Got a $[...] windfall of cash in Oct. 2009 and my wife had green-lighted a bigger TV purchase so w/ money in hand, I began my quest for the ideal TV…. I am an admitted research freak so of course I created my multi-columned spreadsheet and began scouring the internet for information. We had been using a 2005 Samsung 32″ LCD as our main family room TV (due to financial constraints when we bought our new house)… of course, I had done my research on that TV and it had proven to be a good purchase, so Samsung was already on the top of my short list.

I could have gone w/ a cheaper Sharp or the 55-inch LG, but ultimately decided to spend a couple-few hundred more for the Samsung LN52B630 and not second guess myself later. BTW, my wife had seen her friend’s LN52A650 and loved the red touch of color bezel, so the extra cost was easy to sell.

Anyway, in case you haven’t fallen asleep, the LN52B630 is awesome. Blacks and contrast blow away our old TV (after setting adjustments..more later). At first, I was a little thrown off with the 120hz (I’m not a big fan of the ‘hyper-real soap-opera’ effect that some 120hz TV’s display)… However, on this TV, you can manually adjust the 2 sub-settings on the 120Hz ‘AMP’ (Auto Motion Plus) feature… I read a review from some canadian guy and he suggested setting the AMP to ‘CUSTOM’ and then separately turning the ‘blur reduction’ up to a fairly high setting (7 thru 10) and turning the ‘anti-judder’ effect down to ‘0′…. bingo! Smooth 120hz refreshed picture without the weirdness.

You will also need to tinker with the settings (TV is on Showroom bright out of the box).. you’ll want to turn the brightness and backlight down by a lot and consider turning off some of the other misc. processing modes…. I’d recommend getting a calibration DVD or having a tech tune it to get optimal picture.

One thing I’ve found is that the bigger and better the Samsung LN52B630 TV, the more you can tell the quality of the source material.
HiDef content looks fantastic (the higher the better) as do video games. SD looks eh… well… kinda like crap. Can’t wait till it goes away. I can now see the diff. between 1080i and 720p. Anything 1080i looks brilliant and Blu-Ray… wow! To be honest, when I first got my PS3, I really couldn’t tell the difference between Blu-Ray and upconverted DVD on my old 32″ Sammy. Both looked great… but on this 52″… you can really see the difference. Blu-Ray - wow! it’s mind-blowing. and it handles it at the orig. 24p.

I could go on and on… it’s a great set. The only minor gripe I have is the inability to save your picture tuning preferences as a ‘CUSTOM’ saved setting and naming it something, which means that if I want to change the settings to watch football vs. watch a Blu-Ray movie, I have to manually calibrate everything (I used a cheatsheet).

So happy I bought another Sammy (BTW - got mine on 10/24/09 at Fry’s Electronics for $1399+tax)