In March this year it came time to upgrade my HT equipment. Not that I had bad equipment, it's just that 2 okes in a BMW decided to do some shopping at my place one Friday afternoon. Never got to thank them as I've got better kit than ever now. 
I did a fair amount of research and tried to stay within my budget (tough man tough!). The TV I settled on ended up being the SAMSUNG PS50B850 Series 8 Plasma 50".
First thing that blew me away was the size of this thing in the shop. Second was the design and aesthetics. After the review on flatpanelshd.com and an instore play of inFamous on PS3, I finally decided to bite the bullet.
Link to review: http://www.flatpanelshd.com/review.php?subaction=showfull&id=1245336433
While I love the TV picture quality and the size, I soon started to have some problems. When I stumbled upon the B850 owners thread on avforums.com, reports started to come in of all sorts of problems. Above all, the dreaded BUZZING.
Link to owners thread: http://www.avforums.com/forums/plasma-tvs/990633-samsung-ps50b850-ps58b850-owners-thread.html
Low and behold my TV had the buzzing problem. As it turns out, I am sensitive to electronic noise and it bugged the heck out of me. But my problems did not stop there. I got a new PS3 Slim 120GB at the same time and when tested it via the TV directly, I could not get it to work. Long story short, I even swapped out HDMI cables but it turned out that only one out of four HDMI ports worked. Then the cherry on the cake is the majorly annoying poor implementation of HDMI-CEC. It works fine with the PS3 but drives my Onkyo AV Receiver crazy. And me crazy! Constantly switches to TAPE source.
Again, to cut a long story short, Faxsure first checked the TV months ago and said it would need to be swapped out. Month in and month out I asked the retailer for an update. Recently I got fed up and told them I was done with waiting. Then it turned out that Samsung wanted a second visit by Faxsure to verify the problem again (FFS). Two weeks later and it never happened and we skipped straight to the exchange part. Well this is what I am now waiting for confirmation of.
Thing is there is now a big chance that there is no stock for an exchange, since the Series 8 was discontinued (WTF?). The direct replacement is the PS50C6500 which has its own host of problems.
Now I'm majorly put off Samsung but I'm not sure I can get a store credit, or if I can even get something else remotely as good in the price range (must be 50").
What do you guys think I should do? Did I make a mistake going with Samsung in the first place? (And no, the Pioneer Kuro is not an option at this late point) :
I did a fair amount of research and tried to stay within my budget (tough man tough!). The TV I settled on ended up being the SAMSUNG PS50B850 Series 8 Plasma 50".
First thing that blew me away was the size of this thing in the shop. Second was the design and aesthetics. After the review on flatpanelshd.com and an instore play of inFamous on PS3, I finally decided to bite the bullet.
Link to review: http://www.flatpanelshd.com/review.php?subaction=showfull&id=1245336433
While I love the TV picture quality and the size, I soon started to have some problems. When I stumbled upon the B850 owners thread on avforums.com, reports started to come in of all sorts of problems. Above all, the dreaded BUZZING.
Link to owners thread: http://www.avforums.com/forums/plasma-tvs/990633-samsung-ps50b850-ps58b850-owners-thread.html
Low and behold my TV had the buzzing problem. As it turns out, I am sensitive to electronic noise and it bugged the heck out of me. But my problems did not stop there. I got a new PS3 Slim 120GB at the same time and when tested it via the TV directly, I could not get it to work. Long story short, I even swapped out HDMI cables but it turned out that only one out of four HDMI ports worked. Then the cherry on the cake is the majorly annoying poor implementation of HDMI-CEC. It works fine with the PS3 but drives my Onkyo AV Receiver crazy. And me crazy! Constantly switches to TAPE source.
Again, to cut a long story short, Faxsure first checked the TV months ago and said it would need to be swapped out. Month in and month out I asked the retailer for an update. Recently I got fed up and told them I was done with waiting. Then it turned out that Samsung wanted a second visit by Faxsure to verify the problem again (FFS). Two weeks later and it never happened and we skipped straight to the exchange part. Well this is what I am now waiting for confirmation of.
Thing is there is now a big chance that there is no stock for an exchange, since the Series 8 was discontinued (WTF?). The direct replacement is the PS50C6500 which has its own host of problems.
Now I'm majorly put off Samsung but I'm not sure I can get a store credit, or if I can even get something else remotely as good in the price range (must be 50").
What do you guys think I should do? Did I make a mistake going with Samsung in the first place? (And no, the Pioneer Kuro is not an option at this late point) :
