Nowadays, though, Samsung LCD TV owners are no longer forced to have obnoxious image enhancement functions locked on at all times, nor are they stuck with having the backlight lamps behind the panel pumping out light at eye-burning levels. In fact, most of the company's displays, like the LE40B651 here, are a minefield of image processing options and tweaks which allow you to get the best (or worst!) out of them. The whole package is topped off with 4 HDMI inputs (one of them side-mounted), Ethernet/LAN connectivity, an analogue VGA input, 1 RGB SCART terminal, another standard SCART, and USB inputs, and is available for just over £800 from retailers such as Amazon. Today, we're going to take a look at how all of these come together when this 40 1080p LCD has been configured to the best of its abilities.

The LE40B651's design is impressive and a tiny bit disappointing all at the same time. Impressive because the 'Crystal' design's subtly triangular shape and semi-translucent 'honeycomb' feature both look stunning; disappointing because it just doesn't look quite as distinctive as last year's red-tinged Touch of Colour design.

The LE40B651 does a great job, too, of rendering the detail levels and clarity we know and love from our favourite HD sources. And it does this without the slightly grainy, forced look experienced on some previous Samsung sets. So long, at least, as you avoid the set's over-aggressive Edge Enhancement setting.

I'm happy to report, too, that this HD sharpness isn't reduced much when there's a lot of motion in the picture. For the 100Hz engine can take out the vast majority of LCD's traditional motion blur.

What's more, provided you're careful with the 100Hz system's settings, it can do its thing without generating many of the sort of processing side effects that have blighted some previous Samsung TVs.

That said, the LE40B651's motion handling certainly isn't perfect. I did occasionally spot shimmering and flickering artefacts during fast camera pans, for instance. Yet I also found that turning off the 100Hz engine completely, resulted in a large rise in blur.

Another Samsung innovation making a return after debuting last year is the Content Library concept, whereby the TV ships with a wealth of pre-loaded interactive content, including photo screensavers, recipes, children's stories and songs, and even a very basic game.

This has been improved this time round thanks to a slicker interface and the provision of 189MB of built-in memory, into which you can add extra content (via USB) promised to be made available on Samsung's website in the future. You can also delete content from the Content Library if you don't want it to free up extra memory for things that you do.

But to be honest, aside perhaps from the artistic screensaver gallery, I still have my doubts about how much you'll really tend to go back to this feature after your first inquisitive exploration of it.

Once you've set the TV to Cinema mode, we found that our measurements were more than satisfactory: the deltaE94 score of 3.7 demonstrates natural colours. The average gamma of 2.16 guarantees an even distribution of tones. The contrast ratio of 1992:1 is the result of whites at 192 cd/m² for blacks at 0.1 cd/m². The latter aren't perfect, though, as in an entirely dark room, they appear slightly grey. It's still a long way from the worst screens with blacks of 0.3 cd/m², but equally far away from the best which fall below 0.06 cd/m².

The overall result is generally good, and watching some movies confirmed this initial finding. HD looks great, with good contrast, tones evenly divided, natural colours--everything is there. Standard Definition is just as good, but has a slightly weak upscaling, which is nowhere near as good as it would be on a dedicated DVD player. We still recommend then that you use a player that can upscale to 1080p as a source for this TV.

The use of Motion Plus 100 Hz allows you to remove jumpiness from films shot at 24 or 25 fps, but if you prefer, you can deactivate this mode to enjoy movies in their original frame rate. Despite the 100 Hz, we noticed a small amount of ghosting, especially on subtitles moving across the screen.