BERLIN—4K TVs are old hat, according to Samsung. Adoption is still ongoing as technologies like HDR and OLED screens continue to develop and expand, but big trade shows like IFA are all about the future. As far as Samsung is concerned, the future is 8K and AI-powered.
Its Q900FN QLED 8K TV is an 85-inch panel using a Samsung Quantum dot pixel array to project four times as many pixels as a standard 4K TV and 16 times as many pixels as a 1080p TV. That's a lot of pixels. Yet with 4K content still not widespread, let alone 4K HDR, it seems 8K is overly ambitious for a consumer TV.
That's clearly something Samsung acknowledges. Rather than just selling consumers on the crispness, contrast ratio, and 4,000-nit brightness (which are all excellent), Samsung is emphasizing 8K AI Upscaling. That's mostly a marketing buzzword, but it means the Q900FN can take standard-definition content and bump it up into a higher resolution, making your 1080p streams show up in much higher quality.
Whether that will convince consumers remains to be seen. We don't have pricing details yet, but Samsung seems serious about bringing the panel to market with an Oct. 25 release expected in the US. We don't want to speculate, but if the cost of large 4K OLED TVs are anything to go by, expect the price to be hefty. This is a new technology, and there's a price to pay for being an early adopter.
The real question is: can you tell the difference between 4K and 8K?
In all honesty, I couldn't. Standing up close to the 85-inch monstrosity, I didn't notice pixels, compared with the smaller 55-inch 4K TV at home or in the office. But even looking at the 4K content and the 8K side by side, the main difference seemed to be brightness; the Q900FN is incredibly bright.
No doubt color accuracy is incredible and HDR content looks fantastic. However, if you're expecting your eyes to be blown away by the increase in crispness, then you're expecting too much. The Q900FN looks better, though it's nothing close to the leap between 720p or 1080p or 1080p and 4K. As a layman who owns a 4K HDR TV, the Q900FN is a big, flashy panel that probably wouldn't change my life. My colleague Will Greenwald, who tests all our TVs, may have a different opinion.
Whether Samsung can change my mind (and the minds of customers in general) will depend on how convincingly people are sold by all the "extra" features. Much of this hinges on user preference. The Samsung Q900FN QLED 8K TV can also act as an ambient display for notifications and a nifty smart home hub for your IoT devices.
Yet for some buyers, maybe what makes the difference is having a TV that matches your wall or wallpaper. With the bump in resolution, the gorgeous colors and contrast, and glorious brightness, it just might be enough to convince those eyeing pricey OLEDs to get the Q900FN instead.