Samsung Q9FN

kukynas · October 5, 2018

2 weeks wait is over and TV finally arrived, Samsung just confirmed premium care program via sms so time for unpacking and fiddling, still need to buy invisible wall mount but first I need to see if I won panel lottery or not and if there are any visible artefacts, stay tuned...

kukynas · October 5, 2018

another $230 to uncle Sam

kukynas · October 14, 2018

so after week of usage here are my thoughts, and I will take into consideration that I paid 30% less than official market price...

Pros:

- this TV is crazy bright

- excellent contrast

- excellent black levels (Oled like)

- excellent black uniformity

- accurate and vibrant colors

- very good upscaling

- crazy detailed and sharp but not oversharpened

- independent picture profile per input

- fast responsive and easy to use menu, one of the best app store

- high quality remote, bit of a learning at first but than very intuitive, sometimes if would appreciate more dedicated buttons

- sleek design and no gap wall mount (extra money of course)

- one connect cable (could be easily hiden)

Cons:

- DSE is very noticeable if you run the test videos, slightly better than Rting's unit tested (panel lottery) , might be visible during some scenes where only 1 color is spread across majority/whole picture

- blooming around bright objects with black background, level of blooming is fully depended on backlight setting so higher the backlight more blooming is visible, not much noticeable during standard watching but you know it's there

- black crush, lot has been said about aggressive local dimming algorithm so I hope Samsung will address it with new firmware

- unsupported DTS playback and passthrough, for those who use this TV as main movie player (like myself) it's a big downside

- of axis performance (no issue for me)

- flicker might be visible under certain conditions (happened to me once) when auto motion is turned off

To sum it up overall picture quality is breath taking when fed with high resolution content such as 4K HDR, I think at the moment this is the best LED TV money can buy but definitely not the best overall TV on the market, we have to pick our poison when it comes to TV tech as each technology (OLED,LED) has it's own pros and cons, if brightness and no risk of burn in is important than LED TV is better otherwise for dark rooms OLED would be my recommendation

I won't post any pictures as my 4 years old iPhone won't do any justice to show TV performance but there's enough hi-res pictures available on AVSforum.com or AVforums.com from users under different conditions

Would I keep this TV if I paid original 6 grand for it? no way...it would have to be ultimate TV without such drawbacks, direct LED TV competition providing 90% of its performance 30-40% cheaper

any questions let me know

Daniel

kukynas · February 2, 2019

just some small update, still very happy with my choice, Samsung has fixed some of my previous complains so hopefully remaining will be sorted as well, some has been fixed by applying different setting

- blooming around bright objects with black background, nearly unnoticeable after setting local dimming to low

- black crush, seems to be better but still not as good as OLED

- unsupported DTS playback and passthrough, DTS surround works now, DTS MA still unsupported, waiting for eARC which should fix all of it but not sure if we'll see any for last year's models

that's about it for now, got better camera so below some pictures under different light conditions, camera has limited capability of capturing full dynamic range of the TV so highlights aren't as detailed or balanced as they are in real life, big window is on the left side next to the TV so with jalousie open some reflections are visible on the left side of the TV, files are untouched straight from camera, it might not be visible from these pictures but I'm Sony colors guy so my preferences are for neutral profile instead of commonly used movie or warm profile with slightly yellowish/green like cinema look, other than that TV is set to standard mode with all the enhancements turned off, last 2 pictures are from LG 4K demo and as you can see (also in other pictures) TV is capable of reproducing inky black levels without noticeable blooming around bright objects, in all case TV is in 4K HDR mode with high backlight levels (35 out of 50)

I still believe this is the best LED tv ever produced and money can buy with black levels nearly as good as OLED