I ordered a Samsung UE40ES5500 from John Lewis last week and finally received it today! After a good 12 hours sat in front of it (come on it's been a rainy day!) I thought I'd share my opinions on it. Reviews do seem very thin on the ground and 4 pages of people talking about price fluctuations isn't particularly interesting!
I've divided my thoughts into various sections that will hopefully help prospective buyers know what to expect, but on the whole I'm very happy with it, it has fulfilled all of my expectations and would certainly recommend it to others:
Aesthetics: the thin panel and tiny bezel make this TV look a lot more 'top-of-the-range' and expensive than it is. Obviously if this is really important to you, try to go to a shop to see it first, but personally I think it looks great. The only point to mention is that the screen does not rotate on its base; if you're having it in a large room and will need to rotate it regularly it could be an issue.
HD picture quality: using the built in Freeview HD tuner I was very impressed with the picture quality and . Colour reproduction is excellent, blacks are nice and deep (there's a setting to fiddle with this too) and the picture is nicely sharp without looking like it's had the contrast ramped up too far. Fast motion scenes looked very smooth, I've been watching lots of football this evening and it performs flawlessly. Also I've gone through various dark screen scenarios and can only see a very small amount of clouding around the very perimeter of the screen. This is perfectly acceptable to me, given the nature of edge-lit LED panels.
SD picture quality: this seems to have come in for a bit of stick in some other reviews I've read, but I think it's actually quite good. I've watched a range of different types of SD programmes this afternoon and it handles them all quite well; no obvious aterfacts or pixellation as others have reported. Also just watched the cricket on Channel 5 and the scorecard graphics looked as crisp as can be expected from an SD feed.
Sound: after listening to some of my music library it was very obvious that the bass is not great. For general TV viewing it's perfectly fine, doesn't sound weak or tinny at all, but if you're going to be watching a lot of action films for example, you'll notice the lower end of the sound range rather absent! I think this is a common issue with many of the recent ultra-thin LED TVs and it might be worth considering an external speaker system to make the most of it.
Smart Hub software: I think this is massively overrated. Many of the reviewers of the 2011 and 2012 Samsung sets seem very excited about the Smart Hub software, but to me it's a lot of useless apps for stuff that you probably don't want to use on a TV anyway. For example, the Facebook and Twitter apps both had very ugly interfaces and only fit about two or three posts on the screen at a time; nowhere near as sleek as the actual websites. As for the Rightmove and Teletext Holidays apps, I'm never going to use them. Maybe when the BBC iPlayer app becomes available I'll pay it closer consideration, but initial impressions are that it's just a bit of a gimmick.
Remote Media: I have a Synology Network Attached Storage device upon which I store photos and music and accessing this via the Smart TV was one of the principle reasons for buying this model. After connecting the TV to the network it detected my NAS straight away, no need for faffing around with settings, and whilst the photo viewer and media player are a bit cumbersome to navigate with a TV remote, they do the job. Handily, you can access the NAS directly from the normal menu of input sources (e.g. HDMI 1, HDMI 2...) so you don't have to navigate through the Smart Hub every time. For the record, with the Synology DSM software, you need to have the Media Server app installed and running for DLNA devices to be able to access it; regular shared folders that may be visible to other PCs may not be visible to DLNA devices such as this TV.
Live recording: for those not aware, you can plug a USB hard-drive (or even a small flash drive) into one of the USB ports and use it as storage for a Sky+ type recording device and for pausing and rewinding live TV. Obviously the set only has one tuner, so if you can't record one channel and watch another, but it's a very nice addition nonetheless. Playback of recorded footage (even HD) is indistinguishable from the live feed. The recorded programmes can accessed via the Smart Hub or Source Menu (as above) and are nicely organised, if with slightly too few items per screen.
Hope this is helpful to some of you and if you have any specific questions, please post them and I can try to help!