New Year's resolutions smartphone manufacturers should make

Price and release date

Whether or not the world is ready for it, the Samsung Q900R is already out in the wild. In the US, it's available exclusively in an 85-inch variant called the Samsung QN85Q900RAFXZA, while in the UK and other regions it's called the Samsung QE85Q900RATXXU. While the US will only offer the Q900R in a monstrous 85-inch screen size, you'll be able to buy 65, 75 and 82-inch variants in the UK and other territories at some point in the near future.

As for the price, the Samsung QN85Q900R will set you back $14,999 in the US, which comes out to be around £11,600 or AU$21,000. 

Design

For all its astonishing, cutting-edge features, the 85Q900R isn’t really much to look at in design terms: It's just a thin dark frame wrapped around an (admittedly impressively huge) 85-inch screen with a pair of king-sized feet tucked under each bottom corner. While those feet could present many households with a problem given the size of furniture you’ll need to rest the TV on, we didn’t actually find the 85Q900R’s lack of stlye a problem. After all, when you’re talking about a TV with an 85-inch screen and more brightness than any other TV before, its stunning pictures are really all that you see anyway.

The 85Q900R’s design minimalism is enhanced by the way it puts all of its connections onto an external ‘One Connect’ box that jacks into the TV via a single, surprisingly slender cable. The current Q900R One Connect carries four HDMI 2.0 ports, three USBs, Bluetooth (which provides your only headphone option), and support for wired and wireless networking.We say ‘current’ One Connect for a reason, though, as Samsung is going to introduce a new One Connect box for the Q900R range in the new year that will carry an HDMI that’s built to the brand new, barely ratified HDMI 2.1 standard. This is important because HDMI 2.1 can carry much more data than HDMI 2.0, and can support 8K at 60 frames a second and more, rather than only supporting 8K at 30 frames a second as the first batch of Q900Rs do. 

Smart TV (Eden 2.0)

Despite boasting an all new processing system, the 85Q900R carries the same ‘Eden 2.0’ smart TV system found on all of Samsung’s other mid-range and high-end TVs for 2018. That might sound bad, but actually isn't much a problem at all given that Eden 2.0 combines a huge wealth of apps with a straightforward, easily customized interface and impressive voice control/search functionality.The key apps are all up to date in their latest versions too, meaning that Amazon Prime, Netflix and YouTube all support 4K HDR playback. Unfortunately, though, 8K videos aren't supported in any of the above ... yet.

Happily, thanks Samsung’s new processing engine, there's not even a hint of instability or slow down in the menus compared with Samsung’s flagship 4K TVs, the Samsung Q9FN QLED series, despite needing to drive twice the amount of pixels.Smart TV Features TL;DR: Aside from the white backdrop behind its icons making the system look a touch dated, Samsung’s smart platform is one of the best the TV world has to offer right now.

HD/SDR Performance

It seems almost perverse to kick off the performance section of this test of an 8K TV by focusing on its performance with HD and standard dynamic range content. But, as well as this simply being the way we do things, it’s important to reflect that however exciting the thought of 8K might be, most of the video that households typically watch right now appears in HD and standard dynamic range. Which, one would expect to surely present a bit of a problem for a TV as huge, rich in resolution and ultra bright as the 85Q900R, right?

Not as much as you might expect, actually. In fact, the all-new 8K AI Upscaler Samsung has created for its new 8K TV generation does an almost miraculously good job of conjuring up the tens of millions of extra pixels needed to turn HD into 8K.

For starters, the upscaling engine does a brilliant job of separating source noise (such as compression artefacts and over-enthusiastic grain) from ‘proper’ picture information. It then calculates the look of the 30 million plus extra pixels required cleverly enough to leave HD images looking sharper, more detailed, more dense and more three dimensional than they ever have before. Even on the best 4K TVs.

The usual jaggedness around angled or arced edges is completely removed during the 8K upscale, too. Perhaps best of all, though, all of these remarkable (when you stop to think about what the TV is doing) upscaling achievements are delivered in real time without generating any of the sort of unwanted side effects commonly associated with heavy duty upscaling: there’s no double edging, no exaggerated MPEG noise, no ‘stepped’ edges, no sense of motion lag, no unwanted grittiness, no fizzing or shimmering over areas of really intense detail… The purity of the upscaled pictures truly is remarkable to see, and has our hopes up that Samsung consider porting the 85Q900R’s scaling engine over to its premium 4K TVs for 2019.

4K/HDR Performance

Our usual ‘4K/HDR’ header for this section actually isn’t sufficient for this review -  after all, it’s the world’s first native 8K television. Having said that, though, aside from a tiny number of 8K YouTube videos, there’s currently no native 8K content a normal consumer can watch.This is a huge pity, as having tested the 85Q900R with some specially shot 8K clips provided by Samsung, featuring lots of gorgeous views and shots of nature, we can safely say that native 8K looks absolutely astonishing. Any doubts over whether an 8K pixel count can look significantly better than a 4K pixel count are instantly crushed, as your eye is dazzled by 8K’s extra detail, textures, clarity, and enhanced sense of image depth. 

The extent to which the 85Q900R’s colour performance helps to unlock the full impact of all those extra pixels joins the TV’s remarkable upscaling in illustrating just how stunning Samsung’s new 8K processing engine is. 

While native 8K playback on the 85Q900R introduces a whole new level of picture quality awesomeness, crucially 4K playback looks fantastic too. The upscaling engine that surprised us so much with HD is even more effective with 4K: Resolution looks clearly higher than the native resolution of the 4K images, and again this is achieved with pretty much no unwanted upscaling side effects whatsoever.

In some ways the 85Q900R’s remarkable 4K enhancements - which add depth and color refinement, as well as the extra perceived resolution - are more important right now than its native 8K performance. After all, the fact that the set can make today’s best-quality source look significantly better than it does on mere 4K TVs means that anyone who buys one won’t have to wait until native 8K content appears to get a picture quality return on their investment.

All that said, the unprecedented range of color tones the 85Q900R can reproduce thanks to its processing and extreme brightness also reminds us more emphatically than any previous QLED TV of the importance of Samsung’s metal-clad Quantum Dot design. This enables the TV’s QDs to be driven harder than normal QDs without them suffering any performance/lifespan degradation and the 85Q900R’s brightness is as jaw-dropping as its 8K resolution. Capable of delivering well over 4,000 nits of brightness on a 10% white HDR window, Samsung’s 8K star serves up easily the most flat-out spectacular high dynamic range pictures we’ve ever seen. 

4K/HDR Performance TL;DR: The TV’s incredible resolution and brightness combine to deliver simply the most stunning pictures I’ve ever seen on a TV. This is especially true with native 8K playback, but crucially given where the TV content world is at right now, upscaled 4K HDR pictures also look better than I’d dreamed possible.

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