fundamentally a mini LED is just an LED
but smaller so I can understand why some people wouldn't be that excited about it
but hold on because mini LED that's the
same technology that enabled Apple to create their upcoming iPad Pro that
everyone is so excited about except that
on Samsung's new generation of Neo QED TVs you can have it in a display that's
up to 85 in diagonally on paper they've
got all the benefits of quantum dot like crazy brightness accurate and wide gamut
color and resistance to burn in and they
could even deliver black levels that are competitive with OLED that that is a lot
to live up
to in the high-end TV space today you essentially have two competing
Technologies qled which is short for quantum dot LED backlit LCD and OLED
which is short for organic LED you've probably heard me call OLED the best TV
technology on the market and justifiably so its main advantage is that each
individual pixel act say its own backlight and can be turned off
individually allowing the color black to be just actually black as in a complete
lack of light however it's not for everyone at least as of the 2020 model
OLED displays just aren't bright enough that I would call them a perfect option
for a well it environment like this one although LG did Just Launch their second
gen OLED panels which are supposedly much brighter get subscribed so you
don't miss our upcoming review of a Sony TV of all things that has one of those
getting back to more traditional display designs though when you've got a
backlight shining through one or multiple filter layers the only way to
achieve black is to remove or block as
much of that light as you can now with a simp single full screen backlight the
best that you could really do was a washed out sort of bluish purpley black
that makes it virtually impossible for older TVs to display HDR or high dynamic
range content to combat this manufacturers came up with the idea of
splitting the backlight into zones that could be individually dimmed to reduce
the amount of light in dark areas of the scene making them more black or well
rather less lit really cool but when you
only have 50 zones for example on a 75in
display they can be pretty large and very obvious resulting in something
called the halo effect which is just a fancy way of saying wow I can really see
where the backlight zones are and they're super distracting it's
especially noticeable when a user interface element comes up over top of a
dark background like a loading Circle or media controls that's not to say though
that there aren't any TVs with lots of backlight zones like Vizio's P series
Quantum x for example which has 480 on the 75in model but even that is not
really competitive with the nearly 8.3 million zones on an equivalent 4K OLED
so either oleds need to get brighter qleds need to get enough backlighting
zones to effectively eliminate the halo effect or we just need something else
alt together before we end up with something that I would call the ideal
viewing experience regardless of the environment now Samsung themselves are
working on microed displays which would
similarly to OLED displays have pixel level control but they are not how you
say price feasible for the average end user just yet that long history lesson
is where Neo qled comes in this is Samsung's first 4A into mini LED
technology mini LEDs were developed to help shrink the backlight LEDs down as
much as possible in an effort to add more dimming zones and this is the same
approach that Apple takes with their new iPad Pro
except that it has nearly 10,000 mini
LEDs contributing to 2500 zones on just
a 12.9 in display that is very
impressive density to say the least this TV by contrast pun intended isn't
anywhere near the level that apple is able to achieve more on that later but I
still want to give it a shot so let's
uh oh gosh well just finished the setup
process here and it's got a nice phone wizard to make the setup easier like
most modern TVs and consoles um but one thing that did stand out that was
positive was that Samsung allows you to choose your own voice assistant rather
than forcing you to use Bixby that truly
is a pretty nice touch now price-wise the Q 85a we have here is at nearly the
same price level as LG's 2020 model oleds like the C10 at each size so we
grabbed a 48 in c10 for our image quality comparison don't mind the fact
that they are a little bit different in terms of size now both of them are in
their default filmmaker modes for the most accurate representation of the
original footage but it is worth noting that these modes are not typically the
brightest that they can do in a bright room and this is a very bright room
we've got direct sunlight coming in bouncing off the floor over at the other
end there we've got all the lights on they look kind of similar if you lied to
me and said that's an OLED and that's an
OLED I'd be like okay it looks totally
fine I don't notice any Bloom nope
it's hard to tell in these scenes though but no it looks good if it's hard to
tell that means they're doing a good job y so what I've read is that Samsung's
algorithm for doing this sort of stuff is very passive like they really try to
not have Bloom as opposed to seeking the blackest possible black levels so like
if you if you notice in certain scenes if you have very dark and just a small
amount of light that light will not look very bright is LG in like a warm preset
for its filmmaker mode because honestly the Samsung looks way more true to life
to me there's your problem warm two try
warm one thanks for that yeah that looks pretty much the same r one that's pretty
close try cool or medium medium I'm I
think that's it okay you know what there is a little bit of green in the
Samsung Just a Touch now I kind of want to play around with this one too there
we go that
is damn close
holy crap so off AIS over here it still
looks pretty green to me oh okay well here let me let me move for a sec okay
holy crap okay so sitting straight on wow they are very similar now this one
looks too green at least in this scene I think we're at the point now where we're
splitting hairs finely enough that it's pretty clear that either of these TVs
with 15 seconds in the menu yeah you
could get to whatever look you want but it's like I what I'm trying to look
at is the contrast and like in this scene you can see that that sort of
metal structure in the back you can see more in the darks in this TV and I think
that's just the additional brightness that This TV has mhm but in terms of
like blacks like even the Bottom bar
yeah looks totally black cuz I have an older qled that doesn't have very many
dimming zones and when I'm watching a movie like this you will see the black bars bottom it's awful it's awful
