http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarc...ds-on-welcome-to-the-revolution/#3ea27998741f
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Having now seen the new TVs in the flesh, it seems that Samsung's first QLED TVs not only live up to the hype, but if anything surpass even my most ‘out there' hopes.
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Frankly, though, I found it hard to take the time to study the TVs designs properly for the simple reason that I had so much picture quality goodness to lap up. Seriously, pretty much everything about the pictures being shown in Samsung's TV demos was incredible. So much so that it's hard to know where to start describing them.
Since it was an area of slight disappointment during Samsung's 2016 CES unveiling, let's kick off with the new QLED TVs' black level performance. Which appears to be phenomenal.
Although the glamorous demonstration room Samsung was using at CES was too bright to let me confirm precisely how deep the new TVs' black levels get, my impression was that these are the best black levels I've seen from an LCD TV, and actually challenge the black levels usually associated with OLED technology.
Even better, despite the fact that the Q9/Q8 TVs apparently use an edge LED lighting system, their inky blacks are delivered with what appears to be exceptional uniformity. The banding and haloing problems usually associated with edge LED TVs weren't visible while watching Samsung's demo footage on the QLED models.
Again, I'll need to see the TVs in a much darker environment to be sure just how well Samsung has tackled this traditional LCD TV issue, but my impressions so far are that the improvement from 2016 to 2017 is of night and day proportions.
Making this ground-breaking black level improvement all the more impressive is the fact that it's accompanied by an
instantly obvious and really quite breath-taking increase in brightness versus 2016's Samsung models. Samsung claims the Q9 can deliver 2000 nits of brightness - an increase of around 40% over 2016's flagship KS9800 flagship TVs.
And there's more. The addition of so many nits of brightness also has what can only be described as a transformative effect on the wide color spectrums associated with most HDR sources.
There's a level of vibrancy, detail and naturalism (even in dark areas) on the Q9/Q8 models that I just haven't experienced before. And I'm able to form this conclusion, let's not forget, from my experience within a far from ideally lit demonstration room, rather than within a carefully controlled test environment.
Viewing angle: solved
Pacing around in front of Samsung's new TVs also uncovers one more unexpected but hugely important step forward: somehow the structure of these debut QLED TVs seems to have solved LCD's previous problems with viewing angles. Where normally you'd expect an LCD TV's picture to start losing color and contrast dramatically as soon as you're sat at an angle to the screen of more than 30-35 degrees (slightly more with IPS types of panel), with these new QLEDs I swear I could stand almost at right angles and still enjoy a picture full of contrast and color.
In fact, colors at extreme viewing angles are retained more accurately than they were with last year's OLED TVs, which exhibited a noticeable shift in color tone when viewed from the side.
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