2007 Samsung LED Owner's Thread (HLT XX87/89S) - Page 334

"the PIP is limited to the internal tuner only (i.e. cable input). Kinda defeats the purpose..."

I agree. And the acutally PIP functions IF you use the Samaung remote are kinda awkward. On my Harmony its not so bad. There is no way the PIP on the 6189S is even close to how using PIP from my HD Cable box is designed. Samsung coulda saved some money and just left it off. Its practically useless imho.

Eagles,

I am not sure what you are referring to. All the display stuff is adjustable, not fixed. So you can lower those contrast/brightness/gamma/white/etc settings as you see fit.

No one knows for sure. Not even Samsung. No one needs HDMI 1.3 anyway as nothing but highly expensive camcorders and highly expensive receivers support HDMI 1.3. Blu-ray/HD-DVD don't send out the colorspace either, so you'll never benefit. Plus the move from 24-bit to 30-bit is indistinguishable to the human eye.

I have had no issues with color on Blu-ray movies on my PS3. I have my color set to "Wide" (native colors) on my calibrated HL-T5687 and it looks as realistic as you could ask for. The 89 series is marketing hype.

Movie mode was my least favorite 'pre-set', it was dull, too dim\\bland, much preferred Standard, then Dynamic (both with some suggested tweaks/settings found here - wide color, etc), they both POP, actually had to back off the settings to remove some of the starkness. I'll also be adding a 6500k backlight as well, makes a nice difference for me in a totally unlit room, saves my eyes!

Per the original data sheets for either series, only the xx89s offered HDMI 1.3a with CEC. Thats not the first time a Samsung Help desk staff member had his facts wrong. ;-)

Toggling on/off the wider color gamut xvYCC on my HL-T6189s is quite perceptible when viewing content. (1.8 times as many colors as the sRGB color space)

You can still see a very slight difference going from 24 bit color to 30 bit color but the human eye can not perceive any difference higher then 30 bit color.

Similar call from me last night and they came back with 1.2, to confirm what everyone is saying here.

Justin

What is the distance from the bottom of the TV up to the bottom of the screen??

I'm wondering if I can squeeze my center channel their without blocking the screen at all...

Cheers!

The problem you will find with placing your center channel in front of the TV is that it will probably obstruct the IR receiver that Samsung thoughtfully (being very sarcastic) put in the center of the round on/off button in the center of the set.

Nice

Can someone please measure anyways - I may live with manually turning it on/off.. maybe.

It is between 6.5"-7", not sure exactly.

I forgot about the IR in the circle, damn, now what to do.

6 & 7/8"

edit: doh...got beat!

Ok, after some time debating, I pulled the trigger today. I was completely set on going with the 56" version of the 87 series, until today. I found a site that currently is selling the 89 series 56" for basically the same price of the 87. I know direct links are frowned upon here, and it's probably best off that I get a shipment confirmation and delivery before I post the site, but I'm pretty excited. The site is listed with the BBB (no complaints), and is an authorized Samsung reseller, so I hope it's legit. I called them and confirmed everything before ordering, and they did confirm the price.

I'll post more info as it develops. Right now, I just have a purchase confirmation email.

Matt

I decided to poke around the firmware to see if there was anything interesting. I downloaded 1026 and unzipped it, poked around with a hex editor and found that these sets run embedded linux as an operating system. So I mounted the various img files and browsed around and found lots of neat stuff. As long as the hardware between the 87's and 89's are the same(wouldnt surprise me) I am sure someone could probably take the firmware from an 87 and firmware from an 89, compare them, then make an improved firmware for the 87 that enables the extra features of the 89....


Mike

56 or 61? Yes I have seen the recommended viewing distance charts, but what about this TV specifically would you recommend? I have 8-10 feet. Thanks

Justin

Nice work Mike... very interesting. However, the post below strongly suggests that the hardware is different:


Read the Full Post:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...2#post10335792

Avio

Um...lets not hack our firmwares on a DLP.

Is it really sought after?

No one here has posted firmware for xx89s series. The xx87s firmware is at 1028 I believe (1026 was posted), while xx89s firmware is at 1014 I believe. The firmware isn't cross-compatible, but its a good way to totally hose your display if you want to be the guinea pig.

What could possibly go wrong? . . . No TV, No Warranty, and very POed wife!

