While LG and Sony are fighting over OLED dominance, Samsung decided to go off in a slightly different direction. Instead, Samsung decided to invest in quantum-dot LED TVs, or QLEDs for short, to offer their own alternative to the top-shelf OLEDs from Sony and LG. And the top end of what’s available right now is the Q9F.
In general, Samsung TVs offer the best colors of most high-performance TVs on the market right now. It’s one of the reasons QLEDs work so well for Samsung. And the Q9F easily delivers the best and brightest colors of any Samsung TV. The quantum dot mapping can squeeze a little extra detail out of the colors for the brightness to really pop compared to other TVs. Fans of animation would especially be happy with this design choice and focus on colors.
Thankfully, the HDR doesn’t suffer on the Q9F. The focus on colors can negatively impact the blacks and whites in some lower model Samsung TVs. That definitely isn’t the case with the Q9 and the HDR actually measures up with some of the best Sony and LG TVs.
But what puts the Q9F over the top is the processor. And the same goes for the rest of Samsung’s TVs from 2018. Samsung had previously bought processors from third-party companies that were a little more general and might not have been as optimized as they could be. The 2018 models saw a change in that thinking with Samsung keeping it in-house and producing processors themselves. Keeping it in-house means that the processors can be ideally tuned to produce the best quality possible.
If there’s any obvious downside to this TV, it’s that the audio performance may not measure up. That’s not unexpected when it comes to most flatscreens today, but it’s still disappointing that it hasn’t been addressed on a wide scale. There just isn’t enough power in the speakers and they aren’t built into ideal locations. But if you’re looking for a TV like this, you probably have a sound system or already know what you’re going to get anyway.
You can see what Samantha said in her Amazon review:
“Coming from a late generation plasma we’ve had a hard time finding anything better, but after years of waiting for either LCD or OLED technology to catch up to plasma we’ve finally found the next best thing – the Samsung QLED Q9FN.”