Hi guys,
just signed up here to let you guys know about this TV and hopefully get this thread going a bit more. I did get myself the 46F7080 (Swiss version, but I've heard it's identical in construction with the F7000) for my bedroom (~1.5-2m distance to the screen), mainly because I didn't like the design of the F8080 and the width of its stand. Plus over here, it's still 400CHF more. The 46F7080 runs you 1300£ conversed in Switzerland right now and that's what I paid, just an FYI.
Onto the TV, it is constructed very nicely and the clean aluminum bezel is indeed beautiful, with no visible weld seams or the like. Installation is easy and a matter of a few minutes. My media server (Mezzmo) over AllShare was detected immediately without me having to do anything (had it set up with my D6500 before) and 1080p mkvs ran wonderfully from the start. In fact all of the files I've randomly tried worked and browsing the folders (containing multiple TB of HD material) was no problem, while my D series Samsung would regularly crash. I am going to get Plex set up though just to enjoy the more appealing interface. AllShare isn't too pretty and not customizable at all in views and so on.
As for the picture, I've tried a lot of settings over the last few days and while I initially enjoyed the overly vibrant, saturated pictures of the dynamic mode, its blue tint and massive contrast has started to irritate me more recently and made me switch to standard mode. Backlight is at 10, brightness and sharpness at 45, contrast at 100 and color at 55. I've got black tone on "darker", optimum contrast on "low" and gamma at "-1". Motion plus at clear and everything else pretty much off. This delivers very natural and sharp pictures with no visible tint (at least to my eyes) and shadow detail and black seems better than in the dynamic mode. Note I'm just an amateur user here trying to find the best possible settings for myself. Considering I usually watch TV in a pitch black room, clouding is what I was afraid of most and I can say I am very pleased so far. There is no uneven distribution of light (no random blotches like on my D6500),
but when watching in pitch darkness, you can see light coming in from all four corners, but it's very slight and when watching a black screen (series credits or the like), it's practically not visible at all. These corner lights are only apparent when watching a dark scene on a 21:9 film and even then, they remain quite subdued, I wouldn't even go as far as to call them flashlights, simply because they really don't flash very far into the picture and are not that bright. I've tried to capture it as well as was possible and this is the (pretty bad) result (it is more pronounced in reality but you can get an idea of the area it covers):
Again, I think "regular" people you show this TV to will not notice a thing or care at all. Definitely not in an ambient lit or even daylight bright room. In relation to this, the cinema black mode did generally not do anything for me in freeview TV, no matter the setting. Note that when watching material over AllShare, the setting was greyed out entirely (at off). I have not tried BluRays, but I'd say it'd better work there. Just that people don't get the wrong idea, there is no actual "turning off" of the black bars.
As for banding, I did watch the champions league semis and it looked very good to me, I actually sat up as close as 1m to the screen and the freeview HD picture was perfectly flawless. I was never a big detector of banding though. There is actually a "stadium mode" you can enable, but all I could figure it does really is lock the picture settings at a higher sharpness and color.
What else? The remotes. The touch remote in my opinion is unusable, especially in a dark room (ldo) and the regular remote, while being smaller and more elegant than the D series remote, is not practical either. Buttons are no longer backlit, there is no aspect ratio button, the "directional pad" is now not that anymore but single buttons, which makes "blind navigating" on the remote that much harder and the MENU and SmartHub button have switched places, which made me go nuts the first two days, until, you guessed it, I got my D series remote and threw the new one on the shelves. Also, the pressure point on the old remote is far smoother and overall better than on the new one. This may all sound nitpicky, but hey!
A word about gesture and voice control, I've tried it and it didn't work. Room was possibly to dark and the voice control is not an option at all if I don't want to wake people in the middle of the night because of my screaming into a little metallic block. Also, it's not faster, so what's the point? An LG like magic remote would certainly be the better way to go as for improving usability.
Overall, I'd rate this TV 9/10 after four days of use, I don't see how it can get much better than this right now, but there's always room for improvement I guess.
That's about it for now. I hope this helped some people on here. If you have any questions, shoot!
Peter.