By Oo Gin Lee

I NEVER liked Ozzy Osbourne or heavy metal until last Friday when I discovered the nine-year-old guitar prodigy, Yuto Miyazawa, on YouTube.

However, I was not watching the dazzling fret-play of this child wonder on my PC.

I was soaking it all on the new 40-inch Samsung B7000 LED LCD TV which has YouTube built into its Internet TV feature.

Samsung has clearly optimised YouTube for its TVs because the clips loaded amazingly fast and the user interface was easy to use.

I connected the LAN port on the TV to the free 1Mbps broadband line on my StarHub Hubstation HD set-top box and then simply pressed the Internet TV button to get started.

The TV took a few minutes to download some software patches and then I was prompted to create a user account for the Internet TV feature.

Next I had to key-in my YouTube user account and password.

Unfortunately, I could not find a way to do that on the TV and had to open up my laptop to create a new account, then logged in back into the TV.

Once connected, I could easily search for clips by looking under various categories like Most Viewed, Top Rated and Rising Videos where I discovered the clip of Yuto on Ellen DeGeneres' TV talk show.

Unfortunately, YouTube and some weather widget is the only content you can get on Samsung's Internet TV, though there are plans to add more content later.

Another cool feature of the TV is the ability to easily play your own music, photos and videos.

You can either plug-in your USB flash drive or portable hard disk with your media files and the media player software automatically categorises them for you.

I also managed to network the TV and my laptop together through a D-Link router and my family photos were instantly accessible through the TV.

However, these cool features are just extras.

The real wonder about this new family of "edge LED" TVs from Samsung is its thinness and amazing picture quality.

The TV is razor-thin at a mere 3cm.

This is possible because it has moved the LED lights to the edge of the TV instead of placing them at the back where they usually are, thus cutting on the depth of the TV.

These new LEDs are also responsible for ultra-sharp images on the full HD 1920 x 1080 display with a very high dynamic contrast ratio.

The weakness of traditional LCD TVs which use cold cathode flourescent lamps (CCFL) has always been its low contrast ratio where black looked more like dark grey.

With these new Samsung LED TVs, Batman's dark suit looked as black as the Dark Knight should be.

Eschewing the heavy thick brackets, the TV's wall mount is a simple system that works like the way you install a huge picture frame in your hall.

This cuts the space between the wall and the TV down from the usual 5cm to just 1.5cm.

With all four HDMI and two USB ports located at the side of the TV instead of the back, you can access them easily even when your set is wall mounted.

Combined with the thinness of the TV, this gizmo will definitely look good in your living room.

My only gripe of course is the high price point.

At $5,399, it costs 30 to 40 per cent more than the latest CCFL LCD TV from Samsung of the same screen size. If money is not an issue, I am quite sure my wife will not protest if I replaced our bulky one-year-old 40-inch Samsung Series 4 LCD TV with this new object of desire.

Final say

It looks good, with razor-thin sides that make it perfect for wall mounting.

If only the price was just as sweet.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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