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Used for: 1–3 months
165Hz and a near-perfect picture
Home screen is full of promoted content
As a picture it is close to flawless, 165Hz is silly on a television and I love it. Docking a star for the smart platform, which pushes content I did not ask for onto the first screen every time.
Used for: 1–3 months
Astonishing detail
The stand needs a very sturdy unit
The picture quality still makes me stop and stare at adverts
Used for: Less than a month
Once calibrated it is a stunning picture
Factory settings are a demo-mode mess
It is early to be writing this, but a few things are already clear. The picture out of the box is over-processed and needs half an hour in the menus. Turn off the motion smoothing, drop the sharpness, pick Filmmaker mode for anything cinematic and it transforms from a shop-floor demo into something you would want in a living room. Once set it is superb. Blooming around bright objects on black is minimal, and 8K upscaling of 4K sport is noticeably crisper. Two weeks in, that half hour in the menus is the best time I have spent on it. A star off for the awful default settings.
Used for: 6–12 months
Brightness and motion are both a generational leap
Bought as an upgrade from a set we had had far too long, and the jump is larger than the spec sheet suggests. The obvious change is brightness. Daytime television in a room with two south-facing windows used to mean squinting at a grey picture, and now it does not. HDR films have highlights that genuinely make you blink. The less obvious change is motion. Sport at 165Hz with the interpolation off is clean and stable, and the panel does not blur during a fast pan across a pitch the way the old plasma did!
Used for: 3–6 months
The upscaling is the real reason to buy 8K
Native 8K material barely exists
I will admit I bought 8K for the wrong reasons and ended up pleased for the right ones. There is almost nothing to watch at 8K. What you actually get is a panel with four times the pixels doing the upscaling work, and on good 4K Blu-ray the result is genuinely sharper than the 4K set it replaced, with none of the edge halos that cheap sharpening gives you. Four months in, I have found precisely one thing to watch at native 8K. Brightness is the other half of it. Highlights on this Mini LED backlight are searing, and the anti-glare finish handles a bright room!
Used for: 6–12 months
Upscaling makes 4K look better than on my old 4K set
Almost no native 8K to watch
Native 8K content is still scarce, but the upscaling more than carries it
Used for: 6–12 months
Off-angle picture holds up across the whole sofa
Reflections still show on a black screen
At 85 inches the size is right for the room without dominating it the way a bigger set would. What sold me was the viewing angle. Samsung have put a layer on this generation that keeps colour and contrast almost constant off-axis, so the seats at the ends of the sofa get the same picture as the middle. On the set it replaced they did not. Black uniformity in a dark room is excellent!
Used for: More than a year
The One Connect box is the unsung hero. Every cable goes to a small box in the cabinet and one thin lead runs up the wall!
Used for: More than a year
Two years without a single glitch
Two years in a family living room, on for hours every day, and it has never once needed a restart or lost a setting. Faultless
Used for: 3–6 months
Built-in sound has no low end
Picture is astonishing and I would buy it again without hesitating. The one thing worth knowing is that the built-in audio, for all the object tracking cleverness, is still thin at the bottom end. Budget for a soundbar as part of the purchase.
Used for: 3–6 months
Weekly HDMI handshake drops and sluggish input switching
The picture deserves five stars, but living with it does not. The set drops the HDMI handshake with my amplifier more often than it should, giving a black screen until something is power cycled. Firmware updates arrive regularly and three months on have not fixed it. There is also a noticeable delay switching between an app and a live input, several seconds each way, which on a set costing this much feels wrong.
