TESTED SAMSUNG 75Q950TS
8K breaky heart It’ll empty your wallet and fill up your wall, but prepare to fall hard for Samsung’s ultra-sharp TV Rtba / samsung/com/za As reasons to splurge on a new TV go, staying away from all the other humans telling us to stay indoors is a pretty compelling one. But coming up with an excuse to spend huge sums of money on said TV is a little trickier… unless, of course, the set in question turns out to be somewhat futureproofed and sounds incredible. Samsung has been one of the major pushers of 8K for a couple of years now, yet its 2020 range seems – at first glance – no more compellingthanlastyear’s.They’re still expensive, there’s almost no native content around (Japanese broadcaster NHK had planned to broadcast the Tokyo Olympics in 8K), and it’s not like every home has even taken up 4K yet. But taken on its own terms, and with all the obvious excuses made, the 75Q950TS is one of the finest TVs we’ve seen. If you have to stay at home watching TV for the next who knows how long, you couldn’t do it in any more style.
Ain’t nothing like the real thin With a massive screen and minimal bezel (1), this is close to TV design nirvana. And while Samsung’s QLED tech requires backlighting, at 15mm deep it’s hardly overweight. Connectivity is also removed from the screen and put in a separate box, so only a single lead cascades down.
GOOD MEH EVIL
58
Brilliantly minimal design
2
1
Only the zonally With over 33 million pixels, compared to 2m for Full HD, this thing has an awful lot of upscaling to do. So there are 480 separate lighting/dimming zones, all individually controllable to keep blacks deep and detailed even when sharing the screen with brightly lit areas.
Superb upscaling of 4K
Bloody well bright Playing the 4K HDR Blu-ray of Le Mans ’66, this thing is fundamentally making up 75% of the information on the screen… yet it looks dazzling. The colour palette is wide-ranging (2), it’s capable of enough brightness to attract moths, and it tackles movement with aplomb.
Sound is big and open… …but also hard and thin
There’s no Dolby Vision
Price point is dizzying
