Samsung QLED TV Is an Ultra-Bright Gaming Powerhouse

Aug 3 2022

TVs

Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. You’re looking at one of the best and brightest TVs I’ve ever tested. This is the Samsung QN 90 B Q L E D TV.

But is it as good as those OED TVs? Let’s dive in. Let’s get something outta the way.

First though, this TV is not cheap. That might fall a little bit later in the year toward black Friday. But again, this is a high end television designed to compete with those OED TVs and the best televisions from other manufacturers.

Now the QN 90 B series comes in 43, 50 55, 65, 75, 85. [00:00:30] So a lot of size range there in a flagship television. So price out of the way, what are you getting for that extra money on the QN?

90 B it’s basically brightness. This TV is so bright that it actually improves the look of HDR as well as works in a really bright room very well.

Speaker 1: So let’s say you have some windows shining in. You can’t really do anything about that. Ambient light.

This is a great TV for those types of lighting situations. The TV also has excellent contrast. So it’s [00:01:00] able to get really bright without spoiling the darker parts of the picture.

I’ll get a little bit more into picture quality later, but know that that’s really the main thing that separates this television from the cheaper models on the market. So let’s start with design. The Samsung TV actually looks the part of being pretty expensive.

The stand here is a really nice kind of curved look, Samsung calls it a bending floating stand, and it does seem to suspend the panel above the furniture or whatever you have. Of course you can wall out this television. If you want [00:01:30] really thin frame, almost an all picture look like most TVs these days, but since it has fuller Ray local dimming and a complex backlight, it is thicker than a lot of the other TVs on the market.

Speaker 1: Not a huge deal unless you’re looking at it really from the extreme angles, but again, still very sleek. Overall, Samsung also does a good job of minimizing the cables. That’s a nice cable management system along the back here.

So you can run your H GMI, your power cables and keep those nice and tucked away. Another thing that sets this Samsung apart from [00:02:00] the rest is the remote. It’s hands down my favorite remote on a television.

I really like the feel. It’s a nice small remote. The buttons are well designed and it’s also got a really nice rounded look with a metallic finish.

Now the clicker has these shortcut buttons for Netflix and a few other streaming services, but they’re not garish and bright. And the overall design really looks very good. I also appreciate that the volume control and the channel controls are these kind of like flippy little things instead of a standard button.

Speaker 1: So a nice little difference [00:02:30] there. Of course, there’s the mic. So you can use voice control features on this remote as well.

Samsung does include Alexa and Google assistant as well as it’s Bixby voice feature. You can use those by talking into the remote saying, uh, you know, commands for searching for turning on your smart TV devices, things like that. And of course, Bixby is the least popular of those.

Wouldn’t recommend it, but having both Amazon and Google in this television built in is really cool. This TV also has the ability to listen for a awake word without using their [00:03:00] remotes. So you can say that word out into thin air and the TV will respond without having to speak into the clicker.

Of course, you can turn that off. If you wanna improve your privacy a little bit around the house. Another thing I like about the remote is that it has rechargeable batteries.

Speaker 1: So you can plug in a USB if you want to top it off, but if you don’t have a USB handy, you can actually flip it over and use the solar panel on the back. That’s right. This thing will recharge via light in the room, or even sunlight outside.

If you wanna bring it on the patio, I don’t recommend that. Samsung [00:03:30] also says new for this year. These are most can recharge via RF harvesting.

So if there’s like wifi in the house, apparently they can harvest some of that and get a little bit of extra wad. It should top them off. So I don’t know, I didn’t test it, but sounds pretty cool either way.

You’ll be able to get this thing charged up and not have to worry about replacing any of those little batteries inside the remote. Samsung also redesigned its menu system this year, and I’m not a huge fan. Speaker 1: This thing takes up the whole screen before it kind of popped out from the bottom.

But more than that, there’s just a lot of stuff on here that [00:04:00] makes it pretty difficult to find what you want to get to. So we’ll start with this big thing along the top, which can be a sponsored ad. You can see it’s a sponsored by Alexa right now, the apps, which are the thing that I care about most are kind of along the middle here.

