Features:
Coming from their 'Series 9' range of LED LCD TV's, the LN55A950 is a 55" LCD TV which does not use the traditional backlighting technologies in favor of LED backlighting. Backlighting a display using LED's not only gives you a longer life and significantly less power use, but it also allows you to dynamically turn LED's on and off as needed (called local dimming). By having more control over the backlight, blacks can now be blacker by having no backlight "bleed" behind them (and also further reduced power consumption). With a dynamic contrast ratio of 1 million to 1, there's no doubt this local dimming ability of the LED backlighting does what it says.

A problem that LCD TV's have when put up against their plasma or DLP counterparts is a slower refresh rate. Cheaper LCD TV's will refresh at 60Hz where as higher end models typically feature 120Hz refresh rates. The LN55A950 falls into the category of those with 120Hz refresh rates. LCD TVs will hold each frame at full intensity until the next frame replaces it where as plasma and DLP TVs refresh in a manner where they go to black before the next frame appears (all so fast that you can't see it happening of course). Due to the refreshing nature of LCD TV's, you can sometimes see something known as "motion blur". Motion blur is caused by your eyes not having this blank frame in between to "forget" the last image and thus images can be "blurred" together. Alongside the 120Hz refresh rate you can also use what Samsung calls 'LED Motion Plus'. This is a feature which cycles horizontal rows of LED's from the top to the bottom of the TV in an attempt to recreate how a CRT TV would use scan lines to draw an image. By doing this, it attempts to mask the traditionally slow response of LCD panels (although 120Hz in the first place gives a significant improvement).

Following their "touch of colour" design series, the body of the LN55A950 is almost entirely gloss piano black with a hint of grey blended into the outer edges of the front bezel. It can be difficult to see in some pictures, so I've included a close-up shot below to better illustrate this.