Customer Reviews

Great value for money

The LCD panel on this TV is the same as the one on A550 model. Several people have confirmed with Samsung. The difference in contrast ratio versus A550 is a typo apparently.

What I like about this tv:
-great picture quality (search avs forum for professionally calibrated settings for this TV. It made a significant difference in picture quality
- good sound for everyday tv watching
-good quality ATSC/QAM tuner ( I pulled in channels that I didn’t I had)

comparison vs A550:
+ better sound because of side mounted speakers
+ cheaper (though amzn had A550 for less than A530 at one point last month
- does not have wiselink (view photos/mp3s from usn thumb drive)

I dont care about viewing photos/mp3s too much so I went with the A530.

5 Star TV
Hi Everyone,

We recently purchased this TV, and I have to say it is GREAT. We got it primarily for our photography business - basically, to use it as a giant monitor for editing and to show photographs to clients. It is the exact look and feel we were going for.

So far, everything has worked out perfectly. Particularly, it looks wonderful with our iMac putting video out to it at 1920×1080 @ 60 hertz via HDMI (mini-dvi to DVI to HDMI). It looks great as well with our Compaq PC laptop hooked up through VGA - again at 1920×1080 @ 60 hertz. I honestly don’t see a difference on this model through VGA vs. HDMI, but I haven’t run any comparison tests yet.

The sound is really decent on this TV. We can set it at a volume to comfortably here it at 30 feet away without maxing out the volume. Though, we can also hook it up to our sound system to put out more sound / bass. It does have optical sound out which works just fine for this (or you could use the standard RCA red & white audio out).

The display itself is absolutely crisp. We haven’t tried customizing it yet, but there are a good bit of options for that as well. To give you an idea, a photograph on our 20″ iMac looks just as good (if not better) on the 530 Samsung. There’s no loss of color, blacks, or details. Originally, the images on the TV seemed to have a sharpening affect applied - we took down the sharpness on the Samsung and it is now spot on.

I’d easily recommend this TV to anyone. It has all the inputs and outputs you’d need. The display is absolutely great (on par with an Apple screen - which is saying a lot). It has a nice, sleek feel to it (even the buttons are recessed and don’t poke out). It is easy to use.

Oh, one note: it is a 60 htz tv, not 120 htz. For us, we didn’t want or need the 120 htz as we’re primarly working with photographs. Really, movies and TV are still at 24 fps and 29.97 fps … it’ll be quite a while before they go higher than that (to 60 htz or 120 htz) … at the moment I believe 120 htz movies are actually at 24 fps and then the 120 htz tv displays 5 frames per actual frame to make the movie appear smoother. Just some tech talk there.

- Spencer