Samsung UE46D7000 review

Sound

For so many years audio has been the Achilles' Heel of otherwise excellent Samsung flat TVs, but the UE46D7000 sounds surprisingly good.

There's much more raw power and a wider dynamic range than before, meaning the set can deliver a sense of expansion when shifting up a few gears for action scenes and retain clarity, especially with dialogue, when pushed hard. There's even more than a hint of bass in the sound mix, which is all the more remarkable when you remember how slim that bezel is.

Value

Although £1,700 is quite expensive in the context of 46-inch sets in general, by the time you've tallied up its mind-blowing design, massive feature count, groundbreaking 'smart' functions, 3D capabilities and, most importantly of all, terrific picture quality, suddenly it starts to look surprisingly fair value.

Ease of use

Firing up the UE46D7000's onscreen menus immediately reveals a revamped look to things, with much greater use of graphics and a very much appreciated 'interactive' onscreen instruction manual that shows you a brief description of what each feature in the menus does, as and when you select it.
Some of these descriptions are a little too brief for comfort, but overall it's a system of which Samsung should be proud that sets an example for other brands to follow.

Then, of course, there's the Smart Hub. The amount of content this new 'jumping off' menu puts instantly at your disposal is superb, making full use of the screen's full HD resolution to present its many icons and sections clearly and logically. This, surely, is a first glimpse of how the TVs of the future will have to organise their sources.

The other onscreen menus aren't perfect, though, thanks to some general organisational issues. Particularly flawed is the use of separate Advanced Settings and Picture Options submenus within the main Picture menu, when it would have been easier to have all the features spread over these two menus tucked into one (though to be fair, when you highlight a sub-menu you do get a list of the options that submenu contains).

There are also an awful lot of features for you to get your head round, some of which can make picture quality worse if you don't know what you're doing with them.

The basic remote control, meanwhile, is adequate. It lacks the glamorous looks of the main TV, but its layout is reasonably intuitive and its buttons are responsive. If you're after something a little more swish, you can purchase an optional remote control with a full-colour touchscreen interface.

In some ways, this works superbly; its keyboard is certainly superior to the buttons on the standard zapper and it is very effective at navigating the Smart Hub. However, it also makes achieving some really very basic functions feel frustratingly complicated.