PROS
- Outstanding QLED picture quality
- Cool industrial design
- Handy external connection box
CONS
- Expensive
- Banding over some subtle HDR blends
- Occasional backlight clouding issues
KEY FEATURES
- 65-inch LCD TV with QLED technology
- Native UHD resolution
- HLG HDR support
- Ultra HD Premium certified
- Edge LED lighting with local dimming
- Manufacturer: Samsung
- Review Price: £4,899.00
WHAT IS THE SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM?
The QE65Q9FAM is Samsung’s flagship 65-inch TV for 2017, and the first chance we’ve had to delve into the brand’s new QLED technology. In other words, it’s a pretty big deal.
Its £4,900 price is likely to limit its market, and it doesn’t quite live up to all of the QLED hype surrounding it. But that doesn’t stop it from setting new HDR standards and ensuring that QLED technology adds another exciting twist to the eternal LCD versus OLED debate.
SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM – DESIGN AND BUILD
The Q9F looks and feels exactly as it is: a seriously premium TV. At nearly 30kg it’s hefty by modern TV standards, and its ultra-robust metallic side panels extend a chunky-looking 2.5cm from back to front.
This doesn’t mean it lacks style, however. Its perfectly flat front is matched by a perfectly flat, brushed-finish rear, creating a startlingly minimalistic ‘lab monitor’ look that, while potentially divisive, struck me as highly attractive.
The clean look to the Q9F’s rear owes much to the way its connections sit on an external One Connect box. As a result, there are only two cables running into the TV: a power cable and a connection cable from the One Connect that uses fibre-optic technology to become pretty much invisible. This is a great design touch, especially for those who will be wall-hanging the TV.
Samsung offers a selection of stand options, if you choose not to hang the TV on the wall. However, the default option comprises two small, neckless feet that sit a few inches in from each bottom corner. They’re fine, except that their positioning means the TV will have to be sat on a reasonably wide piece of furniture.
Samsung has completely redesigned its smart remote for the Q9F, and this time the results are compelling. It makes a virtue rather than an aggravation of its limited button count; its central navigation area is much cleaner and more straightforward than it’s been on previous Samsung handsets; and its shiny metallic finish and balanced weight make it a pleasure to use.
SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM – SETUP
Your first experience with the QE65Q9FAM will be a good one. Samsung has introduced a new initial installation experience that guides you through all the key setup requirements without you really needing to engage your brain at all. It helpfully recaps everything at the end, and brilliantly runs auto-tuning in the background while you plough on with the rest of the up-front installation.
Optimising the Q9F’s pictures isn’t especially hard, thanks to the TV’s great image quality and Samsung doing a better job than usual with its selection of picture presets.
There are a few tips I’d recommend, though. First, always turn off noise reduction when watching 4K content. Personally, I opted to turn off motion controls, too – although you can reduce judder without generating distracting processing glitches by selecting the Custom motion processing mode, and setting the judder and blur components to three or four.
I also preferred to use the Standard picture preset when watching both high and standard dynamic range content, although the Movie option is, technically, the most accurate setting and is much improved over the rather subdued Movie mode found on last year’s Samsung ‘SUHD’ TVs.
You need to make sure the Contrast Enhancer feature is turned off, since it causes details and subtle tones to look bleached out of the brightest parts of the picture. Personally, I also found dark areas of HDR pictures could look a little crushed and over-dominant if I didn’t set the enthrallingly named ST.2084 gamma setting to plus one or plus two.
Finally, I’d recommend turning off the set’s Eco features, and experimenting with the set’s HDR+ feature to see whether or not you like the way it tries to make SDR footage look like HDR.
SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM – FEATURES
So what’s this QLED technology all about, then? It’s essentially Samsung’s latest Quantum Dot innovation, which sees the QDs being wrapped in metal alloy to make them more stable, so that they can be driven harder and placed in a more forward position in the panel. Samsung claims that this should result in a wider colour range, a big boost in brightness, improved contrast and light management, and better viewing angles.
Note that while QLED is certainly a genuine innovation, the TVs it applies to are still essentially LCD models.
The Q9F’s QLED panel is illuminated by an edge LED lighting system, with lights arranged down each of the TV’s sides firing across the screen. It’s a surprise, perhaps, that Samsung hasn’t followed its usual path of using direct LED lighting – where the lights sit right behind the screen – in its flagship TV. But the horizontal lighting in conjunction with a local dimming system should give more effective results than the more common vertical lighting system deployed by most edge LED TVs.
Inevitably, the Q9F carries a native 4K resolution, while its HDR support extends to the new Hybrid Log Gamma system for HDR broadcasts and Samsung’s open-source dynamic metadata platform known as HDR10+. These formats are joined by the HDR10 industry standard, but pointedly not by the Dolby Vision dynamic metadata platform.
Connections on the One Connect box include four HDMIs, three USBs and Wi-Fi/Ethernet network options. The HDMIs are built to the latest specification for Full 4K and HDR support, while the network options support streaming from networked devices and access to online features via Samsung’s latest ‘Eden’ smart TV interface.
This interface includes access to Netflix and Amazon video streaming in 4K and HDR, along with many more less well-known video, information and gaming services. It’s a shame that it doesn’t integrate a full UK catch-up platform such as YouView, however.
Samsung has reintroduced voice-control support on the QE65Q9FAM – and this time it actually works. There’s no need to use a specific sentence structure – just say ‘HDMI 1’ or whatever – and it works across a startling number of the TV’s features.
Other interesting features are an improved version of Samsung’s HDR+ system for converting SDR footage to HDR, and a processing system that adjusts the appearance of standard dynamic range sources depending on the amount of light in the room.
Also potentially making the Q9F more watchable than most TVs in bright rooms is a new system of filters on the screen designed to greatly reduce light reflections.
SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM – PERFORMANCE
Thanks to a combination of Samsung’s QLED hype and the QE65Q9FAM’s hefty price, this debut QLED TV arrives with sky-high expectations. Fortunately, while it isn’t perfect, it mostly lives up to them.
The Q9F makes its most immediate impact with its colours. There’s a luminous quality to HDR colour tones across the board that I haven’t experienced before. Rich tones look explosively vibrant, bright tones retain their richness rather than looking bleached, and the subtlety of the image’s colour detailing in heavily saturated and/or very bright picture areas is unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Even more startlingly, skin tones look vastly more natural and subtly rendered than they were on last year’s SUHD TVs.
Suddenly, the colour tones I’d once considered state of the art on last year’s Samsung UE65KS9500 start to look rather flat and forced, with skin in particular being exposed by the QE65Q9FAM’s colour excellence as actually being a bit over-ripe in retrospect.
The UE65KS9500 was, in case you’re not aware, a prime contender for the best TV of 2016. Yet it isn’t just in the colour department that it falls short of the QE65Q9FAM. The QLED screen enjoys a much more expansive contrast range, stretching from significantly brighter peaks at one end to deeper blacks than most LCD TVs can dream of at the other. In fact, running the Deadpool Ultra HD Blu-ray into both screens side by side leaves the UE65KS9500’s light range looking almost compressed by comparison.
Oddly, this comparison becomes even more stark when comparing both TVs in daylight conditions. The filters on the Q9F’s screen proved phenomenal at soaking up potential reflections and ambient light interference, enabling the image to retain far more contrast, dynamism and colour richness in a bright room.
The QE65Q9FAM’s extraordinary screen filtering also does a more effective job of solving the problem of HDR content often looking too dark in a bright room.
Its brightness peaks when watching HDR go further than those of previous TV in two ways. First, they’re brighter. I didn’t quite measure a 2000-nit light output that Samsung claims the Q9F should hit, but the TV did achieve a couple of momentary 1800-nit peaks. The screen delivers a very impressive – and stable – 1500 nits or so of HDR brightness when playing a 10% HDR white box.
The QE65Q9FAM also earns major HDR kudos for managing to retain plenty of detail in even the brightest parts of the picture – so long as you follow my earlier advice of turning off the Contrast Enhancement feature.
Being able to sustain a high peak brightness level more consistently than rival HDR TVs additionally pays handsome dividends with bright HDR content such as the Planet Earth II 4K Blu-ray footage. This features much more ‘full screen’ use of HDR brightness levels than your typical film, and the QE65Q9FAM is able to deliver this with stunning boldness and consistency. On the Q9F, the sustained brightness of the sequence where eagles fight over a dead fox on a snow-capped mountain becomes the single finest picture experience I’ve had on any TV to date.
The TV excels when it comes to detail, too. Good quality native 4K images look stunningly crisp and clean, aided by the screen’s gorgeously subtle and accurate colour management and a level of light control that’s hard to comprehend given that we’re talking about an edge-mounted lighting system.
The TV doesn’t lose this sharpness when handling motion, either, be it a camera pan or a sportsman crossing the screen. Thanks to a superb upscaling system, even sub-4K sources end up looking beautifully detailed and crisp.
Finally, the QE65Q9FAM proves a really stunning gaming monitor on activating its Game mode, turning in a fabulously low input lag measurement (the time the screen takes to render received image data) of around 12ms.
If you’re not too giddy with excitement at all this cutting-edge picture glory, you may remember that I said earlier that the QE65Q9FAM wasn’t perfect. Here’s why.
My first issue is that even the Q9F’s phenomenal light control system can’t prevent some HDR scenes from generating faint but wide bands of extraneous light running across dark areas in the vicinity of any stand-out bright picture elements.
In truth, this could have been a much bigger problem than it is given the unprecedented levels of light output that the QE65Q9FAM can deliver. But it’s one area, at least, where the direct-lit KS9500 models – and self-emissive OLED TVs, of course – retain the edge.
Surprisingly, the QE65Q9FAM loses contrast when watched from an angle any greater than 25 degrees. This common LCD viewing angle issue was one Samsung had suggested it had fixed with QLED, but the final product tells a different story. Although, colour actually retains saturation quite well when the screen’s viewed from an angle, and the Standard and Natural picture presets strangely give you a slightly wider effective viewing angle than the Movie mode.
In addition, it turns out that Samsung hasn’t been able to fix the colour-banding issues that can affect subtle colour blends in HDR pictures. This can draw your eye and distract you from what you’re watching, so it’s a mercy that it only shows up on rare occasions.
That’s really it for the bad picture news, though – and, happily, I don’t have to append to this small list of negatives any serious bad news about its sound, either. While there are more powerful-sounding TVs out there, the Q9F is loud, clean and detailed enough in its presentation to make adding a separate sound bar to your set up a mere option rather than a necessity.
SHOULD I BUY A SAMSUNG QE65Q9FAM?
The answer to this depends very much on how well-heeled you are. If you can stretch to its £4,900 asking price then sure, go for it. It does, after all, leverage those fancy new metal-covered Quantum Dots to display HDR footage with more verve and punch than any other TV that has come before it.
However, if your budget falls short then Sony’s previous HDR king, the 65ZD9, can now be bought for around £3,500; LG’s greatly improved 2017 OLED TVs offer their spectacular black levels and light management from £4,500; and Sony’s recently tested 55-inch 55XE9305 can be had for around £2,400.
VERDICT
Despite falling short of the QLED hype in two or three areas, the QE65Q9FAM still makes a hugely compelling, HDR-friendly case for QLED having a long and – literally – bright future in the TV world.
Sоurсе: trustedreviews.com