And you can actually get them arranged how you want. You know, it’s got all the standard apps you could want for streaming and that kind of thing, but the rest of the screen is kind of random. This on now goes to Samsung’s own sort of service.

Uh, that’s their free TV service called Samsung TV. Plus, uh, [00:04:30] there’s all this free live TV stuff on here. Speaker 1: And it actually kind of promotes this service a little bit too much.

Now most venues also have access to settings and things like that to get to that. You gotta go over here to the left hand side. You can see there’s a brand new nav up here.

You can start by search, which is pretty straightforward. You can search for TV shows and movies. There’s also an ambient mode which can turn on the TV, uh, after you turn it off and give you something on the screen.

That includes artwork, things like that, uh, below that is a brand new feature [00:05:00] that I really like on Samsung’s 2022 TVs. That’s the gaming hub. Let’s check it out.

So Samsung’s game hub is unique to this television. No other manufacturer has it. And it incorporates a bunch of different cloud gaming services, including stadia GE force now and Xbox game pass.

Speaker 1: So you can go down here and actually include your Xbox game pass. If you log into your account and game directly on the television with a controller. So I’ve connected this Bluetooth controller [00:05:30] to the, uh, Xbox game pass.

Now I don’t get confused because I actually have an Xbox series X console plugged in. I don’t need to do that. Now I can actually go to game pass.

We’ll see what happens here. So you can see I’m controlling everything via the controller here that I’ve linked to this. That’ll also work with a PlayStation or a third party, Bluetooth controller.

These are some games that I’ve been playing recently on Xbox game pass. Again, this is just the television over the cloud. So one thing to note with all cloud gaming services, [00:06:00] you wanna have as much bandwidth as possible.

So I’ve plugged in an ethernet cable here, uh, into the back it’s wired connection. Speaker 1: Samsung recommends doing that. Um, so if you’re using wifi, you might have a little bit of delay.

Samsung also says it’s around 50 megawatt per second. At least this connection is much faster than that. And I had really good results.

So when I played halo, one of the flagship games, uh, for Xbox game pass, I really noticed the only difference between this and playing on the console was the graphics quality. So it doesn’t have [00:06:30] that super crisp graphics doesn’t look quite as good, but the response times were actually pretty good just in the campaign mode here. So it does respond really well when I’m, uh, going in, uh, fighting or even, you know, riding a vehicle so long story short, it’s a pretty cool way to get access to those cloud games and play, um, you know, again, without having to connect the console.

So of course this TV is well equipped for gaming via standard consoles as well. Speaker 1: That round back you’ll find four [00:07:00] 4k, one 20 Hertz compatible inputs, which in improvement in previous years, Samsung only had a couple of those. This one has all four on there.

It’s also compatible with variable refresh rate. And of course I have an Xbox console connected here. I’ll show you there’s a new game hub, four console gamers that really shows you some of those features in action.

So one of the things that Samsung has added in the last couple years is something that calls a game bar and that displays all the functions that you expect from high end consoles, like a PlayStation five or an Xbox series X. So with my [00:07:30] Xbox connected here, I can long press on the play pause button and some in the game bar. One of the new things for 2022 is there’s different picture modes.

So you can cycle between standard RPG, RTS, first person, shooter sports and custom. Speaker 1: One of the things I noticed you might be able to see here on the screen, there really isn’t that much of a difference between these in terms of picture quality. But I notice with sports, you do get a little bit more of an accurate picture.

So you can see that the greens get a little bit more natural when you were playing assassin creed here, [00:08:00] custom allows you to go in and adjust some, some other settings, including brightness contrast your standard picture settings. So that’s neat to have, but overall, I would’ve liked to see a little bit more difference in the picture quality between these various modes. Now cycling over here, you can also set input lag to different settings right now it’s pegged to fastest.

And one of the things that you want to know is that the input lag on this TV really good, about 10 milliseconds. Speaker 1: Uh, I measured with 4k HDR and 10 P. So that’s great.

Couple of the other settings that are available, uh, in [00:08:30] the game mode, you can turn on and off smoothing. But one of the main things that I like about it is along the bottom here, you can see it, it displays the current frames per second. So it’ll show you when you’re in 4k hundred 20 Hertz mode like I am right now, you wanna maximize that picture quality.

