Tested: Samsung Neo QLED 8K | Expensive Pleasures

Samsung’s all-new Neo QLED 8K is a stunning TV, with heart-warming brightness, definition and rich colors. But its price, its more limited contrast and the scarcity of truly 8K content will put some people off.

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

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First, a short basic course to understand QLED technology, an acronym for “quantum dot LED TV”, used since 2017 by Samsung. Unlike the single panel of OLEDs, QLEDs have a more classic design, reminiscent of good old light-emitting diode TVs. QLEDs actually have a film of “quantum dots” that emit their own colored light when struck by the diodes of a first panel.

Add to that an 8K resolution of 33 million pixels, four times more than 4K, and you have what Samsung delivers with its latest Neo QLED 8K. We tried the 75-inch model, which has a suggested price of $4,699.99. We’re a far cry from affordable cottage TV here.

From the first contacts, we are impressed by the bright luminosity, the richness, the fidelity of the colors and the precision of the image. “Quantum dots,” Samsung says, can render more than 1 billion shades of color.

Let’s quickly go over the rare 8K content found mainly on YouTube and Vimeo: these animal demos and documentaries are so polished that they are beautiful even on a phone screen. However, the Neo QLED 8K uses a full arsenal, combining artificial intelligence powered by a Neo Quantum 8K processor, to “upscale” lower resolution content.

A recent 4K series like Foundation is fully enhanced with such a television. A video game like god of war is more realistic than ever, the Neo QLED 8K also having a “Game Mode” which enhances contrasts and reduces latency to less than 10 ms with a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

The quality of the eight rear speakers, totaling 70 watts, is quite astonishing and reproduces bass and dialogue well. As Samsung typically proposes, all peripheral connections are in a single box, either on the back of the TV or underneath it, and only one cable ultimately goes to the screen. There are four HDMI 2.1 inputs, including an eARC, an Ethernet input and three USB sockets. You can install the Google Assistant, Alexa and AirPlay content from any iOS mobile device. The remote control, very minimalist, has a microphone that allows you to perform basic operations in French, such as increasing the volume or going to such an input.

As for the home interface, Tizen, it is rather clear and offers dozens of unusual functions. For example, you can divide the screen into four parts, bringing together YouTube, broadcasting from the telephone and terrestrial channels. Instead of a black screen, you can program images, personal photos and various information when the TV is off.

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QLED technology has yet to achieve the perfect blacks of OLEDs. The difference is obvious in scenes in the dark or when watching television at night.

As is the case with 4K and probably even more so with 8K, the image is sometimes so defined and realistic that it feels like watching a family video. And we never managed to find on the Neo QLED 8K the option to slightly blur movies, for example.

At $3,299.99 for the smaller 65-inch model, the Neo QLED 8K is expensive, and prices are slow to come down.

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The Neo QLED 8K is clearly one of the best TVs on the market, rendering both blockbuster movies and video games beautifully, while doing a good job of upscaling. But that quality comes at a hefty price, for 8K technology that’s far from essential in 2022. OLEDs.