The TV Samsung UNJS9500 series
In the cosmic battle for TV picture quality supremacy, it's the light side versus the dark side. LED LCD versus OLED. Samsung versus LG. And the dark side wins this round.
The JS9500 is Samsung's most potent Jedi warrior, its most expensive TV for 2015 and the one with the best picture. Its main advantage over our favorite TV of the year, LG's EF9500 OLED TV, is light output: it can get brighter.
Meanwhile one of OLED's big advantages is darkness; it can achieve perfect blackness on-screen, leading to better contrast and impact for all images, especially in the dark rooms and battle stations where theater-quality images are best experienced. Its picture is also substantially better from off-angle seating positions to either side of the sweet spot directly in front of the screen, and I like the fact that it's flat instead of curved.
At press time, both the Samsung and the LG cost the about the same at 65 inches -- a very expensive $5,000, £7,500 in the UK or AU$6,000 in Australia. But even if Samsung were to slash its price, OLED's advantages would probably make it worth the extra money for the high-end audience.
On the other hand, for truly high-end buyers who want an even larger screen, like the 78- and even 88-inch sizes offered by Samsung, OLED simply isn't an option. Even if you can find LG's 77-inch OLED TV for sale anywhere, it's likely going to cost a kidney or three.
For an LED LCD the UNJS9500 is superb, and in extremely bright rooms it might be the best choice on the market. But for just about everywhere else, all of its high-end features and picture enhancements can't keep up with OLED. Don't underestimate the power of the dark side.
Series information: I performed a hands-on evaluation of the 65-inch UN65JS9500, but this review also applies to the other screen sizes in the series. All sizes have nearly identical specs and according to the manufacturer should provide very similar picture quality.
Design
The JS9500 looks every bit the expensive, futuristic TV that it is. The screen's metallic silver bezel is angled in sharply to resemble a modernist picture frame, and the contrast between the black screen and the silver edge serves to accentuate the curve. The frame isn't quite whisper-thin, but it's thin enough and unadorned but for small Samsung and SUHD logos.
Samsung also removed too many of the dedicated buttons, including voice search, rewind/fast-forward and the "keypad" button. Yes, the new remote is aggressively lean and small, its motion control precise and slick, but I miss the old one.
Features
Key Features
| Display technology | LCD |
|---|---|
| LED backlight | Full-array with local dimming |
| Resolution | 4K |
| Refresh rate | 120Hz |
| Screen shape | Curved |
| Screen finish | Glossy |
| Smart TV | Tizen |
| Remote | Motion |
| 3D technology | Active |
| 3D glasses included | 1 pair |
Local dimming is a technology that allows LCD TVs to dim or brighten specific areas of the screen independently from one another, which helps increase contrast. "Full-array" means that LEDs that provide illumination are mounted behind the screen, as opposed to along the edges, which allows more precise control of the dimming, improved brightness and better contrast.
Lesser Samsung TVs, such as the JS9000, JS8500 and JU7100 have local dimming as well, but they're all edge-lit, and the JS9500 offers significantly more zones, which again should improve the preciseness of the dimming. Unlike Vizio however, Samsung won't specify the exact number of zones.
Like its fellow SUHD models, the JS9500 boasts a nanocrystal-enhanced LCD structure, said to improve color and light output, and HDR capability, which is designed to deliver better contrast in the form of brighter highlights, among other improvements.
Nanocrystals seem very similar to Quantum Dots, but Samsung doesn't want to use that term, instead it's going with "revolutionary Nano-crystal technology." The nanocrystals are designed to emit specific wavelengths of light, which allows for greater efficiency (more light for the same amount of power) and wider color gamuts that better approximate the range of colors found in real life. Samsung's method applies a layer of those crystals between the LED backlight and the standard liquid crystal display element inside the TV. For more details, check out Quantum dots: How nanocrystals can make LCD TVs better.
The other big feature is compatibility with high-dynamic range content. HDR video, not to be confused with HDR in photography, promises better picture quality thanks to brighter, more realistic highlights and other improvements. It's widely viewed as the next step beyond 4K, which addresses only resolution, not contrast or color. Only a few HDR-capable TVs have been announced so far.
Like nearly all current 4K TVs, the JS9500 uses a panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. To its credit the company has backed the "Motion Rate" claims down to a smaller number than in previous years, 240 in this case, which it achieves by virtue of a scanning backlight and optional black frame insertion.
The cavalcade of features extends beyond the picture. The built-in is for Skype and other apps, and also enables Samsung's motion control. The latter involves waving your hand around to try to control the TV, but I didn't test this feature.
Like many Samsung sets the JS9500 is also compatible with external hard drives and apps that use the Vidity system to store copy-protected movies, including HDR and 4K titles available from M-Go. The company sent me a Western Digital My Passport Cinema drive to test with the TV, and it worked as expected, although downloads for M-Go took hours. Like eight of them.
The first thing that came up when I hit "Smart Hub" was a clean, simple, horizontal overlay of icons, with recently used apps and other items, like inputs, lined up along the bottom of the screen. To its left sat an inscrutable "Featured" box that seemed a bit frenetic in the way it cycled through icons, but otherwise harmless enough. Between the two is prominent space for an ad that disappeared and reappeared every few days, making its absence almost as annoying as its presence.
Samsung used to offer cross-platform search, but not anymore. Searching using the main magnifying glass icon gave me results from the app store, YouTube and the Internet, but didn't find TV shows or movies from any of the apps. You can still search within individual apps, of course, but if you subscribe to multiple services cross-platform search is very useful. Web OS, Android TV and Roku TV all have cross-platform search.
Of course Samsung includes a browser and of course it's nowhere near as good as using your phone, tablet or computer. Both Samsung and LG offer motion control on the browser, which helps a lot, but LG has the advantage of a scroll wheel on the remote.
While Tizen is an improvement over the complex multipage system Samsung used in the past, and definitely better than Vizio, it's still not as good as LG's Web OS or Android TV overall -- and all are a step or 10 behind Roku TV. Especially if you're getting a TV this expensive, it's worth springing the $70 for a Roku 2, or another streamer (or game console for that matter), instead of using the inbuilt system. It's also worth noting that on the JS9500 I experienced a couple of crashes during my brief test period, and load times weren't always the fastest.
Samsung TVs don't have access to the 4K streams of Vudu yet; currently they're exclusive to Roku 4, so the best you'll get out of Samsung's app is Vudu's (still superb) HDX quality. It does have UltraFlix, however, and as mentioned above it can stream a small selection of 4K movies from M-Go, and even download some to the optional hard drive for improved quality. Some titles are even available in HDR.
The best way to tell in my experience is by using Florian Fredrich's 4K resolution pattern. (Friedrich runs an independent test laboratory in Munich, runs Quality.TV along with renowned video expert Joe Kane and, among other activities, consults for numerous companies, including Samsung.) The JS9500 delivered every line of the pattern, although it took more than a minute to bump up to 4K level; prior to that, the pattern revealed that the stream was only in 1080p. As usual with streaming, your mileage will vary.
You can adjust the local dimming via the Smart LED function. There's also a UHD HDMI Color mode, which allows the TV to "see" and display the 4:4:4 chroma subsampling content that may potentially be included in HDMI 2.0-compatible sources. Such signals are essentially nonexistent today, so I didn't test the efficacy of this mode.
It's worth mentioning here that HDR sources, at least the ones I tested, automatically change some of the the picture settings to specific parameters. They almost always changed automatically once I switched to a non-HDR source, but the switch can still be disconcerting. See the HDR tests below for details.
Source From: http://www.cnet.com
·
0
