Samsung QN90C QLED TV Review | Not What You Expected?

so the whole drag of the TV box thing in has been fun but to be honest with you it's gunking up the carpet and uh plus your boy is tired so here we go Samsung qn 90c we're gonna do a full Unboxing Setup and review of this TV and but first I've got to fix this mic situation this is ridiculous [Music] welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Dennison as I said before we're going to be checking out the Samsung qn 90c today I think this is the premium Samsung qled TV most folks are likely to buy the qn 95c offers a few more uh bells and whistles probably slightly better performance as well but man it costs a lot more speaking of cost though that's going to be an issue for this particular TV because as many of you know and if you don't know I just reviewed the TCL qm8 we're working on the Hisense u8k as well both highly competitive TVs for significantly less than the qn 90c here what kind of Premium nests does this TV offer for its significantly elevated price we're about to find out but before we find that out I've got to unbox this thing and set up so let's get that part out of the way foreign what do we have here I'm sure I will be shocked part of the stand quick setup guide which I'll ignore until I can't anymore and remote batteries and screws that's a good start with this guy on my own so smooth almost like I've done this before I'll hand it to Samsung their stands are pretty solid relatively easy to put together so we should be hey this is um that was solid is what it is I mean it's plastic but it's solid and I have a lot more confidence in the stability of this TV before I've even set it up so that's why I talk about those touch points sometimes is because um you know they're important good grief no one can ever accuse Samsung of not securing The Living Daylights out of their screws good night this guy up here there's got to be a cover plate or something that lets me access the screws there we go time to screw with power somebody was asking who makes the powered screwdriver which is such an interesting request like I'm not giving this thing a huge endorsement or anything like that but it's just a Black and Decker um we'll get that later yeah it's just a Black and Decker uh you know it does the job it doesn't have a ton of torque so we're not going to accidentally over tighten anything or strip any uh screw heads out which we're going to need a manual screwdriver here because we cannot reach in just a second all right so yeah this is easy enough four screws go into the collar we'll call it that affixes to the base and then this will go right in the back of the TV four screws there and then we should be up and running here I mentioned earlier that we're going to need to count just about every premium touch Point This TV has because frankly I feel like we're either going to justify the price of this TV or we're not like even just laying this TV down it felt solid the backing on this TV as we'll show you here in a moment is really nice but I get ahead of myself let's get this thing on the stand all right so uh I was just talking about overall build quality uh but as Chris pointed out this guy wobbles a little bit um which some wobble is going to be of concern not so much here this is built pretty solid it's got some give um for those of you in earthquake zones you know it'll wobble a bit before it finally tips over and breaks I'm kidding I don't know what I'm talking about fact the matter is some TVs wobble some TV wobble is worse than others I consider this to be on the better end of the spectrum for HDMI inputs here all of them support up to 144 Hertz at 4K so you're not having to sacrifice um anything with this TV it's loaded for gaming and it starts there at the 4K 144 Hertz and we'll see later some of the gaming specific features that This TV has to offer at any rate attractive enough we've got some channels here for cable management although I will say that they're a little on the thin side I don't know about you guys but most of my HDMI cables are thicker than one of these channels so nice thought but I don't know how useful it's going to be and then you put this guy right here to obscure them everything Trails out the back of the column uh let's turn this around and get the plastic off oh yeah quick word on the remote if you weren't already aware uh this thing is solar chargeable uh presumably you won't ever have to uh replace the batteries you can't change them out they're not user serviceable uh so yeah I suppose this remote is going to last as long as the rechargeable batteries inside it uh last and Samsung has a good track history with rechargeable batteries right so when we first turn to the TV on we're going to get some voice prompts for assistance uh I'm going to go ahead and start the setup process here and what you'll notice is there's a good 10 to 15 minutes depending on your internet connection update that needs to happen so we'll let that go and then what happened next I was not expecting so for a while now Samsung's tizen Smart TV interface has supported free ad supported streaming television or fast TV this is stuff that you get from Pluto for example or free V there are a number of these different Services Samsung puts that front and center that part is not new what is new I think is that it just automatically launches into that TV so without selecting anything at all it's making this Nickelodeon channel available and then it just goes full screen without me selecting it at all which I do not care for alright so setting that annoyance aside for a minute first thing I want to do is change the picture setting because out of the box it's going to be in eco mode after first click it goes into movie mode there's also filmmaker mode and of course Dynamic and standard you can pick what you like best but get out of the Eco Mode because it's going to cap the maximum brightness of the TV I'm going to go with movie for now because that is usually Fairly reliable I know what to expect from filmmaker I want to see what kind of action I get out of movie mode now right now it's playing that fast TV stuff I'm going to want to go into some of the apps and make settings specific