Hi All,
I wanted to report my experience with a new Samsung LE46A558 46 inch LCD TV which I am using both with VGA and with HDMI.
This TV supports 1920x1080 (1080p) through the VGA port and the HDMI-2 input from a computer.
It does have a high pitch noise that is quite noticeable using either the VGA or the HDMI connection. The noise is less through the HDMI than the VGA port. The noise exists when the TV brightness is at its' highest or lowest setting.
So, I contacted Samsung Technical Service here in Spain and the next day, a service man came over to check out the tv and he decided that the motherboard and the power supply needed to be replaced. Two days later, he received the parts from Slovakia and came over and installed them.
When he installed them, the new software actually updated settings in the tv that I previously could not access, which I was thrilled about. For instance, before, I couldn't select the size for PIP, but now with the new software, I could. Also, before I couldn't select the Picture Format such as "just scan" or ""16:9" in HDMI or VGA mode, and now I could select those features with the new software. i thought this was great and weird at the same time, since the manual was contradicting the TV.
Anyhow, I found the noise still existed on this panel even after changing both the power supply and the motherboard, though it seemed to be slightly less, just different.
I did however find a quick fix though, and that is to turn on the Movie Plus feature, which I couldn't access before with the old software.
Setting Movie Plus to any setting Low to High causes the high pitch noise to totally go away when using the computer with the HDMI input. I haven't checked if this fix works with the VGA.
For normal computer use it's wonderful not to have the noise, however when I watch movies with the Movie Plus feature turned on, even on the Low setting, the software causes motion artifacts, almost like a slow motion effect at times when people move their heads, or when there may be rapid motion, things will slow down for 2 seconds or so, then be back to normal until it does it again.
So, for watching movies, I turn the Movie Plus mode off, and granted there is a slight high pitch noise, the sound of the movie usually drowns out the high pitch from the back of the TV.
In the end, I am not very happy that any monitor would exude any high pitch noise, and this shouldn't be acceptable to the engineers.
One last point--the high pitch noise only occurs when using the computer with the TV, while watching tv from the antennae, there is no noticeable high pitch noise. The engineer told me that it has to do with using the tv at the highest resolution, and especially when the screen is white, all the pixels are turned on, thus making the potential for noise greater than when the screen is dark.
Lastly, I found that I needed to set the sharpness on the TV to 0 to make the fonts nice and crisp, and to avoid any extreme white light behind the fonts making them very hard on the eyes. I find the Dynamic mode on the TV unusable, and am only using the TV in Standard mode, and occasionally on Movie mode.
I am using a Quad Core 6600 PC with 4 GB RAM, a Gigabyte EP35-DS3L motherboard, XP Pro, and an Nvidia 6600GT 128MB graphics card.
If anyone knows if high pitch noises may be caused by a graphics card, that would be interesting to find out.
I plan on talking with Samsung again this week to discuss this noise issue, as it really shouldn't be acceptable to sell panels that make constant perceptable high frequency noise.
I have played with the Nvidia control panel settings and the TV picture settings for hours, and am satisfied with the picture, and now have a tweak for solving the noise, however there shouldn't be any noticeable noise.
Cleartype fonts do work on this tv, but aren't necessary. My wife likes the cleartype on, I like it off---it's just personal eye preference---she did get Lasik surgery, so maybe Lasik eyes like cleartype fonts
If anyone has any recommendations or similar experiences, it would be great to hear.
Regards,
David
PS. The Samsung 22" LCD TV with a resolution of 1680x1050 also exhibits the same high pitch noise. Are we all sure that graphics cards don't play a role in this?