Juha Saarinen: Looking at the bigger picture with an 8K TV

Samsung's QLED 8K has a $15,199 price tag for a 75-inch screen. Photo / Bloomberg

COMMENT:

A few weeks ago, Samsung dropped off their latest 8K QLED TV, the 75-inch variant of the new range that starts at 65 inches and goes all the way up to 98 inches diagonally.

Normally, I set up review gear myself but in this case, I was quietly pleased two Samsungers did it for me due to the size and weight of the TV.

In the box the 75-inch Q900R weighs close to 60kg. It's big and unwieldy to handle especially if, like me, that installer hasn't been to the gym for a while.

Everything's big about the TV, from the size to the 8K resolution and the $15,199 price. If the 75-inch model isn't big enough for you, you can opt to pay $19,000 for the 82-inch variant, or a whopping $80,000 for the special order 98-inch set. You'll also probably want the excellent sounding $1299 Samsung sound bar with the TV.

The fact that TVs costing that much actually sell well, made me consider a career change, or a crypto-currency initial coin offering which is probably a quicker and easier way to boost earnings.

Even though the 7680 by 4320 resolution — rounded up as 8K — means there are more than 33 million pixels, the 75-inch screen doesn't have the pixel density of new smartphones and tablets.

At just over 117 pixels per inch, the 75-inch TV isn't anywhere near the 6.4-inch 3040 by 1440 resolution screen on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus, which has a crazy 522 PPI density.

Get very close and you can see individual pixels on the Q900R, unlike on the S10 Plus which has a screen with a painted-on appearance.

In reality, you don't pixel-peep and the step up to 8K from 4K makes a difference, allowing you to see very fine detail like individual strands of hair if you really for look for it.

Overall, the image quality is excellent as the hi-res screen has great viewing angles and decent contrast ratio augmented by local dimming and flexible frame rates up to 120 Hz.

Along with the very good colour rendition and dynamic range of the screen, those features are probably more important for the image quality than the high resolution.

Unfortunately, 8K content is not anywhere near as common as 4K material but the TV upscales the latter and 1080p material well.

Content that's not been well-recorded and challenges the upscaling engine can look pretty terrible. Ads, in particular, don't seem to get much hi-def love and are often jarringly jagged.

Another issue that 8K brings to the table is fast broadband. Samsung confirmed that 8K needs around 80 to 100 megabit/s bandwidth per video stream.

That means a gigabit fibre connection is required (UFB has an annoying gap in service offerings with nothing between 100 Mbps and 900 Mbps) and you want to either use a wired ethernet network connection to the router, or make sure your Wi-Fi is of the new and fast variety.

QLED stands for quantum-dot light emitting diode which is the technology Samsung favours for TVs.

It competes with organic LED (OLED) screens, mostly made by Korean competitor LG, and this is where things get very geeky with pundits debating the merits of the two technologies.

One key advantage of OLED is that it doesn't use backlighting. Instead, the individual LEDs can be turned on and off, so if you want to display a really really dark bit in a scene, no problem. QLED is a misnomer, as the technology involves using LED backlighting that's filtered through a film of quantum dots and the screens are a bit thicker than OLEDs.

Here's the thing, though. Samsung is promising self-emitting QLEDs by next year that work like OLEDs and won't require backlighting.

Lovely as the Q900R is, it feels as if Samsung's jumped the gun somewhat with 8K, producing expensive sets that could seem dated next year when its new display technology debuts, no doubt costing at least as much as the current flagship range.