My 4K upgrade

[Towen7]

My set has only 12 zones of local dimming and it doesn't seem to dim the overall picture unacceptably. In fact, I haven't noticed any ill effects at all.

 

[Botch]

Can't remember how many zones my set has (48?) but I haven't noticed any dimming either.
Vertical banding (or horizontal banding, for that matter) would be indicative of LED edge-lighting (where I can't believe anyone would even try to have local dimming; it doesn't make sense). My 6-year old set is backlit.

 

[Towen7]

I realized that back-in-the-day we used to turn off all video processing on the TV. That's not necessarily the case anyone.

At the moment I have several TV processing functions on; Active LED zones, Clear Action, Reduce Signa Noise, Reduce Block Noise ...

 

[Towen7]

... the TV has this thing called local dimming which dims all four video ratios except Movie mode. So Natural, Dynamic and Enhanced as you watch the picture gets dimmer and dimmer till it's very dark. Who the Fuck would create such a thing. You calibrate the TV and then when your done it gets real dark.

Thats definitely not how local dimming is supposed to work. The function divides the backlight into multiple zones, the more the better. Then when one zone has more black than another the backlight dims the backlight in only that one particular zone and only as long as that zone has a lot of black. If your picture is progressively getting darker you've got other issues.

 

[MatthewB]

Samsung is very secretive of how many zones on their 4K sets but I've read my model has 600 zones not sure if that's correct or not but the research says that each zone is supposed to get lighter or darker depending on the picture and what zone is affected but just one day and that's not what's happening. I put on something bright like the golf channel and after 30 seconds after changing the channel the whole image got dramatically darker not just slightly but the best way to describe it is it's a bright sunny day then bam a 90% partial eclipse of the sun just hits it gets very dark. I've read this is so Samsung can be compliant with being energy efficient which is total bullshit luckily they give Movie Mode which bypasses local dimming but it starts off with the backlighting at 0 so had to bring it up to 13 to get perfect lighting. Also had to set brightness to 45 and contrast to 88 to get perfect bright and fantastic black level. It's not OLED black but it's up there.

Also noticed that my 30 year old B&K ST1400 stereo amp is having issues. It drives my side surrounds (Def Tech 450's) and there's this horrible scratching sound from the tweeter when anything comes thru. I tested the speaker by replacing it with the other 450 and it's not the speaker but the amp. I should get a can of Deoxit but figured the amp is 30 years old so I should have it checked out. So tomorrow dropping it off to have a full service and clean bring it back up to snuff. I bought the amp ten years ago from a pawn shop and got it cheap as the positive speaker post was completely gone so bought it for 80.00 and jury rigged the broken post with a spare one (same post connecting the scratchy speaker) worked great for ten years and now same day as new TV I get this issue. Oh well hope it won't be too costly and is an easy fix. Figured oxidation and possibly a new solder post or two should fix the issue.