Wireless TV - not ready for prime time

July 21, 4:23 PMGadgets ExaminerDan Appleman

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The Samsung FPT5094W Wireless TV

Today’s large flat screen LCD and Plasma televisions are so thin and light they just beg to be hung up on a wall. Unfortunately the wall you may want to hang them on may not be next to all the video equipment you want to connect them to. By the time you hook up your cable or antenna input, your video game, your computer (for Hulu or YouTube) and your DVD and/or Blu-Ray player, you either have a rat's nest of cables hanging from the TV, or you’ve paid a small fortune to have someone run wires in your wall.

Samsung’s new FPT5094W 50-Inch HD Plasma wireless TV takes a different approach. Instead of plugging all of those cables into the TV, you plug them into a console box that sends the signals to the TV using a wireless signal. True, you still have to plug the TV in, but it’s a lot easier to hide one wire than a half dozen.

By all accounts, the quality of the sound and video is excellent, as one would expect from Samsung. But unfortunately the Samsung engineers made one mistake – when they incorporated the wireless feature they removed all of the video inputs from the set.

Why is this a problem?

Because sending the video signal through the wireless box incurs a delay. For watching TV or playing a DVD, this doesn’t matter – who cares if you are actually watching a show 30 seconds after it is broadcast?

But for video games or any other interactive real-time services, the delay is deadly, making most games unplayable.

True, you shouldn’t be playing most video games on plasma sets anyway – LCD’s tend to be the better choice as they are not susceptible to burn-in. But to spend this much money on a set on which there is no possibility of playing video games seems a poor choice. Samsung’s PN50B650 traditional 50” plasma might be a better alternative, though yes – you still have to run those wires.

Industry research groups expect more and more TV sets to incorporate wireless features going forward, but you can expect most of them to have the wireless functionality as an add-on to traditional input signals, not a replacement. For those that take Samsung’s approach, be sure to check out the signal delay time before you purchase to avoid unpleasant surprises.