Samsung QN900D
Samsung’s new flagship TV suggests 8K is far from dead
Its new flagship 75in TV, the QN900D, finds Samsung pulling out all the stops to improve picture quality, design and, yes, power consumption to ensure that reports of 8K’s death end up looking very greatly exaggerated indeed.
This doesn’t come cheap at £6500, but in its defence, as well as delivering a four-fold increase in pixels over a 4K TV, it backs that ultra-fine resolution up with other premium picture-quality features and a spectacular premium design.
Samsung’s Infinity Air concept sits its screen in a frame so narrow that for once it actually almost lives up to its ‘bezel-free’ claims. The slenderness extends to the TV’S rear, and this incredible and uniform slimness for such a big-screen TV creates a distinctive monolithic effect that looks particularly stunning on a wall.
The silver trim encasing the sides is another gorgeous touch, emphasised by the perforations that puncture all four sides as part of the TV’S Object Tracking Sound system (designed to position effects in the correct place on the TV’S screen). This sound system also impacts the design in the shape of no fewer than eight circular drivers facing out of the screen’s rear.
The QN900D’S 8K resolution puts it into a currently pretty niche corner of the TV world. On top of its 7680 x 4320 pixel count and futuristic design, Samsung has found a way of hugely increasing the power efficiency of its 2024 premium 8K panel, enabling it to meet today’s stringent television energy consumption rules at the same time that it has achieved a 20-30 per cent boost in brightness with HDR content over 2023’s QN900C.
That brightness is powered by seriously advanced light controls using Mini LEDS, meaning far more separate lights (they are around a fortieth the size of regular LEDS) are fitted into the set’s 75in screen, so raising the potential for more precise light control. Those LEDS are controlled by a bumper 1920 local dimming zones.
Behind this local-dimming system is the new Neo Quantum 8K AI Gen 3 processor. This doubles the NPU speed of its 2023 predecessor and apparently features the accumulated knowledge of 512 neural networks that have been tirelessly analysing different types of imagery to make it easier for the TV to know how to optimise its picture performance on the fly.
An Ai-informed 8K upscaler does an unprecedented job of turning 4K and even HD sources into 8K – handy given the shortage of native 8K content. There’s a new motion prediction system, too, that prevents small, fast-moving objects such as tennis balls from glitching in and out of the picture as they typically would.
A Real Depth Enhancer Pro system works out the focal point of any image frame and then subtly tweaks image elements to make foreground images look more pronounced and enhance the sense of depth, to make pictures look more like the way your eyes perceive the real world.
All four of its HDMI sockets are equipped to handle the latest cutting-edge features, plus, of course, 8K games at up to 60Hz refresh rates, should you have a PC rig capable of rendering so many pixels.
Despite the current lack of 8K content, the QN900D certainly makes a seriously compelling case for 8K hardware. In fact, thanks to the remarkable efforts of its 8K upscaler, the QN900D crucially makes a compelling case for 8K TVS even if 8K content never becomes a thing.
More three-dimensional
Thanks, presumably, to AI, the precision with which the QN900D adds the tens of millions of extra pixels required to turn 4K and HD into 8K feels almost mystically impressive. This is especially true in highly textured areas such as hair, grass, trees, the fabric of clothing, face details and so on. It’s not just that this sort of image content looks sharper, either. It also looks denser and more three-dimensional – more organic and natural, even. All with little or no hint of processing unpleasantness or artificiality to disrupt the extra connection with the picture that such image density creates. This unprecedented level of 8K upscaling performance also makes the set genuinely capable of delivering a ‘next-gen’ experience.
This isn’t true with just video sources, either. Good 4K-level gaming graphics also look dazzlingly great, enjoying new levels of sharpness, detail and depth that breathe new life into old favourites. The way Samsung’s set does this without making the resulting pictures look noisy or full of processing side effects genuinely makes you feel more immersed in your gaming.
The QN900D manages to achieve this upscaling feat, too, while taking only 11ms when using its fastest game-mode setting to render graphics received at its inputs. We can’t even start to imagine the level of processing power required to calculate the look of so many pixels in so little time.
Native 8K sources are on a different level of beauty again. Our resident Spears & Munsil 8K test reel of American vistas and wildlife painstakingly rendered in 8K HDR looks exquisite, essentially making the whole concept of pixels and resolution melt away as if you’ve had some kind of ‘fuzzy filter’ removed from your eyes; it’s just you and the great American outdoors.
Contrast is remarkable for an LCD TV, with the Mini LED backlighting and advanced local-dimming controls managing to produce startlingly dark, almost Oled-like black colours as well as phenomenally punchy Oled-beating brightness. The fact that it can also control its light down to impressively localised levels for an LCD TV helps to inject even more definition into the minutiae that makes 8K special.
The QN900D’S colour performance is advanced enough, too, to keep pace with the screen’s brightness and resolution. The Quantum Dots used to deliver its colours can be driven hard without losing saturation, resulting in outstanding colour volume, while the screen can keep delivering subtle shading differences and details way beyond the point where most TVS will have succumbed to flaring, flatness or cartoonishness.
The QN900D’S extra brightness over the QN900C is particularly important, since, as well as getting more impact from HDR’S massively expanded light range, it also ensures that the QN900D’S Mini LED
screen tech retains a clear raison d’être despite the recent brightness increases that the new MLA and QD-OLED technologies have brought to rival TVS.
The QN900D’S pictures aren’t completely flawless. While the Standard picture preset gives you the most dramatic image in terms of 8K sharpness, contrast and colour punch, its backlight settings can cause distracting inconsistencies. For instance, when a very bright HDR object appears against a dark backdrop, the screen dims the intensity of the bright object down quite substantially to limit the potential for backlight blooming to appear around the bright object. Also, if there is an abrupt cut in a scene from a light to a dark shot, or vice versa, you can sometimes see the screen produce a slightly delayed increase or decrease of its overall brightness level. You can fix these inconsistencies by changing the local dimming settings to Low or High from the ‘Standard’ default, but this reduces black level performance or causes more blooming problems respectively.
Movie magic
“The fact that it can also control its light down to impressively localised levels helps inject even more definition into the minutiae that makes 8K special”
Fortunately the TV’S Movie preset is by far the best Movie mode we have seen on a Samsung TV, avoiding the slightly jaundiced tone of before while retaining more brightness and contrast. This seems a logical and welcome change, given that most Samsung TVS now also carry a
Filmmaker mode for people willing to sacrifice colour punch and brightness in return for more creative accuracy.
Even with its eight sizeable midrange drivers and other speakers arranged all around the screen’s edges, and 90W of total power, the QN900D’S sound doesn’t live up to its billing. Its lacks impact and forward projection, with most of the audio sounding as if it’s coming from behind the screen. It can’t get very loud, either, leaving action scenes sounding a bit tepid. There isn’t much bass, and when the TV does ‘dig deep’, its efforts are usually accompanied by some crackling and distortion.
The Object Tracking Sound system deserves some love, though. Sound effects and voices are positioned around the screen with excellent accuracy, giving you back at least some of the immersion lost by the lack of forward projection. The speakers are sensitive enough to bring out high levels of detail, too, and the soundstage spreads quite far from the screen. There’s a mild height as well as width element, too.
The QN900D marks a spectacular debut for Samsung’s 2024 TV range. Its picturequality improves considerably in just about every way on its predecessor, leaving clear blue brightness water between it and 2024’s top OLED TVS, and rewriting the upscaling rule book to remind us in no uncertain terms that 8K TVS don’t have to be fed 8K content to make a difference.