Samsung FP-T5084 Plasma HDTV

The Samsung FP-T5084 offers pleasing colors and sharp picture detail in a sleekly designed cabinet. Moreover, this 50-inch plasma HDTV has an extremely affordable price ($2400), which helped it capture the Best Buy in our chart of 50- and 52-inch HDTV sets.

Colors in high-definition scenes were luxuriously rich. An HD scene of The George Lopez Show revealed bright, natural colors and realistic skin tones. Jurors watching Corpse Bride, a colorfully macabre animated film, gave the FP-T5084 a high score for the vivid tones and detail that it repro­duced. Standard-definition quality was slightly above average; a standard-definition baseball game had well-saturated oranges and turf greens, with fine detail in dark areas and minimal pixelation.

The FP-T5084 offers a slew of adjustable settings, including RGB gain and offset controls in the White Balance section of the OSD menu (for fine color temperature controls), and separate pink, green, blue, and white settings in My Color Control. You also get Samsung's DNIe (Digital Natural Image engine), which combines noise reduction, color enhancement, and motion processing to make pictures look sharper. With DNIe enabled, images did look a bit sharper, brighter, and more color-saturated--unnaturally so, I thought. In the Blu-ray version of Phantom of the Opera, I preferred the TV's presets, such as the default Standard and Movie modes.

The TV's clean lines give it a stylish look, highlighted by a glossy black bezel and thin chrome accents on the left and right sides. The screen could use a better antireflective treatment; reflections from the room became distracting during some dark scenes. The speakers, located on either side of the TV, are far from the best. In Phantom of the Opera, audio seemed brassy and a bit muddled.

It's not the most cutting-edge or full-featured HDTV set, but the Samsung FP-T5084 scored high overall because it is inexpensive, well designed, and a solid performer.