Samsung Q950TS review: what can you do with an 8K TV in 2020?

It costs 6,000 euros, has a stunning design and displays a resolution of 32 million pixels. Samsung's latest high-end television is eye-popping, but does the 8K it promises make sense when content of such definition is almost non-existent?

You noticed it: the size of the screens does not stop growing. Apart from tablets and laptops, all the other diagonals tend to grow over the years: smartphone, PC monitor and inevitably, televisions.

On the latter, the dimensions now often reach 65, 75 or even 85 inches on the top of the range, i.e. 165, 190 or even 215 cm diagonally! Gigantic for most Belgian houses, which rarely have living rooms or bedrooms of 50 square meters…

Why such a diagonal? There is this fundamental trend in consumer electronics which imposes "always bigger, always more powerful". This allows manufacturers to continue to work their engineers, to fill the shelves with "new". However, a 2 meter diagonal TV has to adapt so as not to display a mush of pixels. Hence the arrival of 8K.

32 million pixels!

8K claims to replace 4K. We are talking here about screen definition, the number of pixels that make up the panel. If you're over 30, your first computer screen was probably 640 x 480 pixels. With 8K, we are at around 8,000 x 4,000 pixels. Or 32 million tiny "bulbs" lit in such and such a color by the backlighting of your television.

Magnificent, you say! Except that many houses are equipped with television… Full HD (therefore 2K, or 1920 x 1080 pixels). If you've bought a TV in the last few years, it's probably 4K, without you knowing it.

It doesn't matter to you because the vast majority of content available on a TV is not in 4K. Whether it's your decoder for television, your DVD (which is still content with HD, generally 720 x 480 pixels), your Blu-ray, your game console: the quality of the image is, at best, in Full HD.

So why bother with an 8K television, which can display 16 times more pixels and details?

(© Samsung)

Samsung's QLED

To try to answer this question, I tried Samsung's latest flagship, the QLED 2020 range. you will probably never buy it, especially since 8K sources are almost non-existent at the moment (blockbusters made in the USA are only beginning to be shot in this definition).

I saw someone ask "did you paint the effects?" yes, the normal clear plastic has become too boring for my taste. If… https://t.co/jqrnXGzStn

— ItsaGunpla Tue Jul 27 03:06:01 +0000 2021

Faced with the magnificent OLED screens manufactured mainly by LG Display, Samsung had to search for a very long time before finding a parade that works. Because it must be said that competing with the completely black blacks of the OLED, and its very bright colors, is not an easy task. But the difference is almost made up: Samsung screens manage in most cases to “turn off” the black areas. Thanks in particular to the distribution of light in 480 zones, the accuracy of the colorimetry and the devilishly effective anti-reflective filter (improves viewing angles and reduces the halo effect of bright zones during dark scenes).

However, everything is not at the level of what I have already seen with LG's OLED. I could observe here and there some residual gray areas, in the corners. And for (very white) subtitles on black backgrounds, this causes some small problems with automatic contrast, especially in 'cinema' mode. When a subtitle appears, the general brightness of the image decreases very slightly, but it is noticeable.

Brilliant upscaling: 4K becomes 8K

With a 4K source, I tried the default mode, called "intelligent". And there, the defects of which I speak fly away. Subtitle problems no longer exist, and the image is incredibly sharp. But that's not necessarily what you're looking for when you watch a movie or a series. We are looking more for a "cinema" image, and not an image of surgical precision. I watched a few scenes from Black Panther and felt a little too much like watching a documentary about the savannah and its ancient tribes. The feeling is amazing: it's beautiful, but a little too beautiful.

We touch on one of Samsung's prowess: the image improvement algorithms via the integrated Quantum 8K processor. Aided by artificial intelligence, it is even expected to improve over time: upscaling (scaling) is already efficient, and it should be even more so over the course of updates. Note that this works very well for 4K -> 8K content: the image is very detailed, even when approaching the screen. But there is no miracle on Full HD or lower quality content.

So the only advantage of a (very good) 8K TV in 2020 is this: if the upscaling is efficient enough, and if the initial source of the image is good enough, you can indeed have a giant screen and watch it from a distance of 2 or 3 meters without seeing the slightest mush of pixels. And that, let's face it, is quite impressive, and it's real home cinema...

Stunning design

Impossible not to mention the incredible design of the Q950TS series from Samsung, available in 65, 75 and 85 inches. The company has probably signed the most beautiful TV design of the year, or even the next few years. It's hard to do better than this perfect balance: a 1.5 cm thick pavé, with sharp angles, and whose edges are finely perforated; a practically borderless front panel (Samsung talks about Infinity Display, as on its smartphones, and he's right), all mounted on a discreet stand that gives the impression that the screen is floating... I rarely go into ecstasies in front of a TV, but there...

All this is made possible by moving the connectors and part of the electronics into a large box the size of a decoder, called “One connect”. It is only connected to the television by a single and fairly discreet cable (white/transparent), a few millimeters thick.

As for the audio part, despite the thickness of only 1.5 cm, we have a multitude of speakers in the back which, if they will never replace a sound bar, are doing really well, especially at voice level.

I wouldn't say that the design and the audio justify the price of 6,000 euros, but almost…