So far in 2016 the now customary annual battle between LG’s OLED TV technology and the LCD screens favored by everyone else has been tipping LG’s way. Although not perfect, the previously reviewed OLED55C6 and OLED65E6TVs have both brought OLED on in leaps and bounds from LG’s already strong 2015 models.
What’s more, this OLED improvement has happened against a backdrop of LCD TVs consistently struggling to handle the extreme light demands introduced by the AV world’s exciting but challenging new high dynamic range (HDR) technology (explained in layman’s terms here).
Here, though, I’m looking at a TV which in terms of specification, reputation and relative affordability has arguably more potential than any LCD rival to put a cat among the OLED pigeons.
The Samsung UN65KS9800. (Pic: Samsung)
After all, the $4,500 Samsung UN65KS9800 (UE65KS9500 in the UK) uses a high-end direct LED backlight system with local dimming; introduces a new upconversion system for turning standard dynamic range content into HDR that actually works; uses a Quantum Dot color system to deliver a huge color range; and is capable of hitting brightness levels the likes of which we’ve never seen before on a television set.
Naturally I’ll be assessing the impact of these features over the course of the review, but let’s start by looking at the UN65KS9800’s design. Which is, as ever with flagship Samsung TVs these days, built round a curved screen.
Design
I’ve covered the pros and cons of curved screens in a separate article (6 Reasons You Should Buy A Curved TV – And 6 More Why You Shouldn’t), so I won’t go over the same ground again here. I will say, though, that Samsung’s curve is fairly severe relative to the shallower designs often now found on the dwindling number of curved TVs still being shipped by other brands, making the TV look quite chunky round the back by today’s standards.
The curve still catches the eye nicely from the front, though, and it’s nice to see Samsung returning to a more slender frame design for this year after the spectacular but large frames wrapped around its premium 2015 models.
As with other flagship Samsung TVs in recent years, connectivity on the UN65KS9800 comes courtesy of an external connection box that attaches tidily to the TV via a single proprietary cable. On this box you get highlights of four HDMIs, three USBs, both satellite and terrestrial TV tuner inputs, and an optical audio output.
The Samsung UN65KS9800′s external connections box. (Pic: Samsung)
Please note, though, that unlike previous Samsung TV generations this external box can’t be swapped out for a replacement one in the future containing updated chipsets and features.
This is, of course, a big shame – though if what Samsung says is true and it’s stopped offering upgradability because basically very few people were taking advantage of it then I guess we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves!
While we’re on the subject of past features Samsung has dropped for 2016, there’s no support for 3D on even this flagship set. Samsung has again – bravely or rashly depending on your point of view – decided that there’s not enough interest in the feature to keep supporting it.
Ultra HD Premium Specification
The UN65KS9800’s screen contains a native UHD pixel count as we’d expect these days, and there’s support for HDR playback that meets the AV industry’s ‘Ultra HD Premium’ specification. Full details of this can be found in this separate article, but briefly it means (for LCD TVs) that the screen can deliver more than 90% of the DCI-P3 digital cinema colour range, more than 1000 nits of brightness, black levels of at least 0.05nits, and the ability to accept 10-bit (at least) signals.
In truth the UN65KS9800 actually comfortably exceeds some of these Ultra HD Premium requirements. The Quantum Dot-based color system Samsung has returned to for 2016 after dabbling with Nano Crystals in 2015 serves up around 96% of the DCI-P3 spectrum, while I’ve seen the screen delivering measurable brightness peaks beyond 1400 nits.
Samsung UN65KS9800 stand detail. (Pic: Samsung)
Delivered by a combination of a direct backlight and local dimming over 150 zones, this brightness figure is far higher than anything I’ve seen from any other TV. In fact, it seems on the surface of things to be more than even HDR actually needs considering that most Ultra HD Blu-rays are currently being mastered to around 1000 nits. However, having ‘headroom’ in any picture performance area is the only way to guarantee consistently accurate results. Plus Samsung provides the facility in its settings for you to exploit the extra brightness more if you wish by ‘expanding’ content to more consistently fill the UN65KS9800’s full capabilities.
The HDR+ Difference
This leads me – kind of – into a key new Samsung feature called HDR+. Set to roll out soon via firmware update across all of Samsung’s SUHD TVs, HDR+’s big trick is that it intends to make non-HDR content look like HDR. How? By first remapping the non-HDR image’s saturation and hue color components to representative points in the native DCI-P3 color space, and then analyzing the content using algorithms developed from exhaustive laboratory comparisons between native HDR and native SDR versions of the same content to work out how best to change the gamma curve and boost the image’s dynamics.
It all sounds pretty cool (unless, perhaps, you’re the sort of enthusiast more interested in retaining accuracy to source standards than exploiting the full hardware potential of your TV). There is one problem with it, though: its name.
For starters the industry already uses HDR+ to describe a combination of HDR, wide color gamut and 10-bit sample depth. Worse, the name HDR+ makes you think it’s some next generation of native HDR technology, when that’s not really accurate. Though intriguingly, while HDR+’s main job is SDR conversion, it can also impact native HDR by either introducing mapping to the BT.2020 level if you’ve got the TV’s color space set to Native, or boosting luminance and thus the appearance of saturation if the color space is set to Auto.
One last feature quickly worth covering before getting into the UN65KS9800’s picture quality is Samsung’s Tizen-based smart TV system. This has been hugely improved this year by the addition of a second ‘tier’ of contextual links on the home page that changes based on what you’ve selected in the bottom tier.
The Tizen-based smart TV system used by the Samsung UN65KS9800. (Pic: Samsung)
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