Frustration, for want of a numeric keypad

This past week or so I have had sitting in my office, too large to lightly put aside, a 55 inch Samsung LED/LCD TV. It looks lovely with its aluminium bezel, and its extraordinary sub-8mm panel thickness (over most of the panel, not all of it).

But it has a problem. When Samsung sent it to me, they included its remote, with its very fancy touch screen one, and with its Lithium-ion rechargeable battery. They did not supply the back panel of the remote (I can live without that) nor the charging cable for the remote (I can’t live without that).

The battery was flat from the start. I can’t charge it. The remote won’t work.

This need not necessarily be a problem. The panel is so thin that all the connections are actually made via the pre-attached desktop stand, and indeed its control panel is there too. I almost didn’t find this at all. You touch this barely visible horizontal line underneath the top of the desktop stand, and a little electric motor winds out a small panel. As it fully extends, a row of touch controls illuminate.

So I had the menu, and the means to navigate. All should be well.

Except for one thing: the TV was supplied in ‘Store Demo’ mode.

These days when you buy a new TV and switch it on for the first time, most brands will now ask you whether the TV is for a store or the home. These options allow the manufacturers to meet two conflicting needs (as they see them).

One need is make a splash in the showroom. The other is to consume a modest amount of power out of the box, so as to garner a good energy star rating. Choosing ‘Store’ often makes the TV poke you in the eye with its bright, over the top picture. These days, choosing ‘Home’ usually presents a default picture which is by no means perfect, but is often quite reasonable, even acceptable.

Of course, once I worked out how to use the touch controls on the slide-out panel, I set about resetting the TV to factory defaults (I always do this with all equipment, so as to start as if it were new). But as I embarked on this process, the TV would allow me to proceed no further until I entered a four digit PIN.

There is no numeric keypad on the slide-out panel, so I can’t change it.

Okay, in TV tuner mode with an SD station selected, I went into the picture menu, changed the picture mode from ‘Dynamic’  to ‘Standard’ and that improved it a lot, but it looked twittery — with little sharp edges flitting around, and flickering on and off. I checked and the sharpness control was on 50. I rolled it down to 20 and that softened the picture to what it should be for SD resolution, and eliminated all that irritating noise. The picture also looked a bit paint-by-the-numbers (ie. posterised). I drilled down through the menus and found in an advanced one that the setting for Gamma was ‘-3’, whatever that meant. I pushed it up to ‘0’ and now the picture was quite respectable. Not perfect, but good enough for general use until a remote came in (I found the slide out panel a pain because if I paused to ponder a choice, it withdrew again — seven seconds seemed to be the wait time).

A while later, though, the TV picture looked awful. I had changed between inputs and stations in the meantime, so I assumed that you had to set this for each particular station. Or something. I fixed it again.

And so it happened again. And again and again, I realise in retrospect. I, absentmindedly, would just fix it again whenever I noticed.

Until the penny finally dropped this afternoon. I had it on ABC24 to watch a speech and the discussion, and I know for a fact that I had changed nothing, but the picture I had set to very nice watchability that morning was now looking dreadful again. I checked, and the picture was back on ‘Dynamic’ and the ‘Sharpness’ back on 50.

This evening I went to a HDMI input. This had stuck with ‘Standard’ as I had last set it, but ‘Sharpness’ was up to a nasty 40. I put on a test Blu-ray, and found I had to wind it down to 10 before every last vestige of edge enhancement artefacts were eliminated. Then I clicked on the stopwatch and waited. After thirty minutes the picture went black for a flash, and then came back again … with the hard, distorted edges of the ‘Sharpness’ back up to 40.

I am getting pretty frustrated.

When the remote comes in and I can change out of ‘Store Demo’ mode, it will be interesting to see if the sliding control panel will also stay open a bit longer. I can imagine you’d have a quick countdown clock on store mode.

Update (11 August 2010, 12:51pm): Samsung finally provided a remote with charging cable yesterday. Now this is a ten thousand dollar TV, so you’d expect its bits and pieces to be pretty good. But I have to announce here, without a doubt this TV has the coolest remote control I have ever seen supplied with a piece of consumer electronics. If you ever see a Samsung 9 Series LED in a store, stop and ask them to show you what the remote can do.