I just received the TV so I can't add more to the great stuff already said about this way over top of the line TV. So far all is excellent.
What I want to complement is Amazon's delivery. As Amazon is an authorized distributor, their price is limited to the $2,465 that all other authorized distributors are priced at. Many other etailers sell around $2,090 but are not authorized, so I was very wary of them.
Then Amazon comes along with a $400 promotional discount (unfortunately expired on 6/1) and basically unadvertised on their site. I found it through bloggers. So I was able to buy at a price matched to the other guys.
Delivery estimate was 6/4 for me, but I got a call saying it was ready for delivery on 6/1. Three days early, yeah!
Now for the best part, it was delivered white glove. The guys brought it into my house, powered it up and worked with me to verify all was operational before they left.
So for $2,065 bottom line, I received this TV white glove delivered shipping included. No one, not even the non-authorized dealers, could touch that.
Cons: While reading the user manual I found the electronics design engineer part of me saying "that is just stupid" several times. Some of its intentionally built-in limitations just amazed me, but I find that is somewhat true of all electronics, so I didn't degrade my star rating any.
The most bizarre case, the 5.1 channel sound is only available if the source is the built-in tuner. Any source sound from HDMI inputs (such as a BD Player) is downgraded to 2 channel for passing through to the HDMI output. Per the user manual, the only way to get 5.1 sound from all your devices is to have them each send their audio via optical straight to the audio receiver. This just defeats the whole advantage of HDMI doing combined audio/video in one cable.
Design wise, this should be a simple HDMI pass-through. I am always amazed when companies spend manpower to delete naturally occurring functionality, especially when that deletion make otherwise great features useless. Four HDMI inputs yet you can't use them because surround sound is stripped. Is this a case of the consumer getting screwed by movie industry driven DRM (in the guise of HDCP) once again?
I am hoping this is a simple Korean/English Technical Writer translation error. It would make more sense if they said that only component and conventional audio/video inputs are limited to 2 channel when passed through to the HDMI outputs, because that would have cost design effort to convert analog surround to digital surround.
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