Holy crap.. What a thing of beauty!!

I just brought my 6189S through the front door, now I'm starring at it here in the kitchen waiting for the wife to get home so I can put this on the stand and fire it up.

My 52" LG projection LCD(now 4-5 yrs old) is now going in the bedroom

At least 2 posters in this thread who are xx89S owners have mentioned the existence of ver. 1019 for the xx89 series. If you "Search this Thread" for "1019" you can find those posts.

Avio

Well I am an electronics tech, at work we have all types of programmers, so if I did mess with my tv and it went to hell I could pop it open and reprogram the chips directly back to factory original....but i have no interest in being a lab rat lol. I was just tossing it all out there in case there was someone so inclined to take on the task/risk involved.



Mike

Here's the most believable post confirming that v. 1019 for xx89 series exists:


Avio

Your right!
See page 289 of this topic.

We're on the same page!

Avio

I'm still simply wondering what is the difference between the 1026 and 1028 firmware and the earliest ones. After upgrading to 1026 on my set, I have found absolutely none.

Mike: I'm not interested in hacking the xx87s firmware (and also not able to)... but I'm curious about the "neat stuff" your exploration revealed.

Could you post the most interesting stuff you discovered, or, alternately, could you provide a zipped data dump or "screen shots" of the img files. I do not know if we are talking about graphics, text, source code or whatever.

Can you show us what you found, even if highly technical, or so-called gibberish, or "Greek-to-Me"?

Thanks. Avio

Have 1019 on my 6189S.

The only way I'd consider looking into 3rd party firmware is to make sure you can go back to the default incase you need any service issues. Having a hacked firmware would more than likely void the warranty.

Doing firmware updates for stuff is not that unusal these days.

What I'd like to see as well is what types of things can be changed/tweaked/etc.

Unless we could know what is actually available for tweaking its hard to say what the value would be. Changing a color of a button would hardly be worth the risk. Adding full support for 24fps, well I might think about doing that. Not sure I would but I would at least think about it. Or change the behavior of the analog ins on HDMI3 so that you could use them no matter what, turn on dd 5.1 pass through, make sure audio out analog jacks were variable, stuff like that.

Edit: Just as a general comment I'm surprised we haven't seen hacked firmware already for stuff like these TV's or the bluray players, etc. With the knowledge and skill set of folks "out there" my guess is there probably already are hacked firmwares but they aren't just laying around for us common folks to find.

DirecTV sent 2 more guys out and they still couldn't fix the problem so I'm heading over to Comcast now. Anyone have feedback on how HD looks on their 5687 with Comcast HD?

Also, even with Blue-Ray now I'm noticing some flickering on the darker scenes and with certain camera angles...I'm assuming this is the TV. Can I fix this myself or should I do a return/exchange for a new one?

Really wish the delivery guys were more competent so I didn't have to drag this one back in... After seeing them ramp over speed bumps and swap out my TV for a smaller broken one at first thinking I wouldn't catch them, there's no way in he** I'm trusting them.

Well the img files are basically like iso files for cd's. It is basically the "disc" copied bit by bit into a file. Under linux you can mount such file systems as if they were the actual "disc", and then browse through them just as you would a cd, usb drive, or hard drive. So upon mounting the img files I was able to browse through what windows users can equate to as the tv's "c:" drive. Basically all the linux config files are there along with the standard executables and what I would assume are the binary drivers for several of the tv's systems(display, sound, i/o). One of the files(exe.img) contains what appears to possibly be the main program for the tv....not sure though.

This stuff is mainly of use to someone with the time to reverse engineer the various drivers and compare them to the 89 series. Hardware comparison would also be important. Once you know how everything works it is easy enough to change as you see fit. Since it is linux you could even make your own programs to run on it rather easily. It is running MontaVista Linux pro 3.1, kernel 2.4.20, they appear to make linux distros for various embedded applications including set top boxes.


Custom firmware is always fun, I have an older htc pocketpc phone that people reverse engineered and made a tool where you can customize the firmware through their web site, download the firmware image it produced, and burn it to the phone....very cool.

I can talk geek all night....but i will save you all from that.


Mike

On my set (HLT6176), the IR sensor in on the light engine which means it gets it's signal through the screen! Maybe yours is too, easy enough to check.