Samsung PN51D6500

Samsung PN51D6500 51" 3D Plasma TV

The $1400 (as of September 4, 2011) Samsung PN51D6500 sports some very cool features. One attractive and easy-to-use screen gives you access to all of your local and Internet sources. It provides a single interface for searching for movies and TV shows across all of the set's video-on-demand services. For the most part, its images--both 3D and 2D--look very good, and its audio is as good as you could reasonably expect from an unaided television. But pieces of its user interface--especially text entry-- feel half-baked. And even by plasma standards, the PN51D6500 is a power hog. The PN51D6500's image quality is very good, but not exceptional, earning Very Good marks for Brightness and Contrast, and Good for Detail and Motion. But the set had its problems, too. More than one judge complained about yellowish colors and too much contrast, and some test scenes looked oversaturated. It received universally low scores in a test that the PCWorld Lab designed to isolate and exaggerate diagonal motion problems. We noted less extreme but similar problems in a clip from Mission Impossible III. Though PCWorld hasn't yet added 3D image quality tests to its HDTV test process, several scenes from the 3D Avatar Blu-ray disc looked very impressive.