Customer Reviews

Samsung TX-R3080WH 30" Wide SlimFit HDTV

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Great TV. Fabulous picture. No complaints of any kind. Several reviewers of the sister model TX-R3079WH, which is identical except the speakers are on the sides, complained of geometry problems, specificaly bowing at the bottom and blooming at the sides during transitions between bright and dark seens. Mine has virtually no bowing at the bottom and very little blooming. I think that the reviewers that have complained about the geometry issues are simply fixating on a minor problem. In reality, the tube in this TV is a marvel of engineering. Frankly, I expected and was ready to accept much more distortion than exists because of the difficulties in steering the electron beam around corners to make this design work. You have to have your priorities. If you want a svelte design picture tube, then you generally have to pay the price somewhere else - geometry. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good it actually is. I was originally in the market for a flat panel. However, the less expensive ones have poor picture performance. In order to do close to as well as this Samsung, I would have had to spend twice the money and even then the picture wouldn't have been as good - especially in a darkened room. And the Samsung is amazingly thin at 16 inches. Not as thin as a flat panel for sure, but no mammoth box like the competitors.

This product was purchased after extensive review and comparison of HDTVs. Compact design with speakers on the bottom and slim depth was a perfect fit for my setup. More features than you'll probably ever need, a marvel of engineering. HD picture is stunning. Love the dual antenna connections and multiple picture settings (16:9, 4:3, Panorama, Zoom1, Zoom2) all controlled from the remote. The only thing missing is more HD programming. This one is a keeper. Only thing negative I've found is it weighs a ton.

We purchased the Samsung 30" Slimfit HDTV so we could watch the Superbowl in High Definition. For about 5 months, it had an amazing picture. The bad news started (of course) after our store return period expired. The edges of the screen became blurry (so much so that you can't read text displayed near the edges of the screen), and there are fine white horizontal lines in the screen that will not go away. Lately, the screen colors fade in and out, like the color changing nightlight in my daughters room. We found other similar complaints on the web, so at least we are not alone, but we are curious about how well, and how soon, Samsung will solve this problem. This is our first Samsung product, and the jury is still out on our intent to repurchase.

I just picked up my second Samsung TX-R3080WH and this one has a major defect too. My first one had serious distortions after 2 weeks that made it impossible to watch so we returned it for a new one. We just unboxed the new one this afternoon and this one shuts off automatically every 3-4 minutes and then turns back on. So this one is going back too... *sigh*

We bought this model at a Best Buy last October. It was fine for awhile and then after a month or so we started getting the distortions that are well documented across the web. We made some adjustments on the picture and that seemed to help - for awhile. Then after the New Year we started getting this hideous strobe-light flashing effect every time there is a lot of white on the screen. It was especially bad during the winter Olympics - all that snow and ice! I have been on the phone with Samsung several times over the past many weeks and they keep telling me they will have a technician come to my house to look it over. So far of the two authroized techs in my area - one does not make house calls and the other has totally ignored our phone messages. If we had not invested over $800 in this incredibly awful piece of electronic junk it would be on my tree lawn awaiting the sanitary engineers. I have been surprised by some of the positive comments I have seen about this TV posted on the web. That being said there are plenty of thumbs down reviews posted and that screams incosistent product from Samsung. If you're in the market for a new TV - stay away from this one.

I've had this model for close to a month now, and I've been pretty satisfied with it. I picked the R3080WH over the nearly identical R3079WH because the cabinet space I had would just barely accommodate the speakers-on-the-bottom '80 but not the spearkers-on-the-side '79.

On the positive side, the picture is generally quite good. I'm no true video expert, but I've been quite pleased with the overall picture quality, especially in widescreen, in a variety of lighting conditions. The audio is probably nothing to get too worked up about, but it's a vast improvement over the tinny speakers in the 10-year-old 20" stereo TV this model replaces. Not bad sound at all, really, for built-in speakers, though any serious audio fan is going to want to spring for a separate set of speakers. The set does have a nice look to it--superior, in my view, to that of the '79 and '81 versions, and it looks fairly slim despite the obvious protrusion of its tube. No one's going to be fooled into thinnking that this set's an LCD or plasma, but it's not a bad look, anyway. The TV also has a built-in HDTV antenna, which would be a better deal for someone living in an urban area with more nearby HD signals than I get where I live.

My chief complaint is, probably no surprise, the bowing. It's neither as severe and disturbing as some would suggest nor, I dare say, as insignificant as some others have implied. It's quite noticeable even in normal viewing; when you call up a satellite-receiver menu or even the volume slider, it's pretty darn blatant. Your mileage may vary. I find it to be distracting, but I pretty much knew from other reviews what I was getting into, so I have no room to complain much. I'd advise trying to see a '79/'80 in the store first before buying.

