ but, in that respect, Samsung are living in the past.

Its image quality and motion smoothing could be better, but it's packed full of great online services and smart features