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The Samsung C9000 series displays have kept a low profile since their unveiling at the January 2010 CES show. When you consider their high price (the 46″ UE46C9000 costs no less than £3000), that probably won’t come as much of a surprise. As the company’s top-tier model, this 3D capable, ultra-slim LED-sidelit LCD display features a Full HD 1080p panel, 4 HDMI inputs, and also ships with a unique touch-screen remote control.

The Samsung UE46C9000 is certainly a stunningly engineered HDTV: with a screen that’s just 0.5cm deep, it truly is “pencil thin”. The 46-inch LCD panel is surrounded by a silver metallic bezel, and although we prefer black (for the perception of higher contrast that it gives on-screen images), we can’t deny that the design is aesthetically pleasing as well as technically impressive.

Also of note is the UE46C9000’s remote control, which more closely resembles a high-end touch screen phone than a television remote. We think that the possibility of watching TV on the remote screen is neat, although honestly can’t think of much practical use for it. Crucially, the remote control is more difficult and slow to use compared to the standard “plastic slab with buttons” variety. Given the amount of back-and-forthing we do in the menus during our intensive calibration process, we quickly put the fancy remote aside and grabbed the more responsive remote that came supplied with a cheaper Samsung LCD instead! (Samsung also ships the C9000 with a basic small remote that only features volume and channel options, making it of very little use).

In its out of the box state, the UE46C9000 displays video that is certainly not in accordance to industry mastering standards. The result is missing shadow and highlight details, blue-tinted whites, oversaturated colours, and emphasised edges. After selecting the “Movie” picture preset, which appears to be Samsung’s attempt at an accurate picture mode, we measured the following data from the LED-lit LCD panel:

After selecting “Movie” mode, the Samsung UE46C9000 was doing a good job of reproducing the correct colour of grey. At all points, there was a slight bias of red and lack of green making up grey shades, and at 10% stimulus, there was a prominently visible excess of blue, meaning that shadowed areas of the picture looked overly cold. This is a common issue with LED-based LCD screens. Still, this is not a bad result at all, especially considering that no other calibration work has been performed on the display.

The results weren’t surprising at all: Samsung’s colour management controls are some of the best we’ve seen, and meant that we could correct almost all of the small Saturation, Hue, and Luminance (colour brightness) errors that existed in the UE46C9000’s images. The only exceptions here are Red and Blue, which both appear slightly desaturated on this television. This appears to be a common issue for LED-sidelit LCD sets, and unfortunately, Blues do appear slightly purple-ish to our eyes, since we’re used to watching nearly-perfect displays. Still, there are much worse colour errors that an HDTV could potentially show, so we don’t feel this is a huge problem – just one we’d rather not see on such an expensive display.

We were largely happy with the quality of the Greyscale tracking in 3D mode, even before any adjustments were made. LCD-based displays have the advantage here over their Plasma counterparts, in that they appear much more able to display a consistent shade of grey at all brightness levels. The excessive amount of blue at 10% stimulus remained in 3D, and there was no satisfactory way of removing it, due to the fact that the [10p White Balance] control only works in 2D. In any case, this is certainly one of the better results of Greyscale Tracking that we’ve seen from a 3D TV.

Immediately after turning on our Samsung UE46C9000 review unit, it became apparent that it does not follow in the footsteps of our UE46C8000 sample, and features the most uniform, “clouding”-free LCD panel that we’ve seen from Samsung in years. Yes, the extreme far left and far right edges of the panel were slightly brighter than the rest, but that’s really all. It marks the first time we’ve seen an ultra-slim edge-lit LED LCD TV from the company that doesn’t feature patches of uneven light marring dark areas, which bodes extremely well for the future (let’s just hope they can manufacture such high quality panels at cheaper prices). We sincerely hope that this is not only the case with our review sample, and that all units feature this same high panel quality (they should do at this price). Perhaps some C9000 owners can let us know how their screens look in the comments section?

What hasn’t changed, though, is the level of contrast performance. When the LED LCD TV receives a fully black video signal, it will shut its LED lights off entirely (obviously in this case, the light output from the panel measures at 0.00 cd/m2). Of course, this is of no use in real world viewing, which is why we’re now performing measurements with ANSI test charts, which test how dark blacks appear when they’re displayed beside white areas. After ensuring that peak white on the Samsung UE46C9000 was calibrated to our standard 120 cd/m2, we verified that the black patches in the chart measured 0.058 cd/m2, which is enough to give the impression of deep blacks.

The viewing angle performance of the C9000 was noticeably better than the cheaper C8000, and for a VA-type LCD panel, was very good. When the panel was viewed from a side position, there was a visible Gamma shift, meaning that the picture appeared more grey-ish, with exaggerated shadow details. Greyscale characteristics also shifted, with certain shades – which looked absolutely perfect when sitting face-on – appearing a little pastel-coloured. However, these flaws are simply inherent to LCD display technology, meaning that viewers are probably more than used to them now. Whether or not they are tolerable is down to the viewer and the usage environment.

In our scrolling test chart, the Samsung UE46C9000 managed to hold onto 1080 lines of resolution, even during movement – at least in the area of the chart that displays grey lines. The exact resolution of the moving black lines was a little harder to settle on, but whatever it is, it’s suitably high. (Ah, for the days of LCD displays which could only manage 300 lines of motion resolution – back then, reading the chart with just our eyes was so easy!)