For the price, this is, I would say, a pretty high-value set, and I'm happy enough with it. Allegedly, the '81 version of this set has better geometry, but it appears totally unavailable. If you think bowing's going to be a problem for you, wait for forthcoming models or try another brand. For me, the '80 was a pretty good choice given my available space and budget.

Like other reviewers, I thought this TV was great when I purchased it in December 05. It was new to the market, slim, good image, and affordable for an HDTV.

Six months later, I started to notice some bowing of the screen and a rainbow appearing in high contrast areas (I lucked out with no strobing). I've had it looked at three times. First time, they thought it needed degaussing, which didn't do a thing. Tech modified some numbers in the factory menu, and that seemed to fix it. Then I began to notice bowing and the rainbow effect return a week later. Second time, the TV was taken for repair. Got it back, the rainbow seemed to have disappeared, but I didn't keep it around long enough to see if it would return. The screen was massively pincushioned and deformed. One end of the TV could make Fat Albert look like a skinny man, while the other end maintained the proportions. And the pincushioning... I wish that was all it was. But the edge of the screen wasn't just pincushioned, it was forming a wave.

This TV is terrible! Buy it if you have money to throw down the toilet. If you don't, stay clear. The people who gave it good reviews must have been the lucky few who got a non-defective set. Based on the number of complaints on the web, I wouldn't have purchased this set. Samsung should have recalled this set.

I BOUGHT THIS TV IN MARCH AND AFTER 2 MONTHS IT SHUT DOWN AND NEVER WENT ON AGAIN. ITS BEING NOW 3 MONTHS AND AM STILL ON THE PHONES WITH SAMSUNG AND ITS SERVICES TRYING TO FIX MY TV.VERY VERY BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE

I made a mistake. I did not read the user reviews of this set before purchase, only the product specs and marketing noise... I was absolutely horrified when the screen started it's "bowing". It is unbelieveable that a high-end electronics company like Samsung would put their name on such a flawed tube design.

I was drawn to the set by it's price, plus it was the absolute perfect size for the shelf in my bedroom! This is my first HDTV and I was really excited to get it. It has been a real let-down.

Come-on Samsung! This is an HD TV, not a fish finder. The display is what it is about! If it could not be engineered properly, ie; overcome the "Geometry issue", then it should not be sold, or it should be sold with a big red warning label on the box alerting you to the design flaw. Samsung has made their design problem my problem and that is just plain wrong.

I am in a long drawn-out process of trying to get Samsung to make good on this product. I am still hopeful that eventually Samsung will either fix it or replace it with a different product, but I will continue to be unforgiving about my wasted time. Don't waste yours!

We got this HDTV as a replacement to fit in our cabinet: 32"x23.5". It fits perfectly, with not an inch to spare!

This is a good solid HDTV, that does all the things you'd expect: 16x9 widescreen display, ATSC (HDTV over-the-air) tuner, HDMI and VGA connectors. There's two component connections. There's three S-Video and/or composite connections, but only two are really usable: the third is buried off to the side and almost unusable (a very poor placement). In addition, it has two cable connectors, which is handy: I use one for our existing analog cable and another for getting free ATSC from an antenna.

The switching between input sources is rather complicated, as there are *three* buttons on the remote to do it all: one switches between component and HDMI only, the other switches between the two cable connectors, and the other switches between the various composite and S-Video hookups! That's amazingly complicated for what should have just been a single button, or maybe a second button to bring up a menu. In addition, the TV does not skip over unused input sources, and provides no way of manually disabling them during setup, so you end up having to wander around a lot before managing to find the input source you want.

Our middle-class AV setup, a mishmash of components acquired over the years as finances permitted, ran into a limitation of this TV, unfortunately.

The audio output jacks, on the back of the TV, only work when the TV is displaying a signal from the built-in TV tuner, or a composite video input source! S-Video connectors (our Playstation 2), and component video connectors (our DVD player), do not have any sound output at all! This is a real oversight. It is a hassle, because it means I have to have an extra audio switchbox and make the people in the house get up and hit buttons whenever they want to change video sources, so they have matching audio to our receiver. I can't just take the existing TV audio output jacks, unfortunately, because the TV cuts off their audio output.

What's maddening is that it does this on purpose: I hear the sound coming out of the small built-in TV speakers, but there's nothing coming out of the TV's audio output on the jacks going to my audio receiver! So, the TV is getting audio just fine, it's just choosing not to pass it along. This is a stupid design oversight that Samsung should have detected during engineering. It makes hookup a real pain, and a lot more complicated than it should have been.