That’s what Samsung Electronics of America calls it: the Holiday in July Product Showcase. It’s a press and analyst event where new products are shown and Samsung marketing executives are made available one-on-one over two days at the end of July in New York and for one day in early August in San Francisco. I learned some interesting things about displays and "other" large products, like the immense stainless steel kitchen appliances and washer-dryer sets.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

But if you don’t care about "white goods," what was there to see? Several of Samsung’s TV sets had "widgets" scattered around the screen, which are just what you think they are if you’re familiar with the widgets on Google Desktop. In this case, if you have an Internet connection (wired or wireless) to you TV, you can click on a widget and get information such as local weather, news, and stock quotes displayed on your TV. The information is supplied by USA Today without charge, and the widget chip is contained in all Samsung Series 6 and 7 LCD- and PDP-TVs. That is, it’s free — if you buy the "right" TV sets.

Among the TVs on display was a second-generation 46-inch FHD LCD-TV with LED backlight. The set featured 100,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 120Hz frame rate, and 4ms response time. The images looked very nice, with impressive blacks, but I would have appreciated some fast-moving content to see how well that fast response time and double frame rate were controlling motion blur. (Insight Media has done some recent testing of these LED-based LCD-TVs and found some interesting things. See "Did You Know" note attached to this article for more)

Scott Birnbaum was showing, for the first time in public, a disassembled LED backlight unit. There’s about an inch-and-a-half gap between the white LEDs on the back of the BLU and the four layers of optical film on the front. The gap is needed for light mixing, and has been a feature of direct LED backlights for years. Eventually, these things will get thinner.

Also on display was Samsung’s 50-inch 3D plasma TV. The set has been for sale since March but you couldn’t actually see 3D on it because the active glasses and transmitter weren’t available. Now they are, and the resulting 3D imagery is convincing and not fatiguing. Samsung spent a lot of time designing the glasses. They’re fairly bulky but very comfortable, thanks in part to good balance, a large and well-designed bridge that’s easy on your nose, and a commodious structure that accepts eyeglasses without complaint.

The 3D "kit" comprises a pair of glasses, a transmitter, and the software that allows your PC to deliver a video stream the set can interpret. Your PC is necessarily the source of all 3D content, including the 20 or so DVDs that have been mastered in 3D. Also included is software that will convert old-fashioned 2D video streams into simulated 3D.

I also had a chance to see Samsung’s iPhone killer, called the Instinct. This elegantly designed phone has a touch screen, of course, but one-ups Apple by providing haptic feedback. That is, the soft button gives you a tactile feedback to let you know your touch has been recorded. This one of the nicest haptic implementations I’ve experienced. It doesn’t vibrate your fingerprint off, but the phone lets you know your touch has been recorded.

This is a very feature-rich phone, but Samsung also has zeroed in on an identified iPhone weakness: short battery life combined with a built-in battery that can’t easily be changed. Samsung makes it very clear that not only does the Instinct have a replaceable battery, but it comes with two of them.