Black levels are sensational, for starters; OLED-like in their depth and, even more surprisingly, their consistency. There’s no sign of baseline black level ‘flicker’, and when this TV fades to black, its screen completely blends in with the pitch darkness of a blacked out room - something I haven’t seen before outside the premium OLED world.
Not super impressed so far because my ZD9 from 2016 does all this.
I'd like to know the actual black level, the black level being "OLED-like" means nothing to me, I want to know the black level on an ANSI checkerboard pattern + in a real scene that shows true black but along with a varying brightness of elements. You don't often get
I'll wait for another review as I find this guy really biased towards Samsung products. He writes his reviews in this clever way where he points out the flaws but written in a way that makes them sound very minor, such as:
"and shadow detailing is superb, with
pretty much no significant black crush"
From my experience this means, there is black crush generally but its very minor and sometimes its really significant/strong. Thats a big problem imo, then you have to choose between keeping a reference image with crushed shadows or ruining another part of the image to "fix" the shadow crushing caused by their inaccurate curve.
I don't want to go on a rant hating this guy with many quotes because he's just doing his job but try reading between the lines of his previous reviews and you will see what I mean. You will only hear about the real problems Samsung sets have when you read technical reviews/aggregate information from the internet, you won't see them in a review like this so I don't find it that useful.
Sony clips highlight detail on their sets so they have that caveat too, but I'd almost always want to see more detail in the shadows than more detail in a bright highlight, I'm sure there are exceptions, but few. In games they often clip the highlights (old habits for showing brightness on old dull SDR TVs maybe) for some reason anyway so there so I'm only really talking about Film/TV.
edit - wait one last one lol: "There can also occasionally be a little straight-edged backlight blooming around stand-out bright objects in Game mode - though oddly this is more likely to occur where bright objects appear on a greyish background than a truly black one"
If it was a truly black BG and the zones can turn off why would there be more blooming than on a grey BG? As long as the zones aren't much bigger than the bright object (and they are very very small in this TV, like a couple of inches across) there should be little blooming in that case. A grey BG is the most challenging thing to show bright content over, there is bound to be blooming in that case unless you dim the highlight to stop it.
www.forbes.com
