Myth Busted: Samsung TVs Still Your Friend
I feel a little like a Mythbuster with this post - Someone posts a fantastic story online somewhere, the story is propagated by others without any fact checking, and a myth is born. The problem for me is that the story didn’t pass the basic smell test, and I knew there must be more to it.
In this case we have the looming ‘Analog Sunset’ for Blu-ray players, where analog outputs on future players will not have analog outputs. The online report was that Samsung had embraced the analog sunset early, and had down-rezzed their inputs on thier new line of D8000 series TVs to 480i/p only.
This didn’t make sense because Samsung has no reason to break compatibility, and the ‘analog sunset’ as defined by the Blu-ray license does not apply to TVs. They gain nothing by doing this. If the myth was about Sony I could kind of believe it since they have a movie studio, but even that is unlikely since Sony Pictures and Sony Electronics are very different groups with different interests, or so I’ve been told. Still, any embracing of analog sunsets would likely come from the source devices, not the displays. And to make the story even more suspect, the Samsung user guide apparently reports up to 1080p on the component input.
Next, a contributor to CEPro.com made some phone calls to Samsung, who apparently told him that in fact the TVs only supported 480i/p. That is rather baffling. I’m even more interested in the truth now!
So to settle this, I went down to my local Best Buy/Magnolia Design Center store, and explained to the very helpful and knowledgable Jared that I would like to see the Samsung D8000 and verify that component video inputs work at 720p and 1080i. Now Jared was even more skeptical than I, and wagered a full paycheck on it working fine. They had on display the 46″ version. After Jared found the goofy breakout cable Samsung supplied, we connected it to a Pioneer Elite Blu-ray player, and set it up for component out at 1080i. And no surprise to Jared, it worked fine. We also set it to 720p, no problem. And yes, the picture looked exactly the same as the HDMI input. They had a very nice NuVision demo disc, which was sort of ironic, but it proved the point.
Of course I know if I did not supply pictures the myth would never die, so see below and click for full size images.
So Jared gets to keep his paycheck, custom integrators around the globe get to keep using component video with their Samsung displays, and the internet can keep churning up rumors of impending doom.