Pat PilcherSummary
Samsung QN900C Neo Q LED 8K 65″ TV
PAT PILCHER watches so much TV that his eyes are practically rectangular, but even our harshest critic is gobsmacked by Samsung’s latest.
$7099
I’ve previously written about Samsung’s 2023 TV range launching in New Zealand, but the really exciting bit involves getting my hands on their new tellies to test them out in my own home.
Samsung’s 65″ QN900c TV, a sound bar, sub-woofer and rear surround speakers all duly arrived, lugged down to my home by a courier with a hernia-in-waiting.
Getting set up meant a lot of unboxing and DIY, which saw me liberally applying elbow grease with a screwdriver to get the stand attached and the external tuner box connected. Fitting the stand was no great hardship. From figuring out Samsung’s instructions to doing the mahi, it was pretty intuitive and I was good to go in around 15 minutes. The stand is of course optional, as the QN900c can be wall mounted: On its back, there are four M8-sized screw holes for a VESA wall mount and additional screw holes for Samsung’s Slim Fit wall mount. As I was only using it for review purposes and returning it to Samsung, stand mounting it was. This turned out to be dead easy as they’ve cleverly made things so that the stand can be attached while it is still upright in its box, reducing the amount of manhandling needed with the TV, which weighs in at a hefty 43.7kg without the stand attached.
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Connecting the TV was also a doddle as there are only two connectors – a USB-A port and a single slot for the supplied One Connector box which contains the tuner, inputs and outputs. The One Connector box is about the size of a small pizza box and can be stowed inside an AV cabinet. Annoyingly, Samsung seems to have stopped making it mountable on the rear of the TV stand as they’d done with past TVs. That said, swapping out HDMI cables and connecting/disconnecting gear on the One Connector box in the AV rack is much easier than poking around the back of a TV trying to read a black label on the black plastic rear of the TV.
The One Connector box’s connectivity includes a terrestrial TV tuner, Ethernet, 4x HDMI ports (of which one has ARC), and USB-A ports for connecting external hard drives and other widgets. The other connector worth noting is the AC power socket, which handily means that the almost invisible One Connector cable from the box to the TV is the only cable clutter you have to deal with, making for a far tidier install than with most other TVs.
As with earlier models, the QN900C also has a near bezel-free display which sports a near edge-to-edge screen with only a tiny black surround distinguishing the screen from the near-invisible speaker grilles. The tiny speaker grilles are almost invisible thanks to a dark grey finish. These are located along the top and side edges of the screen and are invisible when viewed front-on. The weighted stand is also done out in a matte black finish that helps it almost disappear when viewed front-on. Living in an earthquake-prone part of NZ, I was pleased to note that the low centre of gravity and weighted stand combine to make the QN900C almost impossible to tip over.
Samsung bundle their battery-free Bluetooth TV remote and with it, I ran the initial set-up, which involved connecting the QN900C to my home’s Wi-Fi, logging into my Samsung account and tweaking it to my AV preferences. From woah to go the entire process of setting up the TV took just under 10 minutes. The remote is a clever design that uses ultra-capacitors, a small photovoltaic solar cell and the ability to harvest energy from your home’s Wi-Fi to stay charged. Replacing flat batteries will never be an issue, and best of all, there are no used batteries going into landfill.
In use, the TV quickly became the hub of my home. This was largely due to its Alexa integration which allowed me to get on-screen alerts and video previews from the ring cameras and smart doorbell if anyone entered my property. I was also able to use voice commands to switch inputs, change volume and turn the QN900C on or off. Very cool!
As cool as having the biggest Alexa show in the neighbourhood is, there is an even niftier feature baked into the QN900C. I installed the Samsung Xbox app and once I’d fired it up and logged in to my Xbox account, I was able to play games directly from the TV using a paired Bluetooth Xbox controller: No console needed. This is hugely useful for anyone who is a gamer as it removes the need for a console, freeing up valuable AV rack space. Even better still, if you already have an Xbox, multi-player Halo sessions using your home’s Wi-Fi become possible and these are about as much fun as you can possibly have with your clothes on.
As you’d expect from a smart TV, all the usual streaming suspects are supported. These include Netflix, Disney+, Prime, TVNZ+, 3Now, Neon and YouTube. This meant I could catch my favourite SkyTV content without having another set-top box and I never needed to worry about missing the weather part of the evening news bulletin (which let’s face it, is about the only reason anyone bothers to watch the news nowadays). Samsung also include the Samsung TV Plus app, which bundles up free-to-stream services and learns your viewing preferences. It’s a nice touch, especially as it is completely free of charge.
While Samsung bundled a soundbar, surround speakers and sub, I couldn’t get them paired up and working, but this wasn’t a huge issue as the QN900C delivered audio in spades. Where nearly all flatscreen TVs struggle to reproduce audio with anything approximating dynamic audio, the QN900C sounded almost soundbar-like in its own right. While it comes with a bunch of audio pre-sets, I set the Audio Mode to Auto, which changed modes depending on what I was doing.
As Samsung’s top-tier TV, the QN900C sports Mini LED Backlighting which combines with quantum dot LCD. This combination helps Samsung achieve almost OLED-level onscreen blacks without noticeable halo effects around bright on-screen objects when set against a dark background. The other big bonus with a Micro LED set-up is that screen burn becomes a non-issue. The TV is able to crank out thermonuclear brightness levels with a peak luminance level of a staggering 2,434 nits, which has to be about the best brightness levels you’ll see in any TV to date.
A combination of smarter backlight processing and 1000 dimming zones saw the QN900C showing off eye-popping colour and contrast levels. Backlighting was beautifully balanced with the only, barely noticeable issue being a tiny amount of halo blooming around the Netflix ‘loading’ graphic.
The use of quantum dots made for superb on-screen vibrancy with HDR content delivering a 93.04% Colour Gamut. While vivid, colours remained super accurate, which speaks volumes about the Neo Quantum HDR 8K video processor powering the Q900C’s on-screen goodness.
While many reviews seem to bring up the lack of 8K content as a criticism, they’re missing a key point: 8K TVs are not so much about content at their native resolution, but upscaling content so it looks good on a bigger screen. The model I reviewed was a 65″ beast and 8K upscaling effectively doubled the pixel density per inch of 4K content, resulting in a super clean image. Even 1080 content from Sky looked good. Much of this comes down to the use of AI and machine learning plus 14-bit video processing, which allows the HDR 8K silicon to improve image quality at the pixel level. Viewing the QN900C off-axis saw no noticeable reduction in colour saturation, brightness or contrast. The sheer amount of brightness that it cranks out also meant that screen glare was rarely an issue.
When it comes to gaming, both my PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X looked absolutely stunning in native 4K. Gamers can also rejoice that Free-Sync Premium Pro, auto-low latency mode, and variable refresh rates are baked in alongside the integrated Xbox.
The verdict? Samsung has knocked it out of the ballpark with the QN900C. Stunning video, solid sound, a bezel-less design and smart features actually make it the TV to beat. That said, the 65″ model’s sticker price of $7099 might give you pause for thought. But then you are getting one hell of a lot of TV for your money.
