FLATSCREEN 4K TV PERFORMANCE - SAMSUNG HU8500
At a viewing distance of 1.5m, it was hard not to be impressed by the big screen and the boatloads of details that the HU8500 brought. Even though the HU8500 didn’t come with the PurColor and Auto Depth Enhancer technologies like the curved HU9000, the sense of 3D-ness was very much present in the Grand Canyon Adventure, a 4K documentary that was on the Samsung UHD Video Pack (basically a hard drive preloaded with 4K material). In fact, using just the Standard picture mode and without doing any kind of calibration, we found images to exhibit just the right amount of ‘pop’.
The HU8500 also excelled when we switched to 1080p content. Even though it had been upscaled, details in the Blu-ray version of Skyfall still looked super-sharp. We also didn’t experience any judder for 1080p24 2D material.
Although the HU8500’s local dimming method relied on fewer zones than the curved HU9000, we found the former’s backlight control to work well across different types of materials. Sure, during low APL scenes in The Dark Knight, its black level performance, while good, was still no match for OLED TVs, but in movies with primarily high APL scenes and bright colors, it was capable of the brightest whites. The TV also exhibited very good motion clarity, thanks to effective black frame insertion implementation; even with the LED Clear Motion setting turned on, there was hardly any flicker. Lastly, 3D image brightness remained high, and the slight crosstalk of the active 3D system didn’t ruin the viewing experience.
For audio, the small front-firing speakers into the TV’s cabinet actually did quite a good job, as we could quite make out the many multi-directional audio moments in the Star Trek Into Darkness movie. The HU8500 also incorporates a Dolby MS11 multi-stream decoder that supports decoding of many of today’s popular audio formats.