SAMSUNG Q900R
Wildly ambitious precursor to a new era of TV or wizardly marketing wheeze? Perhaps the first 8K TV is actually a bit of both…
The world’s first 8K TV has landed, but is it really the next step in telly tech or a mere marketing gimmick?
Though we know our loyal
T3 readers are ahead of the pack, 4K screens have only just elbowed regular HD out of the picture. So do we really need another resolution revolution? No, of course not. But when did that ever stop the march of technological progress? The TV industry will always embrace the next big thing, and Samsung is the first major brand to break cover with a screen that goes where no telly has ventured before: a whopping 8K resolution in all its 33-million-pixel glory.
So many pixels
Needless to say, the prospect of 8K for the home has had us salivating. Just as 4K UHD offered a four-fold jump in resolution over 1080p HD, now 8K introduces a screen resolution that’s four times as dense again.
The catch, of course, is that there is effectively no 8K content to be had right now. Not even a sniff. That means the real appeal of this pricey pixel pusher hangs on its ability to upscale 4K content, regular HD Blu-rays, and that pile of dusty DVDs you have in the spare room. Smart connectivity is no
different from other high-end Samsung screens. The Q900R employs the familiar Tizen Smart OS of other Samsung TVs, accessed via horizontal bars on-screen. One of these has curated content from various services, the other a list of apps and services themselves.
Available apps for streaming video include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube. The set doesn’t support Freeview Play, though. It’s still a solid smart platform with much to like.
It also boasts Ambient Mode, which enables the TV to serve a purpose even when you’re not watching something specific: it can blend, chameleon-like, with your wall coverings (you use the SmartThings app to create an image of your wall that is displayed onscreen), function as a picture gallery, or display a news ticker. Ambient Mode is a very cool feature, but in a world of increasingly alarming climate change news, we don’t exactly find ourselves drawn to the idea of leaving the TV on just because we can.
Size and shine
Ultimately, the appeal of this TV hangs on its video performance. There’s a hefty price premium attached to the newly baked panel and associated image processing technologies. We tested the 65-inch model (QE65Q900) for this review. An official Australian price is yet to be announced by Samsung, but as a guide it’s £4,999 in th UK which translates roughly to $8,700 – a premium over most 4K OLED or QLED models (this is the latter, as Samsung has yet to enter the OLED game), but nothing compared to super-luxury giant TVs.
There’s also a 75-inch version, which comes in at £6,999 ($12,300), and the 85-inch version, which more than doubles the price to £14,999 ($26,400). This isn’t out of whack with the cost of high-end OLED TVs of a similar size from the likes of Panasonic, but the steep rise certainly trips you up.
The good news is that it looks absolutely amazing with native 8K footage. The detail and clarity it presents is second to none. Our 8K viewing selection, which was provided by Samsung for testing, comprised fancy footage of city spaces, pets and people, and all looked so real we swear we could have just reached out and touched them.
But for the foreseeable future, owners will actually be watching 4K or HD. This is where the set’s AIbased upscaling comes in.
Upscale funk
Ultra HD Blu-rays look extremely good. Guardians of the Galaxy:
Volume 2 is vibrant, detailed and a joy to watch. But was Samsung’s hyped Machine Learning Super Resolution (MLSR) technology adding much above a comparable high-end 4K set? Well, not really, at least nothing appreciable at the 65-inch screen size to our eyes. Certainly more pixels have a bigger impact at bigger sizes, but we want to see the benefit here, too, since this will be a common size.
At trade shows, Samsung has shown upscaling technology able to do remarkable things with SD