HDR Done Bright

removal helps keep the price down. The Q90T’S connections are now found in a more typical place—the back of the set. (The One-connect box continues to be bundled with Samsung’s 8K-resolution TVS.)

Local dimming is the best method available to achieve respectable blacks and shadow detail on an LCD TV, and Samsung’s local dimming has always been among the best. The 65Q90T’S full-array backlight provides fewer local dimming zones than last year’s Q90R. By my count that model had over 400 zones, but the Q90T makes do with 98 zones. The lower number here means less dimming precision and more visible blooming, particularly around bright objects against a dark background.

When I reviewed the Q90R, it was clear that Samsung had made significant advances in improving off-axis image quality. While that set was no longer on-hand for comparison, the Q90T’S off-axis performance seemed nearly as good. As I stated in my Q90R review, the best seat in the house remains front and center, but even fussy viewers at the left and right seats of a couch are likely to have no complaints, and that remains true here.

I’m not a big fan of Samsung’s anti-reflective screen design. While it generally does dim reflections from in-room light sources, light that hits from certain angles gets spread out across the screen. As always, the best solution for this issue is a room setup that prevents screen reflections.

The “Q” in QLED stands for the Quantum Dots used in the Q90T’S backlight, a technology that delivers a wide color gamut. No current consumer Ultra HD video sources exceed P3 color (a subset of the BT.2020 Ultra HD standard, which is 37 percent larger than P3). Samsung claims that the Q90T delivers 100 percent of P3, though our measurements indicated roughly 92 percent coverage.

Samsung’s Tizen Smart TV feature offers access to most popular streaming sites. I found it a little clunky and overly sensitive at first; on more than a few occasions an unintended, light touch on the otherwise good but not backlit remote control directed me somewhere I didn’t want to go. Airplay 2 streaming is supported, and the set’s Ambient Mode+ can display a selected image onscreen, including a photo of the wall behind the TV to make the set (more or less) disappear. I was often accidentally transported there as well!

Samsung’s own Bixby voice assistant is built into the Q90T, and it’s also compatible with Amazon and Google voice control. The set’s sound quality is good by TV standards. Its optical digital audio output can pass lossy 5.1 multichannel Dolby Digital to an outboard device such as a soundbar but is limited to 2.1-channel output with a DTS source.

While only one of the

Q90T’S four HDMI inputs is version 2.1, the other connections offer HDMI 2.1 features important to gamers, including VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode). The set also has HDMI EARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel) and supports sources with frame rates up to 120Hz. When I played an Ultra HD Blu-ray of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a disc with a 60Hz frame rate, it was displayed on the Samsung with all of its features intact: 4K, 60Hz, HDR, and P3 (inside BT.2020), 4:2:2, 10-bit color.

The Q90T has a ton of additional features that would take many more pages to cover, though I can’t imagine a need for most of them (such as making color images black and white!). The Samsung's full feature set is addressed in its onscreen e-manual, something I found challenging to navigate.

SETUP

Samsung offers five preset picture modes: Dynamic, Standard, Natural, Movie, and Filmmaker. Of these, I used the Movie mode exclusively. The Filmmaker mode doesn’t offer any out-of-the-box advantage over Movie mode and is unique mainly in that its Picture Clarity settings (which control the set’s motion compensation) are turned off. There’s also a Game mode, but it’s buried deep in the general menu and tedious to access (Settings>general>external Device Manager>game Mode Settings>game Mode).

Both 2-point and 20-point grayscale controls are provided in Movie mode (2-point only in Filmmaker), plus a full color management system (CMS) for the primary and secondary

While the HDR and SDR calibration results shown in the Test Bench section of this review were performed with the gamma sliders and the Shadow Detail controls in their off/centered positions, I found that the results (particularly in HDR) were often too dark. With such material, increasing both the gamma slider and Shadow

Detail controls by +1 (and less often by +2, or a mixture of +1 and +2) offered significantly more pleasing and consistentlooking images.

ULTRA HD/HDR PERFORMANCE

I used Blu-ray discs (HD and Ultra HD) played on an Oppo

UDP-203 player for most of my serious viewing. With both formats, banding (posterization) was never an issue on the Q90T. Ditto for screen uniformity, which was good throughout.

Although I didn’t spend much time viewing the Samsung pre-calibration, I was impressed with its out-of-the-box performance. After reducing Contrast a bit to get the HDR PQ curve under better control (it was too “hot” in its upper half at the default Contrast setting), it calibrated beautifully for 4K/ Hdr—something I can’t say about every Hdr-capable display I’ve tested.

Some manufacturers might claim a peak brightness higher than the Samsung’s measured