for HDR and Dolby vision and we'll see if my SDR settings carry over or not so I realize I just made a gaff Samsung doesn't support Dolby Vision so we won't be making any Dolby Vision settings at all uh we'll just do HDR here so I've queued up Ozark on Netflix because it's an HDR and we'll go ahead and navigate our way to the picture settings and we're in the movie HDR picture mode so that's great if I want to dig deeper I'm going to have to move all the way over here to get to full settings there we go yeah Samsung does make it a little bit more um complicated to get to the full menu I mean it's quick menu is usable but if you want to go deeper you got to click a lot of times so here local dimming is currently set to standard we'll mess around with that for the full review uh HDR and tone mapping is set to active um I imagine we're going to want to go with static eventually but I'm going to leave it as it is for now to gauge its performance everything else looks fine I want to double check that we don't have any motion smoothing on picture Clarity settings are on custom we do so I'm going to turn that off you guys know how I roll so that'll take care of hdr on pretty much every streaming service that there is so so I give Samsung's tizen Smart TV OS a lot of grief because it's very advertising forward also it takes a lot of clicks to get where you want to go sometimes as I just showed you but on the positive side of that it is modernized enough that you get the best version of most of the streaming apps so Netflix for example I opened up the app I scanned a QR code boom I was instantly logged in and that's true for most of these apps if there's an easy way to get logged in it's going to be available here which is not something that I can say for competing Smart TV platforms also I do have to mention that I appreciate the fact that once I make a picture setting selection in SDR it carries that selection over to HDR as well and it applies to all of the apps so I don't have to log into each individual app and make custom settings for all of them okay review time and for those of you who watch a lot of my TV review videos just want to mention that this one may feel a little bit different than the ones I've done in the past because a lot of what I have to say doesn't fit into the typical little organizational boxes that I try to use so stick with me I think it's important though so I mentioned earlier that a Common Thread in this video would be around what you get when paying a premium for this Samsung TV and we'll stick with that but as I evaluated this TV it occurred to me that there's another topic we should talk about as well so let's start with that on paper the qn 90c looks more like last year's qn85b than it does a straight replacement for last year's qn 90b I'll get into the details around that shortly but for now I just wanted to say that I understand anyone who might think that the qn90c here was somehow downgraded but the reality is a little more involved than that see two things are at play here at the corporate level Samsung restructured its TV lineup for 2023 but at the consumer level the qn 90c is kind of Samsung's response to what we asked for yes we the TV Enthusiast Community asked for certain things and Samsung delivered them in the qn 90c first the restructuring thing last year the qn 95b was not destined for the North American Market the qn 90b was supposed to be the 4kq-led flagship for the North American Market but enough folks made enough noise that Samsung ended up bringing the QI 95b to the US and Canada and it wound up being the top 4kq ad for 2022. so in a way the qn 90b got knocked down a peg in the lineup for last year this year the qn-95c was planned to be the top 4kq live for 2023 it's got more dimming zones a more elaborate speaker system slightly higher Peak brightness and a few other bells and whistles that means that the qn90c that we're reviewing here has to be a step down and that means that it looks a little more like last year's qn85b but also Samsung made a few technological changes in response to our requests and or complaints again our and we in this context refers to the TV Enthusiast Community made up of reviewers like me and vocal viewers like you notably the qn 90c here doesn't have the same anti-glare technology that the qn 90b had last year see while Samsung's best anti-glare technology is extremely effective at reducing Reflections it has this side effect of scattering ambient light in such a way that it results in a sort of faded rainbow effect and some folks complained about that taking things a step further that anti-glare technology is tied into Samsung's off-angle Improvement technology which is why you see Samsung marketing anti-glare with ultra viewing angle so Samsung dropped that technology for the qn 90c here but they still wanted to have improved off-angle viewing as such Samsung is using what's called an ads LCD panel on this tv ads is similar to LG's IPS which is known for having inherently better off-angle viewing than the very common VA panel type that we talk about all the time now historically the problem with ads and IPS has been that black levels weren't as good but with many LED backlighting Tech ads and IPS panels can have excellent black levels and black uniformity while also offering great off-angle viewing so what we have here is a TV that doesn't have the rainbow effect from Samsung's anti-glare Tech but still has good off-angle viewing and great black levels unfortunately the anti-glare treatment that this TV does have isn't as effective so Reflections can be visible trade-offs folks TV design is and always has been about making trade-offs next on the we asked for it list is the qn 90c's slightly lower average Picture level or overall brightness stick with me here now don't get me wrong as I'll soon discuss this TV still gets plenty bright but you may recall last year that many reviewers complained that Samsung's HDR TVs were over brightening everything abandoning the Creator's intent and in tandem accuracy well this year if you put the qn90c in filmmaker mode it tracks the eotf or Electro Optical transfer function very well in other words it makes an HDR picture that's just