honestly it's one of the reasons that regardless of everything else I made the
switch to OLED as soon as I could because sitting especially in a dark
room and seeing that bloom around the image on Ultra wide content for sure
it's very distracting okay so this room is very bright like more bright than
your living room would be but I think this TV is acceptable and this one is
just like maybe 10% darker than I want it to be so maybe the next Generation
would be enough might actually it might be enough wow look at this look at that
that's insane yeah and but you don't lose any of the detail in the darks too
like I've seen in the past like in look at his face you see more in his face for
sure yep what does it feel like off axis though it's fine it's fine yeah I mean
one thing I noticed when it when it was on the test bench before when we just
had it on the floor was that standing above it is not as good but if Samsung's
smart they would have tuned this thing to watch from either level or below and
the reason for that is a lot of people Mount these on their fireplaces oh for sure they're monsters but they do it so
Samsung's got to be ready for it I'm like actually shocked I'm I'm pretty
surprised too because I was not expecting them to perform this similarly
side by side I was like beaten on it before when we had it set up that it was
below us because the bloom was bad off axis but now it looks it looks great
yeah wow for PC use I would still go
OLED regardless yeah because when you've got a mouse cursor moving around or
whatever there's no amount of dimming zones that you can have that's going to
deliver a perfect experience there okay but should we try them in a dark
room we definitely should now it's time for the real test LTT Store.com by the
way we're in a dark room now all we've got is the bare minimum amount of light
we need for filming
and this is where you would see more Bloom yeah there's no ambient light to
hide it y I am really impressed I was
kind of expecting this to just be kind of a blowout pun intended yeah not not
only can I still see a ton of detail in extremely dark parts of the scene on the
qad which means that they haven't just turned the backl off basically in those
areas like we're we're still getting light through but I can see the
difference between the black bar and
almost black bottom like the black a camera captured you know what I mean
which is not quite black look at the bottom left yeah I can totally see it I
can see the line and I'm off axis all the way across I'm very far off angle
and it looks pretty damn good this is good for an IPS display like there's not
much backlight bleed I was kind of expecting a different conclusion today
you were you were a bigger Downer I told him I was like I want to try this TV and
he's like I was so sure this was going to end
up as a manufacturer say and we were so
wrong it's almost like Samsung went and bought some LG TVs and when they were
working on the pricing for this they were like we know what this is compe
went should I buy one of these if we did a blind taste test of this pick the OLED
I don't think people could figure it out accurately do you think you could I don't think I could not without getting
really close yeah if I okay you know what let's try it yeah if I get in here
really close I can see the bloom but that's only if I use my hand to block
the brighter parts of the image cuz what you got to understand is the way your
eye works you've got a fixed amount of dynamic range that is the brightest or
darkest things you can perceive at a time but just like a camera you can
actually close the iris so that that range moves up to perceive differences
in brighter objects or open it up your pupil remember and you can see a greater
range of things that are dimmer so bottom line as long as there's enough
contrast almost black will look black we
just hadn't gotten there yet so long answer yes I could tell short answer no
not from an actual reasonable viewing distance well we had a scripted kind of
outro where we summarized everything but I'm probably going to have to kind of
wing it at this
point before we conclude I want to come back to the question of dimming zones
though Samsung hasn't officially released information on how many zones
the 75 in q& 85a has Samsung Supreme is
not a number just release proper spec sheets but other reviewers have
painstakingly counted 1,3 20 on the 85
in variant and just under 800 on the 65
in that puts us at around 1,000 for the 75 which sounds a lot less impressive
when you compare it to the iPad especially when you consider the size
but it's about double what viio was able to do with normal LEDs last year and so
while it might not be an earth shattering increase in zones we have to
consider that this is their first mass Market display making use of this
technology and that see this is where I got to add the result is actually really
really good enough about video though I want to talk about audio for a bit as a
soundbar pleb another feature I wanted to check out is Samsung's Q Symphony and
it's basically a way for your TV and your Soundbar to work together using the
speakers from both to enhance the audio experience it actually launched with
Samsung's last year QBs but I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet so I
figured what the hey we're all set up anyway actually they didn't send a
soundar so I had to go buy one but than that it was very little
effort H
well that's really unfortunate I was
really hoping to compare just the TV to just the soundbar to the two of them
working together and I just don't think I'm going to be able to do it our thingss did say that this Soundbar has
trouble in environments with a lot of interference like uh our office
and there's like constant hiccups it's
kind of unusable actually Soundbar aside my expectations were subverted today and
having seen the 85 I'm now pretty curious about the 90 which uses a VA
rather than an IPS panel and is rated for even higher brightness though it
does have the same number of zones with that said there's a lot of competition
on the market LG has their basically Monopoly on OLED panels at least
high-end ones Samsung is pushing towards micro LED themselves and there's other
players like high sense with those sweet like dual full cell displays they have a
second 1080p monochrome LCD layer that does almost pixel level lighting control
so get subscribed so you don't miss our review of that as well and if you're
looking for something else to watch why not check out the Intel extreme rig
upgrade that we did for our camera guy David he actually used this same c1048
in as a gaming monitor cuz he's a bad
lad like that just like I'm a mad lad and I'm going to tell you all about
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