Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 7 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

After over 11 years of faithful service as our primary family room TV, my 42″ Panasonic plasma died last week. Time to do some TV shopping!

It’s hard to believe we’ve been using an ED (that’s right, 480P) television as our workhorse display for the past 11 years. When we bought it, we couldn’t quite afford the hefty price tag of the new HDTVs. My priorities at the time were lots of jacks (composite, component, HDMI, etc.) and the CableCARD slot for future digital cable. Over the years I’ve had all sorts of equipment connected to the TV (VCR, DVD changer, DVD burner, Wii, multiple TiVos, etc.) but never actually used the CableCARD slot (thanks to my first HD TiVo in 2006).

While connections are still important, my setup is now significantly simpler: the only thing I have connected to the TV is the TiVo Roamio Pro (via a single HDMI cable) and an optical audio cable to the receiver (which is 16 years old and still kicking!). So my priorities this time around were picture quality, size (the TV needs to fit in some built-in shelving), and miscellaneous extras like network connectivity, Bluetooth, etc.

After doing all of my normal Consumer Reports research, reading internet reviews, and doing price comparisons, I selected the 50″ Samsung UN50JS7000 (the 55″ model was unfortunately just a smidge too tall to fit in my cabinet) and picked it up a at local Best Buy (who also took care of recycling my old plasma for $25).

My new 4K UHD (3840 x 2160 resolution) television is 50lbs lighter, 2 inches narrower, and 1 inch shorter than the ED (852 x 480 resolution) plasma it replaced, but has an 8-inch larger (diagonally) screen. Technology has really progressed over the past 11 years! 🙂 The JS7000 has 4 HDMI jacks, 1 set of combined component/composite jacks, 3 USB ports, optical audio out, RF (coax) in, built-in WiFi and ethernet networking and Bluetooth. More than I need for now: as I mentioned above I’m using a single HDMI jack for my TiVo, optical audio out to my receiver, ethernet, and coax cable (to take advantage of some picture-in-picture/split screen features).

The picture quality is really good. I followed the calibration settings from rtrings.com to tweak the Movie picture mode, which supposedly made for a more “natural” look but currently I prefer (ironically) the built-in “Natural” preset which is a little brighter. The two 10W speakers are downward facing (the plasma had two forward-facing 16W ones) but are still plenty loud to fill the family room for basic TV watching.

The JS7600 is a “Smart TV” so it includes Samsung’s Smart Hub. A lot of apps are pre-installed (like Netflix and Amazon) and you can install a plethora of others (like Plex). All of the apps I use regularly (Amazon, VUDU, Plex, YouTube, etc.) are already available on my TiVo so at first I didn’t really think I would use the Smart Hub apps as much. I will admit, however, that some of the apps are nicer looking and (strangely) easier to use on the TV than the TiVo. Still, my family prefers the simple, single remote setup and are used to using the TiVo remote so I suspect we’ll usually be running the TiVo apps. There are also some privacy concerns around the Smart Hub and Samsung’s data collection on these connected televisions. I made sure to disable as much of that background garbage as possible, but for some reason a Samsung account is required to use the Plex app, which is baffling to me. You can do some basic “casting” (of music and photos) to the TV from your mobile phone using Samsung’s Smart View app (which can also double as a remote control) and it also appears as an available cast receiver in the YouTube iOS app. If you have a Samsung Android device, you can do screen mirroring but there’s no AirPlay compatibility for Apple devices.

No TV is perfect, though. There are some minor nits I have with the JS7000:

• why, why, why does there have to be an annoyingly bright red power LED on the front!? This has been a constant complaint of mine over the years with electronic components. Why did I have to put a little square of black electrical tape on my new TV? Turning off that LED should be an option in the settings … I don’t need a light to tell me my TV is off!
• switching into and out of Sports (Soccer) Mode plays an annoying “cheering crowd” sound effect and shows an animated soccer field graphic overlay on the screen … is that really necessary?
• you can’t disable inactive inputs to make the selection menu shorter. For example, I’m never going to use the component or RVU connections, so I’d like to be able to hide those when switching sources.
• the TV can be sluggish to respond to the remote when it first powers up. The picture comes up very quickly, but I suspect that all of the Smart Hub software loading in the background temporarily slows down the quad-core processor.

Now I just need to get some 4K sources (and maybe a TiVo Bolt to record them)!

Note: my runner-up selection was the Vizio SmartCast E50u-D2, which is tuner-less and not “smart” (and thus cheaper). Instead of having all the apps built-into the TV, you just cast everything from your phone using their SmartCast app, which made perfect sense to me since I use the TiVo as a tuner and for apps. The E-Class series don’t come out until next month, though, so there wasn’t a lot of real-world, hands-on experience to read about. That, paired with the fact that my plasma had died, help cement the decision to go with the JS7000.