The biggest thing to talk about with the Samsung Q8F is the implementation of their local dimming for the full array backlight in the Q8F. Samsung has made a very distinct choice here to avoid blooming artifacts and to preserve highlight details that impact the performance of everything else. This has some positive benefits, which I think many people will like, but also some negative ones that come up.
Watching clips from the 4K Blu-ray of
Batman vs. Superman, I compared the Q8F to the
Sony Z9D and the
Vizio P65-F1. On very bright highlights, they each offered very distinct takes. The Sony was easily the brightest but would clip very bright highlights as white and miss some fine details. The Vizio would try to maintain peak brightness but still keeping highlight details, though due to a lack of saturation the overall highlight was mostly white, while the Sony only had the clipped section as white and the rest has color. With the Q8F, it would keep the highlight color, and also maintain the detail in it. So at first glance, this looked better than the rest, offering both improved saturation and full details.
However, Samsung does this by reducing the peak brightness far more than the other displays. While they will track the EOTF correctly here, Samsung will reduce the light output of everything to maintain that detail that I saw. So while you might see a bright highlight that keeps its color, that highlight isn’t nearly as bright and vivid as it would be on a display from another company.
This behavior carries over when you look at scenes in outer space on Gravity. The other two displays keep the starfield completely visible on this ***SDR*** disc, while on the Q8F the stars are almost completely invisible. In attempting to not add blooming artifacts with the full array backlight, the Samsung is crushing details and they are not visible at all. This also causes it to have some shadow crushing in very dark areas, as it again tries to avoid haloing artifacts and reduces the backlight too much. When watching sports or brighter content you won’t see this, but you can notice it directly next to another display.
The local dimming also takes a bit of time to react on quick cuts. Watching
The Equalizer on 4K Blu-ray, there is a shot early in the film that cuts to a room in his house, and you can see the room dim as it is cutting from a brighter scene to a dim room. It looks as if they are dimming the lights in the room after it switches, but it is just from the reaction time of the Q8F. Overall this behavior is the reason that while I think the 1300+ nits that the Q8F can produce is a great number, I don’t think you’ll almost ever see that in real life. Maybe a firmware update will improve this down the line, but currently, the backlight is so aggressive in preventing blooming that it has overall lower light output
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