It’s a nice buttery picture. And it also tells you when your HDR is on, which is great, cuz of course you wanna game an HDR when you can. And finally, I recommend using VRR when available on the gaming.

This one displays that free sync premium is available. So all that is really cool to know kind of reassuring that you’re [00:09:00] getting the best, uh, gaming experience now compare compared to some other TVs, the gaming modes on these weren’t quite as accurate. Speaker 1: Again, we saw some of those neon ish colors.

Um, we also saw a little bit of false contouring artifacts in some of the areas that weren’t present on some of the other higher end TVs we tested, but overall gaming looks really good on this TV. And again, it supports all the latest features. So beyond gaming, let’s talk about picture quality in general, for TV shows and movies.

I compared the QN 90 B to a couple of the other TVs that are in the high end of the market, including an LG O [00:09:30] led TV and a Sony TV that uses a similar technology for the backlight. Those are called mini L E D. Now real quick.

One of the step-ups on this TV is that mini L E D backlight. It allows the TV to get really bright and also have really small local dimming zones. Speaker 1: Now, Samsung doesn’t tell me exactly how many local dimming zones there are, but it has improved the technology this year to reduce blooming.

So in that side, by side comparison, I’ll put up something that has a dark background and a really bright thing against that. And the blooming, [00:10:00] which is sometimes the stray illumination that can leak from the bright into the dark area is really minimal on this TV. That’s especially impressive, cuz it’s so darn bright.

I measured about 1900 knits, which is really, really bright. One of the brightest TVs I’ve seen in the most accurate picture mode on this Samsung for comparison that’s two or three times as bright as the brightest O led TV. Now that brightness really translates well with high dynamic range material, especially something outside natural scenes, something really bright and well [00:10:30] lit for more theatric content.

However, I did prefer the look of the O led TV. Speaker 1: One of the things that it does better is it really shows those shadows keeps ’em nice and dark keeps ’em theatrical and dramatic, whereas sometimes on a TV, even a really good L E D TV like this, you see a little bit brighter shadows, a little bit less of that contrast and punch that you want with a highly theatrical movie that said the QN 90 B still looks spectacular with movies and TV shows. And again, one of the best TVs I’ve tested. [00:11:00] I did notice a couple things I didn’t love about the QN 90 BS picture one is that the color accuracy wasn’t quite as good as some of the other high end TVs that I’ve seen.

It was cast a little bit blue or a little bit green depending on the color temperature. So at the end of the day, it’s not something that really ruined the picture, but again, compared to those other TVs, something to keep an eye out for the other thing, of course, compared to O led TVs was off angle viewing. Speaker 1: So if you’re at a seat that’s not the sweet spot right in front of the screen, you’ll see sometimes that the image will get a little bit faded [00:11:30] and washed out on an L E D TV Q led TV like this QN 90 B an O led TV.

On the other hand, when you watch it from extreme angles, we’ll stay nice and sharp. You’ll get a really good color fidelity, good black levels and color. So again, if you’re watching from those extreme angles at the edge of the couch, you’re not gonna get as good of a picture on a QLA TV like this compared to an Ola TV.

So beyond those little nitpicks, the picture on the Samsung Q N 90 B was excellent. Overall really liked how this TV performs. And again, that brightness [00:12:00] a big advantage over O led TVs at the end of the day, though, I still like O led TVs just a little bit better again for that extra contrast and pop in theatrical movies and TV shows.

Speaker 1: So to sum it all up the Samsung Q N 90 B has excellent picture quality. It’s pretty expensive, but you get a lot of great features including that gaming hub. Now, if you want those extra features, you don’t wanna pay quite as much Samsung to other TVs do offer them.

But again, the step up on the QN, 90 B is that excellent brightness that really good, uh, blooming control and black levels for an overall picture. [00:12:30] That’s just slightly worse than OIB.

So that’s a quick look at Samsung’s Q N 90 B Q L E D TV.

I’m David Katz Meyer from CNET.