Hardware Canucks posted a review of the Samsung LN52A850 52" 120Hz, 1080P LCD TV, This TV is a successor to the ever-popular 750 and 650 series which are still on sale (along with the older 550 series) at major retailers across the country.

If you are using the LN52A850 as your everyday TV, of its main uses will be to upscale all of the standard definition 480i signals to fit the larger real-estate a 52inch screen provides. To avoid the distortion that comes with stretching a 4:3 image to a 16:9 screen, I decided to keep the aspect ratio unchanged for incoming standard definition signals. Like many other things about this Samsung TV, the upscaling engine can handle standard definition signals extremely well and is able to significantly improve their overall quality. Granted, there are still some artifacts apparent but nothing like I have seen with other sets in the past which have made SD signal viewing a chore at best.

You would think that in the few days that I have had this TV I wouldn't have found any major issues with it. Well, you would be wrong since there was one problem right from the get go: for some reason the LN52A850 seriously messed with the reception with the IR remotes for both my Blu Ray player and Bell HD PVR 9242. I had heard of this being a problem with certain set-top box remotes (the 9242 among them) but after trying numerous solutions including turning down the backlight on the TV and moving the components into another piece of furniture, nothing helped. I am now using the RF remote from the PVR and crossing my fingers that the interference doesn't happen with the next Blu-Ray player I buy. However, looking at some of the release notes from past firmware updates for this TV, it seems like this issue was resolved with the 1003 update. Stay tuned for next week's update to this article since I plan on upgrading the firmware to the 1004 version as soon as possible.

There are some other minor issues I will go into further detail as this review runs its course but there is one thing I can tell you right now: until I mess around with the setting a bit more, the AMP (Auto Motion Plus) feature is staying completely off. They say to not judge a book by its cover so my jury is still out deliberating about the usefulness of AMP and will come back shortly with their impressions. Unfortunately, so far it isn't looking good. Normally, I am a very critical person (it comes with the territory folks) but it is extremely hard to find any faults with this Samsung TV even if it is still early in the review process. It is simply an amazing product which I believe Samsung needed after some issues began popping up with the 650 and 750-series TVs.