I picked this up last Friday night. Very heavy to take up stairs, but assembly is straight forward. October 2013 Build date.
First thing I noticed is it's not nearly as bright as my 42" plasma. With that thing even at night with maximum energy savings on it would still hurt my eyes.
Blu-rays out of the box look amazing and are proper amount of brightness to my eyes. The only thing that looks dull is cable tv. I wonder if that is due to my cable signal and internet signal being split out of the wall. I was also thinking about getting an OPPO as a video pass through source, maybe that would help. PS3 games look vibrant. So it's just mainly cable, but I watch that most.
Fans. I haven't heard these things at all. If I was told this is a whisper quiet tv, i'd believe them. Every time I've touched it, it's been cold or room temp.
No image retention so far. I fell asleep last night for about 90 minutes with the ps3 home screen up. The ps3 home screen does dim quite a bit with no activity, no retention that I could see.
I have been running the slides while at work and will just use d-nice slides in a couple weeks. Are they also for a dark room setting like c-nets? If the f8500 was close in same price i'd probably exchange it. Maybe i'll get used to it.
