Samsung is out to finally bring mega TV screen sizes to the masses with this surprisingly great mid-range 4K QLED monster
While the extra light controls and precision mini LED TVs provide might well have helped the 98Q80C in its battle against the key issues king-sized LCD screens can face, though, it does at least use a direct full array panel design with local dimming .
It will surely help the 98Q80C’s light control that it uses a VA type of LCD panel rather than an IPS one. IPS panels can offer slightly wider effective viewing angles, but find it notoriously difficult to control the amount of light that seeps through them during dark scenes.The Quantum Dot color engine, meanwhile, should enable the 98Q80C to deliver a more vibrant color palette capable of handling more brightness without tones and shades starting to look thin.
As ever with a king-sized screen, the most important question once you’ve decided you can handle one is how much it’s going to cost. And here I think the news is pretty exciting: in the US you can pick up a 98Q80C for a cent under $8K , while in the UK the set is currently going for £6,499. That’s a fraction of the price such a massive TV would have cost you just a couple of years ago - and is still a fraction of the price you need to pay for similar sized self-emissive screen technologies.
Even more surprising than the simple depths of black the 98Q80C can hit, though, is how consistent and natural these black levels are. For one thing, shadow detail is remarkably well sustained - better in some really dark scenes, in fact, than it is with some Samsung TVs that deploy far more dimming zones. Especially, again, when using the Standard preset.
There’s also markedly more evidence of light blooming into the black bars above and below wide-ratio films in the Movie and Filmmaker Mode presets than there is in Standard. Third, very aggressively mastered HDR titles, such as the 4K Blu-rays of Pan and, especially, Babylon, can cause the Standard preset’s color punch to tip over into looking quite over-wrought. All those writhing bodies in the low-lit Babylon party, for instance, appear with a very unnatural, over-cooked reddish tone, while some of the skies and sunset-bathed faces in Babylon’s opening desert scenes can suffer with hints of clipping in their brightest areas.
It’s worth saying on the back of all this discussion of the 98Q80C’s mostly very impressive backlighting and colour performance that its pictures also look engagingly bright with HDR sources. This applies to both the general look of full-screen bright content but also, as noted earlier, the punch of small bright highlights in both mostly dark and mostly bright HDR images.I mentioned back near the start of this review that screens as big as the 98Q80C are the best argument for 8K resolution.
Standard definition broadcasts look a bit soft when blown up to 98 inches, but this is pretty much inevitable really - and I’d like to think that most people spending thousands of pounds on a massive TV like the 98Q80C will be set up with a good roster of HD and, ideally, 4K sources.
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