Of course, to achieve this high level of motion performance, the Samsung UE46C9000 had to have its [Motion Plus] system engaged. We set [Blur Reduction] to 10 and left [Judder Reduction] at 0 (to avoid the “soap opera effect” being introduced into films). Unfortunately, just as with the rest of Samsung’s 2010 LCD sets, we did notice this occasionally causing the on-screen image to stutter, especially around rapid scene cuts. A good indicator is any sort of news channel with a smooth scrolling headline ticker – in our case, the BBC News ticker would sometimes erroneously drop to half of the usual motion smoothness when the [Motion Plus] system was enabled.

We were surprised at how much better the 3D performance was on the UE46C9000 compared to the Samsung C8000 LED LCD display we reviewed back in May. Readers have told us that the 3D performance of that display improved considerably after firmware upgrades, but we’ve not had a chance to re-assess it. As a result, we’re unsure if the superior 3D performance we’re seeing now with the C9000 is the result of software updates, higher quality components, or both.

In any case, crosstalk is greatly reduced, which is very reassuring given just how damaging it has been on other LCD-based 3D televisions. Of course, it’s still not at the point where it could be described as a non-issue: during 3D Blu-ray discs such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the various demo discs we’ve amassed over the months, there are still some instances of the dreaded black/white glowing. We were expecting worse, so this bodes well for the future. We do need to point out, however, that since the UE46C9000’s 3D display mode is 60hz-centric, 24fps movies displayed with some unwanted juddering.

On the plus side, though, since we mentioned Panasonic 3D Plasma TVs, we need to point out that the quality of the Samsung UE46C9000’s Greyscale tracking in 3D mode is much better than any Plasma display we’ve measured. This results in images being free of unwanted colour casts (except for the aforementioned excess of blue in shadowed areas). Although they’re winning the battle on Crosstalk artefacts, Plasma TV panels appear to have a very hard time maintaining clean, bright, linear images with smooth gradation when it comes to 3D.

Video deinterlacing of 480i, 576i and 1080i SD and HD formats was excellent, with almost no jaggedness making it onto the screen. The look of Samsung’s scaling engine (which performs the actual resizing of SD signals to the HD panel resolution) may be something of an acquired taste, since its edge-adaptive nature means that it ends up producing a more natural picture, rather than a pin-sharp one. For example, other scalers will produce an incredibly sharp picture with some aliasing (jaggedness) present, whereas Samsung’s tends to smooth over such imperfections and present a smoother, more believable image instead. Neither is necessarily better than the other, and personally, we like the look of both.

The UE46C9000’s HD images, for the most part, look very good indeed. The LCD panel’s high level of contrast performance combined with the linear and accurate Greyscale tracking, and accurate colour performance, mean that 2D high-def material has a sense of involving depth.

Because the noise reduction is motion-adaptive, it means that the amount of grain seen will vary depending on the picture content (it also means you can see the original image if you pause your Blu-ray Disc player). For example, at the start of chapter 17 of the Aliens BD, the scene is lacking its film-like texture – until a cloud of smoke rushes past the camera, which brings powdery remnants of the grain back momentarily. This is a shame, because LCD screens are especially suited to reproducing film material with grain, without any additional “tizzing” or dithering like a Plasma television adds due to its driving method. Later on in Chapter 18, the heavy grain in darker scenes cannot be fully removed by the smoothing processing, meaning that what’s left of it looks more like noise, and “swarms” and “smears” around in the dark. This scenario will please nobody: those who like to see films looking like films won’t be appeased, and those who dislike the look of film grain will probably have their attention drawn to it more.

With this out of the way, we need to say that the image quality delivered by the UE46C9000 is still very good indeed, provided that the material you’re watching doesn’t draw attention to the aforementioned smoothing process (or if the viewer simply doesn’t notice it). For example, CG animated films, which are almost always visibly grainless by their very nature, looked excellent. One of our favourite 2D animation discs, Ponyo (which actually does have some subtle digitally added grain, for aesthetic reasons) still looked wonderful. The clean look of the LED LCD TV and the absence of any noticeable black smearing added up to produce an impressive image.

We were expecting the Samsung C9000 to simply be a thinner version of the step-down C8000 – a display which we weren’t totally enthusiastic about when we reviewed it in the Summer. As it happens, the UE46C9000 does manage to improve on some of the shortcomings of its cheaper sibling. In the review sample we received, panel uniformity was excellent. Furthermore, auto-dimming during dark scenes was no longer an issue, and there was no judder in 24p material (during 2D playback). Also, crosstalk in 3D material is greatly improved over the C8000 we reviewed back in May – although if this is the result of firmware upgrades, it’s possible that the C8000 will have the same performance now, too. Let’s also not forget about the wonderful Greyscale, Gamma and Colour performance, all of which lend on-screen images a heavy dose of depth and realism.

Still, we’re impressed that crosstalk in 3D is kept to a surprising minimum compared to other LCD-based 3D sets we’ve seen, and we’re also glad to see that Samsung can produce an ultra-slim panel without obvious screen uniformity issues. As a result, we look forward to seeing improvement such as these (and fixes to the other issues we outlined) make their way onto cheaper Samsung HDTVs in the future… because Samsung has made some truly excellent value-for-money displays in the past.