as bright as it's told to make it without adding anything now you can get the TV to be brighter you can start by picking the movie mode you can make sure the HDR tone mapping setting is set to active instead of static that option alone is new and by our request by the way and you can engage settings like Dynamic contrast all in an effort to over brighten the pick sure if that's what you like but Samsung gave us what we asked for by letting us decide whether we got an exuberant technically over Brighton picture or one that complies with the standards of accuracy as for the slightly lower brightness specs over last year's qn 90b well remember that the qn95c is now the top dog for 2023 and so the ultimate brightness potential is reserved for that more expensive set all of that to say that while the qn 90b last year was considered by many including myself to be the best alternative to OLED that you could buy in a 4K TV that distinction now probably lay with the qn 95c this year but that doesn't mean that the qn90c here is any kind of slouch quite the contrary it's an excellent TV question I think most folks would ask is whether it is better than it's much less expensive competition well I'll just answer that question right now yes in many ways the qn 90c is a bit better than the TCL qm8 or Hisense u8k most notably it's upscaling and picture cleanup processing is better than either the TCL or Hisense tvs when I watched low resolution and low bit depth content note it's about bit depth not just bitrate the Samsung does a better job of smoothing out color banding pixelization and pasteurization all of which are fancy display nerd terms for stuff that makes for a dirty fuzzy looking picture the qn 90c has a very clean crisp image when playing back less than awesome content from sources like sling TV UTV or cable reminder dispatches has done something wrong with Dyna Cabo yes there is definitely something wrong with Dyna cabu but the Samsung prevents you from knowing that it's ever a problem so for everyday TV viewing the Samsung qn 90c is a bit better than its cheaper competition it's also got better out of box color accuracy and color temperature when using the movie mode or filmmaker mode and if you want to have it calibrated to Perfection all the controls you need are right there the qn90c being a Samsung qled TV also has four full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports that support 4K resolution all the way up to 144 Hertz with just about every flavor of vrr or variable refresh rate that you could want and Samsung has a pretty handy gaming dashboard to further appeal to Gamers now it's gaming picture preset leaves a little bit to be desired I noticed that the backlight control system doesn't seem to be as effective in game mode as it is in the movie or filmmaker mode picture presets and it tends to look over brightened to me you lose a bit of bright highlight detail too but overall I have to admit that the qn90c outperforms its competition in many key ways it's got a gorgeous picture highly impactful HDR highlights with good highlight detail great contrast and black levels are excellent with no perceivable black crushing going on so you keep all your low light details too the TV Peaks at about 2 000 nits for SDR and HDR and it comes in just under 700 nits full screen white which is very bright and considering how bright it can get blooming and Halo is very well controlled I mean you will see some blooming in Halo when you have small intensely bright objects on very large dark backgrounds especially off angle but like the black letterbox bars stay black and you don't see a massive Bloom when you engage white subtitles over the letterbox bars the way that you will see on some TVs my only complaint from a non-picture performance perspective is around tizen which I could just do without especially that auto play video thing that I talked about during the setup section that's bad on the internet and it's bad on your TV and I still haven't found a way to turn that off but if I do I'll pin a comment down below now moving forward I'm going to dig into a direct comparison between the Samsung qn 90c and the TCL qm8 that's for a future video and I'll let you decide whether the Samsung earns its premium price but I hope I've made it clear to you that you definitely do get a bit more from the Samsung whether you value those improvements enough to spend a lot more is entirely up to you with all that said when we get out of the weeds and get up to a 10 000 foot perspective there's no doubt that the qn 90c is a really excellent TV and very much what I expected from Samsung I was immensely impressed the first time I saw this TV and I'm still very impressed and that doesn't always happen one of the things I like most about it is that you don't need to root around in the picture settings a bunch to get a great picture just pick movie or filmmaker mode whichever you like better and enjoy the qn 90c is the premium Samsung TV I think most folks should consider buying and it is definitely a short list TV for anyone who values premium picture quality quick sidebar about the sound quality and I'm just kind of injecting this in so if it doesn't really line up with the rest of the video I'm sorry I almost forgot to mention it but the sound quality is fine I mean honestly the best thing about Samsung's Sound Solutions is that the TV works with its sound bars to enhance the overall audio field so really you kind of want to get a Samsung Sound Bar to enhance the audio of this TV but it's passable you can hear stuff and dialogue is reasonably intelligible it's just spent a lot of money on a TV you want to have really great sound quality and unfortunately that's just not a thing these days thanks as always for watching everyone what do you think of my qn90c review let me know down in the comments what I didn't cover that you'd like to see covered in the versus video that's coming up soon don't forget to like And subscribe I'll see you on the next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might like foreign

Channel: Digital Trends

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Id: bOgSjABfTPg

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023