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Samsung 65-inch Q9F QLED TV (2018) review: Closing the gap

By Ng Chong Seng - 23 Nov 2018
Launch SRP: S$8999

TV settings & Performance

Key TV settings

Like the 2017 Q9F, I found the Movie preset to be the best picture preset on the 2018 model. Even if you aren't going do any calibration, I’d still recommend this picture mode for most content, including live TV and Blu-ray movies. I also selected the Warm2 option for the Color Tone setting. I eventually settled for a Backlight setting of 7, but when watching HDR content, it should be cranked all the way up.

Advanced users with the tools will want to calibrate the color space and white balance, both of which can be done at a pretty granular level. For example, in addition to 2-point white balance controls, the QLED TVs also have 20-point controls for some serious grayscale optimization. For most people, it’s perfectly fine to leave the Color Space setting to Auto, which will have the TV automatically adjust the palette to suit the content.

I also left the Local Dimming setting at High, as I found it to draw out details in highlights very effectively, especially in darker scenes.

Turn off Ambient Light Detection if you don't want the TV to auto adjust its brightness based on your room light level.

For Samsung TVs, I always use custom settings for Auto Motion Plus. For most cases, I also prefer the local dimming performance when Local Dimming is set to High.

FreeSync and Game Mode's motion interpolation settings are located in a separate Game Mode Settings menu.

 

Performance

For 4K testing, I used various clips I’ve amassed through time, played from either a custom PC or a USB drive connected to the USB port on the One Connect Box. Samsung’s UBD-K8500 was the player used for UHD and HDR Blu-ray movies, which included Planet Earth II, The Revenant, and Life of Pi. I also spent some time with 1080p Blu-ray movies, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Casino Royale, mainly to observe the upscaling performance. Finally, a bit of time was reserved for some Xbox gaming and input lag testing to find out how viable it is to use the TV as a gaming display.

The same smart remote used by the TV can also be used to control other devices, such 4K Blu-ray players.

 

1.) Bright vs. dark room

The 2018 Q9F performs well in both bright and dark room settings. The former is especially important if your viewing environment has high ambient lighting that you can’t rein in (such as placement near full height floor to ceiling windows). The anti-reflective treatment on the display is also very effective, and helps to further reduce sharpness, contrast, or color problems in ambient lighting.

Since the Q9F is an LED-lit LCD TV, it can’t switch its pixels off like an OLED TV. Thankfully though, the Q9F’s local dimming performance is very good (albeit aggressive), which translates to not-very-obvious “blooming” and generally very deep blacks even in a dark room. That said, the Q9F’s viewing angles could certainly be better - contrast dips and color shifts were quite apparent when I veered from the center sweet spot.

The Q9F's local dimming performance is excellent as photographed here. (Movie: Planet Earth II.)

 

2.) Colors

Like the LG W8 OLED TV, the Q9F offers excellent wide color gamut performance, and is able to cover nearly the entire DCI-P3 color space.

Also, the Q9F wide gamut didn't suffer much when I cranked up the brightness level. This high color volume at high brightness characteristic bodes well for users who watch a lot of HDR/wide gamut content.

In my review of the LG W8, I mentioned the slight banding I observed on the OLED TV. The Q9F isn’t immune to this problem, but the degree of banding here is even lower, and that’s good.

Colors really pop on the Q9F, even when the room is bright. (Video: Breathtaking Colors of Nature in 4K III on YouTube.)

 

3.) 4K & HDR

Easily hitting the 1,000 nits target in our HDR test scene, the Q9F is very good at producing realistic and bright specular highlights, even when the overall scene is dark. Coupled with the rather effective local dimming, HDR looks great in a dark room.

The high luminosity also comes in handy for SDR content. If your room is very bright, you’ll like this TV. For those curious, the Q9F is able to pump out at least two times the brightness of the LG W8 OLED TV.

That said, colors in HDR mode on both Samsung and LG TVs looked great. Using just out of the box settings without any tweaking, the W8’s colors looked the richer of the two, and jumped out a bit more due to the contrast advantage. But I’ll give the color accuracy advantage to the Q9F because it’s less affected by brightness changes.

A point to note here is that if you were to view this TV's performance without any comparisons whatsoever, you would be hard pressed to nitpick it. Viewing it for what it is, the Q9F is a really good performer. Alas, its narrower viewing angle will wipe out this advantage if you don’t have the best seat in the house.

While the blacks aren't as deep as OLED, HDR still looks great on the Q9F thanks to the excellent local dimming performance and high contrast. (Movie: Life of Pi.)

Good level of details in highlights, too as photographed here. (Movie: Planet Earth II.)

 

4.) Motion

The Q9F’s Auto Motion Plus settings control how the TV handles motion images. Like last year’s Q9F, I used the Custom option for AMP and turned the Blur Reduction and Judder Reduction values all the way down to minimize the soap opera effect that I saw for 24p content. You can, of course, adjust these settings to taste if you actually prefer smoother-looking videos or if you notice any stutters and want to get rid of them. Generally speaking, compared to OLED TVs, stuttering in low framerate content is less of a problem on LED-LCD TVs like the Q9F.

The AMP menu also has an option called LED Clear Motion. This strobing of the backlight may increase visible flicker but the upside is that motion will look clearer and the image sharper.

 

5.) Gaming

I found the Q9F’s response time to be very fast. Along with the improved backlight and motion interpolation, all the Xbox One X games I’ve tried on this TV looked great, with excellent sharpness and nary a trail when things were flying around on-screen.

In addition, the Q9F supports FreeSync, which is something not found on most other TVs. When gaming at 1080p, this enables the QLED TV to match the source’s refresh rate in real time up to 100Hz. For 4K, it varies the refresh rate up to 50Hz.

In a nutshell, for PC and console gamers, the Q9F is technically a better gaming display. Thanks to the adaptive synchronization technology, it’s unlikely that you’d notice any screen stuttering and tearing during gaming. Its 4K input lag is also the lowest I’ve ever encountered on a TV.

The TV was able to detect the Xbox and engage Game Mode automatically.

 

6.) Sound

The Q9F’s speakers have a power output of 60W. Bluetooth audio and Dolby Digital Plus formats are supported natively. Thanks to the decent woofer drivers, the TV speakers sounded good across different types of content. However, for a top-tier TV that costs close to S$9k, you would expect far better audio performance as it doesn't necessarily sound any better than a TV costing a third of its price.

If you want better audio, you should be looking at getting external speakers or at least a soundbar. One option is the Samsung Harman Kardon HW-N950, which is 7.1.4-channel soundbar that supports Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. However, this high-end soundbar costs a steep S$2,399.

Performance Scores
Test Score
Bright room 8.5
Dark room 8.5
Color 9.0
4K 9.0
HDR 9.5
Motion 8.0
Gaming 8.5
Audio 6.5
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8.5
  • Design 9
  • HD Performance 8.5
  • SD Performance 9
  • Features 9
  • Value 7
The Good
High brightness and color volume
Excellent local dimming performance
Very good motion handling (for sports and games)
Supports HDR10+ and FreeSync
Smart Hub and One Remote work well
Good industrial design
The Bad
Narrow viewing angle exposes flaws
Bigger One Connect box
Doesn't support Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos
Supplied TV stand not as sturdy as the optional stands
Cheaper OLED TVs tend to show off better contrast
Middling audio quality for a top-tier TV
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