Review: Samsung Q9 Significantly Enhanced Viewing, Even In Bright Light
Right now, is a crucial time for Samsung, they are the market leader in premium TVs and when you’re leading a race by a slender margin and have some very powerful brands contending for the crown you have to be confident that your latest offering is simply the best.
Known for being an innovative brand Samsung gave us access to their all new 75” Q9 which is a worthy contender in the battle with the new TV technology kids on the block with their impressive OLED TV offerings.
The new Q9 has stylish looks and athletic picture performance and could well see Samsung hold onto their crown as brands such as LG, Panasonic and Sony challenge the Korean TV maker.
Also taking a stab at Samsung’s market share are cheap bottom end brands such as Hisense who are using price as opposed to a quality hardware offering to try ad position themselves in the fast growing 4K UHD market.
I reviewed the new Q9, which is considerably cheaper than last year’s model, in a multimillion dollar Bondi penthouse that was bathed in light and despite this the picture was as good as any OLED TV in these conditions.
Anyone can get a good picture in a dark room but to get a great image in a room bathed in light is another thing.
The engines built into the Q9 combines direct backlighting with arguably the most comprehensive and impressively controlled local dimming engine the TV world has seen.
What the new Samsung display processor delivers is a significantly enhanced
processing technique that enables it to reduce the intensity of the light produced by a particular dimming zone as it spreads away from that zone’s brightest point, thus reducing the obviousness of any blooming effect.
This was clearly evident in the top floor apartment that not only had light streaming in via front facing sliding glass doors but from a big wide skylight.
The experience of watching contrastrich HDR images on the Q9 suggests that what Samsung has delivered with this new model is a new generation of seriously good TV technology.
The image delivered to the screen whether it be from a Blu ray DVD or from Netflix as well as Live TV is immersive, with minimal opportunity for the TV’s lighting technology to distract you from what you’re watching.
The black level performance is all the more remarkable because Samsung’s latest TV can serve up brightness peaks measured (on a 10% white HDR window) of 2413 nits in dynamic mode, or around 1940 nits in Standard mode. These are huge numbers for today’s TV, they are also numbers that brands such as Hisense struggle to deliver.
What I was not able to test was live sport because stupidly Foxtel has pulled the plug on TV manufacturers having access to their Foxtel App.