Samsung 2020 QLED range - What are they doing?

Soldato
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To be honest I'd be surprised if Samsung sold all that many Q90R's given the price and comparatively poor value compared to OLED, the type of people who forked out for the Q90R will likely be the same ones rushing to invest in 8K as soon as it is available.

when I bought a TV last year I compared the lg c9 and the Q90R

The Q90R didn't have hdmi 2.1 and was priced $400usd higher than the OLED. None of that made any sense so I went with OLED. If Samsung wants to keep overcharging for an inferior product that's their problem.

And now they've taken it one step further, by saying that 4K is no longer high end and you have to buy their 8k screens to get high end features like full array dimming with 500 zones

8k is a joke, no machine even a pc can run games at stable framerates at 8k, there is little other 8k content and 4K on a 4K screens looks better than 4K on an 8k screen. I certainly hope Samsung fixes their contrast issues that their 8k had last year
 
Soldato
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They're really not. There's so many factors going into it that people ignore just because the on-paper specs say something, it's crazy. It's ambient light, it's the paint your walls have, it's what you focus on when looking at the TV, and on and on.



https://www.nature.com/articles/lsa2017168

Besides the physical differences, another big thing people don't consider is how poor the source itself is. Meaning, it doesn't matter how black your TV can get when the content you're watching is poorly mastered. For games in particular you'll find, if you have an oled, that blacks levels are raised considerably and you aren't going to see an actual deep black. In fact, if you also calibrate your display you'll see how poor some of the reference material is, where it's not properly mastered for either SDR or HDR. Not especially surprising, if you see how these games are made and on what hardware, but it's something to consider. Audio people went through the same struggles, where they find out after getting new equipment and properly calibrating it that their favourite records didn't sound better but rather worse, due to how they were mastered (and whom for).
Remember the down-grade struggles, when PC ppl complain consoles keep games back due to their limited power? Kinda same here. The content wants to reach the most people, and most people have crap setups, so guess how that consideration plays into it.

I feel the biggest issues for me is maintaining IQ especially in daylight with open blinds

The black levels of my NU7400 seem pretty good, I'm still thinking of upgrading to OLED in April / may but I don't think it's a massive upgrade need, perhaps HDR will be a welcome improvement
 
Soldato
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The Q90R didn't have hdmi 2.1 and was priced $400usd higher than the OLED. None of that made any sense so I went with OLED. If Samsung wants to keep overcharging for an inferior product that's their problem.

And now they've taken it one step further, by saying that 4K is no longer high end and you have to buy their 8k screens to get high end features like full array dimming with 500 zones
his, objective, nature article justifies why q90r can be the right choice in daylight
 
Soldato
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his, objective, nature article justifies why q90r can be the right choice in daylight

funny thing is if you are using a TV in a bright room then you most certainly do not want FALD, you are better off buying a low end model like the NU8000 that doesn't have FALD because having deep blacks in a bright room means lots and lots of reflections which ruins the picture. So for that reason i would not buy a Q90R for a bright room
 
Soldato
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I feel the biggest issues for me is maintaining IQ especially in daylight with open blinds

The black levels of my NU7400 seem pretty good, I'm still thinking of upgrading to OLED in April / may but I don't think it's a massive upgrade need, perhaps HDR will be a welcome improvement

While brightness by itself can help to cope with direct sunlight, I'd say that's not completely enough. You'd ideally want the anti-reflective coating from Samsung's higher end models. Afaik they're the only ones who have that. Though I don't know if you'd really want to have blinds open even then, ultimately that sort of lighting is very hard to deal with regardless & picture quality-wise I'd say reflectivity makes the sort of minimal differences that exist between sets almost moot. I have the XF90 and it's nowhere near as good as the Samsung for those environments but it still does fine, and worst of all the walls in the room are white, so there's some reflections even with all the blinds down & at night, just from the TVs own light bouncing around. Then again, no one made me put it in a giant living room that's almost covered in windows in the first place lol.

OLED seems to do fine as well, check out this guy, he has quite a few B9/C9 & Q90R videos testing stuff. I don't know if your room is like his, but it might give you an idea.

 
Soldato
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funny thing is if you are using a TV in a bright room then you most certainly do not want FALD
agree I've disabled it on my older panasonic ... not sure if they have produced a fald that does not show noticeable image 'aberrations' as it adjusts the picture -
to wit .. the moving ball pictures they use to count local dimming zones.
its not dissimilar to disabling other IQ enhancing options like frame creation
 
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