To thoroughly test the L46B550, I sat myself in front of the TV for hours upon hours with various inputs: cable TV, digital OTA, Blu-ray via HDMI and PC via HDMI. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. When considering a purchase of this magnitude, it’s absolutely imperative that you judge all reviews with a grain of salt. There’s really no way for you to tell whether or not the TV is worth your investment by a few pictures. Do yourself a favour and visit your local brick and mortar store and stand in front of the TV for twenty minutes. Find the remote and play with the settings. If you can’t do that or would like to narrow your choices, let me show you a handful of pictures and videos of the TV in action!

I’ll start with the viewing angle. There is no claim as to what the viewing angle for the 46B550 is and while it doesn’t appear to be 178 degrees, the average household need not worry. I would guess the angle is closer to the 160 range. I was still able to get good contrast at obtuse angles but the picture does tend to fade together. Judge for yourself with these photos.

Original Picture Straight View:

Viewing Angles:

Here are some pictures of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:

I would bet many of you will be using the TV as a monitor for your PC. If that’s the case then you will want to be able to clearly read the text off the monitor. I sat about 15 feet away and had no problems making out the words from Digg. The quality is definitely not as good as sitting a mere 2 feet from a monitor or that of a high end LED TV but it is more than acceptable.

To cap off our look at the TV display, I turned the 46B550 into a monitor for my Dell M1210 and used a X-Rite i1 Display 2 to judge how well the default picture settings (Standard, Movie and Dynamic) compare against a calibrate screen. The calibration settings will be a Native White Point, 2.2 Gamma and 90 Luminance.

I will test each profile (Standard, Movie and Dynamic) one at a time and walk through the entire calibration process. I will test the ambient lighting and adjust the overhead lighting in the room so the color temperature and illuminance is consistent.

Let’s start with the Standard display. The ambient light check shows a color temperature of 5900K and an illuminance of 59 lux. The default Standard setting has a color temperature of 10,000K. The luminance reads 331.4 cd/m² and the gamma is 2.3.

During the Dynamic display mode test, the ambient light check shows a color temperature of 5300K and an illuminance of 63 lux. The default Dynamic setting has a color temperature of 9,900K. The luminance reads 476.6 cd/m² and the gamma is 2.1.

The final display mode is Movie and the ambient light check shows a color temperature of 5100K and an illuminance of 70 lux. The default Movie setting has a color temperature of 6,700K. The luminance reads 206.7 cd/m² with a gamma of 2.3.

To compare the three default profiles, I ran the calibration one more time with the Standard profile and made adjustments to the backlight, brightness and contrast settings in order to get the best picture quality as determined by X-Rite. During this test the ambient light check showed a color temperature of 5400K with an illuminance of 68 lux. After some tweaking, the color temperature read 10,600 K with a luminance of 88.8 cd/m² and gamma of 2.3. To achieve this setting I had to lower the backlight from 8 to 1 and drop the contrast two notches to 93 from 95. I didn’t have to change the brightness setting.

Here’s a picture of the Standard display with the calibration on.

Here’s a picture of the Standard display profile with no calibration.

Here’s a picture of the Dynamic display profile with no calibration.

Here’s a picture of the Movie display profile with no calibration.

The differences between the settings appear to be very small, at least in my eyes. From what I can see, the default settings are fairly well tuned to what X-Rite deems as appropriate for an LCD monitor. Any major adjustments would only be required if you think colors should appear slightly different.

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