New Samsung QLED 8K Q900R, characteristics, price and technical sheet.
If during the past CES 2018 the arrival of the 8K TVs was already anticipated, this IFA 2018 has served to reaffirm it. LG has already presented its first OLED TV with 8K resolution in 88 inches and now it is the turn of Samsung, who shows us one more product “for the masses” with its new range of 8K Q900R QLED TVs, which unlike LG, these will be available for sale in just a few weeks.
These new Samsung 8K QLED TVs will be available in 65-, 75- and 85-inch sizes. Samsung knows that right now the problem will be to find content in 8K, so one of its most important weapons will be image scaling using artificial intelligence, something that would solve, for the moment, the lack of content, or at least that is what assures Samsung.
Resolution, HDR and upscaling
Of course the 8K is the attractive part of this new family of Samsung televisions, so they have sought to provide them with tools that take advantage of this resolution and present us with images with total clarity. Therefore, the company emphasizes that its Q900R range will be able to produce brightness peaks up to 4,000 nits, something that was only limited to professional devices in the film industry.
With these televisions, Samsung is presenting a technology that they have dubbed ‘8K AI Upscaling’, which, they explain, will serve to make scaling in the images towards 8K using artificial intelligence, and that it would be compatible with any source connected to the TV, either from HDMI, streaming, USB and even when duplicating the image from our smartphone.
According to Samsung, ‘8K AI Upscaling’ technology it would be incorporated in the new ‘Quantum Processor 8K’, with which the source content would be recognized to perform the scaling that would not only be for the image, but also for the audio.
The lack of native 8K content makes them focus on that rescaling to significantly improve the quality of current sources (SD, HD, FullHD, UHD) since stop using interpolation to rescale and switch to AI, with 256 algorithms that act in a specific way according to the type of image and that improve over time.
Likewise, they have the ‘Direct Full Array Elite’ technology, with which they claim it is possible to obtain the 100% color volume, which would give us greater precision in the tones as well as better contrast and backlight control. These televisions will be Full Array of 480 zones and even more depending on the model, following the trend of the Q9FN that also has 480 backlight zones.
Within all this, Samsung also incorporates something that they have called ‘Q HDR 8K’, which is based on HDR10 + technology and which would allow to offer images with greater realism taking advantage of the possibilities of 8K resolution.
As is the case today with the current generation QLED, these new QLED 8K incorporate ‘One Connect’, which allows you to have all the connections separately through a device that connects to the TV through an optical cable. This means that we have a single five-meter cable that includes both the optical connection and the electrical supply, and thus we avoid having the well-known tangle of cables.
However, Samsung has indicated that they will continue to study the evolution of the market in the field of connectivity standards: they do not rule out returning to offer standalone ‘One Connect’ so that people can keep the panel and update “the brain” of these televisions.
Prices and availability of Samsung QLED 8K TVs
Samsung’s new QLED 8K Q900R televisions will go on sale in Spain during the month of October. Prices They range from 5,000 euros for the 65-inch model at 15,000 euros for the 85-inch model.
Current high-end QLED TVs cost 3,500 euros, for example, so those labels appear to be well aligned with that Samsung pricing strategy on its top-of-the-range televisions.
