Samsung Series 7 UA46D7000

Samsung’s 46-inch Series 7 ‘Smart TV’ is a brilliant television. It’s exceedingly thin, and lightweight enough to be wall-mounted without major structural work. The LED backlight provides sufficient brightness for daytime operation, colours are accurate, and 1080p video comes through sharp as can be.

The only downside to image quality is mediocre upscaling of DVD-resolution content to fit the Series 7’s 1920 x 1080 pixels. Whether that’s a downside or an excuse to replace your DVD collection with Blu-ray discs is really dependent on your budget.

Viewing photos, playing videos or listening to music from a USB flash drive or hard drive is easy and reliable. Streaming video from your home network is also simple thanks to in-built Wi-Fi. You can even schedule recording to an optional USB hard drive. All this is great, and makes it all the more disappointing that the internet component of Samsung’s Smart TV offering is so poor.

The TV’s ‘Smart Hub’ offers a range of apps, including one for free video haven YouTube. However, searching for specific clips is painful.

Even using an Android phone as a remote via Samsung’s free app, you can’t just type in a search term: you have to enter it letter-by-letter using an onscreen keyboard which you control only with the four arrow buttons. Playlists and users’ channels seem to be entirely absent, and the interface is clunky.

A web browser with Adobe Flash support gives you access to a whole world of video and interactive content. Unfortunately, it’s very slow and prone to random lag, crashes and navigation issues.

There are no apps or services that offer access to full-length mainstream movies or TV shows.

You could almost justify the price for such a slim, high-quality TV. However, the dreadful internet features drag the whole thing down into the ranks of the average.